When is a book not a book?
Even as the printing press was taking hold, the Abbot of Sponheim urged his monks to keep copying texts by hand. The written word on parchment, he said, would last a thousand years, whereas words printed on paper were cheap and fleeting.
His argument has echoes in the ebooks debate. [...]
Memoir, “reality,” and condescending pep-talks
The man who once called James Frey’s first memoir “A Million Pieces of Shit” suggested last December that Frey may have borrowed subject matter from junkie Eddie Little, who died of an overdose a few years ago.
(Little wrote a novel called Another Day in Paradise. It inspired a film of the same name.)
I [...]
“The reincarnation of Vladimir Nabokov” — and other, future ad campaigns
Before my panel at the Association of American University Presses last week, I caught the last half of a talk about Google’s “AdWords” program, which allows advertisers, including authors and publishers, to place ads in Google’s search engine using key words of their choice. The Google representative argued that the trick is to tailor [...]
Blogger book deals, and an unrelated ‘possum story
A college friend’s roommate hailed from Crestview, Florida, a Pensacola-area town I have visited only once, accidentally. Mr. Maud and I were on our way from Tallahassee to my grandparents’ place on the Mississippi Gulf Coast when a trailer tipped over, releasing a herd of cows onto I-10. All the cars on the [...]
Self-fulfilling prophecy: is fiction really dead or are publishers killing it?
The U.S. publishing industry pumps out a new work of fiction every 30 minutes — an unprecedented pace — but this summer a National Endowment for the Arts study revealed* that Americans, particularly teenagers and college students, are far less likely to read literature than they were twenty years ago. Blame for disinterest in literary [...]