Amid historic disruption in the publishing industry, big questions are-rightfully-being asked. Here, experts weigh in on how books (and the ways we discover them) are going to change.
There is a growing fashion for fake books. Not fake as in written by a series of AI prompts, but fake as in things - cleverly painted empty boxes, or a façade of spines glued to a wall - designed to mislead the casual onlooker into thinking that they are books.
There was laughter coming from the foxhole between bursts of the Germans' anti-tank guns. The American servicemen were in a tight position, pinned by the Boche, but they'd made it to an interesting part of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith and everyone knows how hard it is to put down a good book. Read more
When Andy Hunter was looking for US$1.2 million to create Bookshop.org, "It was actually an extremely lonely experience because I was wandering around New York City talking to big agents, like publishers, high-net-worth individuals or investors I thought might care about bookstores. Read more
Increasingly, people of the book are also people of the cloud. At the Codex Hackathon, a convention whose participants spend a frenetic weekend designing electronic reading tools, I watch developers line up onstage to pitch book-related projects to potential collaborators and funders.
Nearly three times as many Americans read a book of history in 2017 as watched the first episode of the final season of "Game of Thrones." The share of young adults who read poetry in that year more than doubled from five years earlier. Read more
One day last week, after I spent the best part of an hour opening two days' worth of post at my office - I work as literary editor of the Spectator - I posted a peevish tweet: "Can we all stop publishing, for good and all, nonfiction books about the future, books about how to change your life, books about what it means to be/how we came to be human, and books about fucking Nazis? Read more
Tis (almost) the season for resolutions. If you're a writer, here's an idea: resolve to get rejected. 100 times this year, if you're lucky. After all, some very famous books (and authors) began their careers at the bottom of the NO pile. To inspire you to keep on writing and submitting, here are some of the most rejected books I could dig up.
Covers sell books. But in the case of Hillary Clinton's memoir What Happened, you can't help thinking that the book's sales in the UK are despite the jacket treatment, not because of it. Whereas the US jacket oozes the gravitas you expect from the woman who stood up to Donald Trump, the UK jacket has all the power of a shrugged "meh".
'I'm very reassuringly honest. It's a job as well as a calling. It's my living - I'm the chief breadwinner in my house. My husband is retired, he supported me through the two decades while I wasn't making enough to live on, and was doing all kinds of things to do with writing to survive - judging competitions, running workshops, appraising manuscripts.
‘My settings of Europe and English visitors weren't really doing it for them, so we decided Scotland would be good. I thought an island would be great, because it's a small community, and it's an opportunity for my main character to get away from it all. The team at HarperCollins have been so supportive and enthusiastic... Read more
For the past five years or so, I've read books on my phone. The practice started innocently enough. I write book reviews from time to time, and so publishers sometimes send me upcoming titles that fall roughly within my interests. Read more
The Guardian calls Irish-Indian poet Nikita Gill "Britain's most-followed poet on social media"-she has 780,000 Instagram followers and 180,000 TikTok followers, and her Instapoetry has been reshared by the likes of Khloe Kardashian, Alanis Morissette, and Sam Smith-and she has published seven volumes of poetry and two novels in the U.K. But she is far less known on this side of the pond. Read more
Nikkolas Smith knows a thing or two about book bans. The illustrator has created five picture books over the last three years-four of which have been yanked off library shelves. There's I am Ruby Bridges, about the civil rights icon; That Flag about the confederate flag; Born on the Water, which explores slavery; and The Artivist which features a child supporting trans kids.
Simon & Schuster has acquired the largest Dutch publishing group Veen Bosch & Keuning, including all of its publishers in the Netherlands and Belgium, as well as sister companies Thinium and Bookchoice.
The Publishers Association (PA) has criticised the government's response to a House of Lords report on AI, saying that it has failed to make "any tangible commitments to protect the creative industries against mass copyright infringement".
'I'm very reassuringly honest'
‘My settings of Europe and English visitors weren't really doing it for them, so we decided Scotland would be good. I thought an island would be great, because it's a small community, and it's an opportunity for my main character to get away from it all. The team at HarperCollins have been so supportive and enthusiastic... Read more