Writings, Reviews, Cultural Criticism
Two weeks ago, the world learned that Puffin Books, publisher of the late Roald Dahl oeuvre (am I allowed to say oeuvre?), unleashed a pack of ravenous sensitivity dogs on the dead author’s sixteen volumes and the upshot of their efforts is a squeaky clean oeuvre with all the naughty words scrubbed so that even…
Late last evening (Nov 7th), judges announced this year’s winner of the Scotiabank Giller Prize for Fiction. Before sharing the announcement, a couple housekeeping matters: First, I would recommend all the books on the short list. They are very different, one from another, and each has something unique to commend it. From Noor Naga’s playful,…
It’s the same old capitalist story. A small startup crowd-sources its content. Behemoth gobbles it up with a hefty payout to the owners of the startup … and nothing to the content creators.
Do you ever worry there are too many ebooks? The internet has made publishing almost costless, which means that anybody with a thought in mind can plunk away at a keyboard and send it out to all the world. Not everybody is enthused by this state of affairs.
It’s a Sunday in September, and as an act of revenge against all the construction companies snarling Toronto traffic with their new condo builds, books take to the streets. Pavilions go up all around Queen’s Park Crescent diverting traffic east to Bay & Yonge and west to Huron & Spadina.
Since the rise of Amazon, the Kindle, ibooks, the iPad, etc., it’s hardly news that the publishing industry is struggling to cope with radical change. The latest, and perhaps most ludicrous, is an antitrust suit brought by the U.S. Justice Department against Apple & the Big 6 U.S. publishers alleging that their agency model is, in fact, price fixing.
Have you heard the news? Publishers Weekly reports that a Japanese insurance company purchased Toronto-based ebook seller, Kobo, for $315 million dollars.
The Kardashian sisters, whose sole claim to fame is that they are famous, can now claim novel-writing as another of their accomplishments.
Reuters reported last week that Spam is Clogging Amazon’s Kindle Self-Publishing. The problem, it seems, is PLR or Private Label Rights. I don’t understand how PLR works, but I suspect it’s like the water the Morlocks drink in H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine – an underground toxic sludge.
Mark Coker, the founder of Smashwords, posted an op-ed today in the Huffington Post, calling on authors to throw themselves on the gears of the machine. This is a reference to Mario Savio’s 1964 speech in which he called on students at UCLA to resist the administration’s attempts to curtail free speech.
I shouldn’t do this. I shouldn’t laugh in public at someone else’s writing. Especially when I’m publishing some of my own work in a couple weeks. It’s courting disaster.
NewNorthByNorthWest Inc., a publisher of literary classics for use in secondary school curriculum, has announced that a new edition of Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice is in the works and is expected to be available in time for the 2011/12 school year. A staple of English curriculum even a generation ago, Shakespeare’s tale of love and usury has appeared in fewer and fewer English programs as parent teacher associations increasingly raise objections to the work.
A couple weeks ago, in the Telegraph, Adrian Hon announced: “Your time is up, publishers. Book piracy is about to arrive on a massive scale.” He conducted an experiment: to see how long it would take to locate an unauthorized e-copy of a book he already owned but didn’t want to lug around. It took him about 60 seconds.
While the question of cloud computing – is it a good thing? What are its benefits? How will it change the way we interact online? – sounds like it properly belongs in the province of geekdom, I’m of the view that it also deserves to be discussed as a social justice issue.
The protagonist, Raskolnikov, is an impoverished ex-student living in St. Petersburg. His chief supporter is fellow student, Razumihin, who earns a few roubles here and there translating European works. It is Razumihin who dreams of setting up his own publishing business.