Category: words

In response to criticism that no one is actually buying e-books, electronic publishers released sales figures – modest, yet encouraging. “Given that printed books have been around for 600 years, and e-books have barely registered on the consumer radar yet, I think we’re doing OK.” – Wired

How worried does the audio-book business (a $2 billion-a-year industry) need to be about the recent proliferation of downloadable audio books on Napster-like sites? “The question really is whether there is a demand for audio books in the MP3 format. If there is, publishing would be well advised to figure out a legal – and money-making – way to make audio books available online. Readers might be willing to pay for the convenience of easy downloading if such a site were made available to them.” – Inside.com

• Does anyone write more than Stephen King? He cranks out projects like a man possessed. “Writing is just this great big conduit, this outflow pipe that keeps the pressure nice and even. It just pours all this [expletive] out. All the insecurities come out, all the fears – and also, it’s a great way to pass the time.” – New York Times Magazine

The relationship between biographer and subject can be adversarial. Sometimes subjects retaliate. “It’s war, and a number of contemporary writers have tried to gain the upper hand by putting biographers in their novels and short stories.” – National Post (Canada)

Salon Magazine’s “Reader’s Guide” to the best and worst contemporary fiction of the last 40 years. “The world of established literary giants, each one solemnly tapping out his version of the Great American Novel on a manual typewriter, has since dissolved into a fluid, unpredictable marketplace where the next critically acclaimed hit first novel might be written by a 57-year-old horse breeder from North Carolina or by a 36-year-old former aerobics instructor from India.” – Salon

In Israel, as in many other parts of the world, libraries are in terrible decline. Government funding has decreased, leaving Israel’s libraries without money for renovations or new books – “of the 1,233 public libraries in Israel today, only 133 provide Internet services and only 10 lend out computer compact discs.” – Haaretz (Israel)

Within a few hours of hitting the shelves last month, the latest Harry Potter book was available in pirated e-form over the web. Tuesday the Association of American Book Publishers and Microsoft announced plans to fight e-piracy. – Washington Post

“Is there something churlish about Canadians that we balk at the idea of an official poet laureate? Are we too modest, too embarrassed? We certainly need an advocate for poetry. Poetry is the least honoured and the most respected of our art forms. A poet laureate would bring poetry to the people, giving us, as John Newlove said, ‘the pride, the grand poem / of our land, of the earth itself’.” – The Globe and Mail (Canada)

• WHAT A DREADFUL IDEA: “Poets are already considered to be on the very bottom of the arts ladder, frantically vying with the likes of documentary filmmakers, performance artists and other degenerates. And Canadian poetry, in the main, is horrible, consisting primarily of nuanced references to woodchippers, and surprisingly vulgar accounts of childbirth. To crown a laureate then would be something like appointing a pantomime artist to remember the dead for us each November – a poignantly awful idea.” – The Globe and Mail (Canada)

Thomas Keneally, author of “Schindler’s List,” seems to be fascinated with suffering and adversity; he has written about the Holocaust, the famine in 19th-century Ireland and British convicts being deported to Australia. His most recent subject of focus has been the struggling African county Eritrea. “‘Novelists,’ he says, ‘write about fraternity and love across borders, race and culture and about characters who have everything against them “because the best stories are there.'” – Sydney Morning Herald

Why do literary critics seem to be tripping over distinctions between fiction and non-fiction? “The trendy new genre ‘creative nonfiction’ is just a clever marketing tool — a way to sell the old tall tale, part fact, part fiction, by assuring us that what we are reading is ‘real.’ And that sense of clarity is not just reassuring, it also demands less of the reader — who does not have to suspend disbelief — and of the writer, who does not have to work as hard at rendering a story believable.” – San Francisco Examiner