A backlog at the printing presses, plus a surging demand for popular hardcover titles, has hurt publishers at peak sales season, with popular titles out of stock in some stores.
Category: Publishing
👓 Towards the Future Book | Kottke
Writing in Wired, Craig Mod expertly dissects both the e-book revolution that never happened and the quieter one that actually d
👓 Why Books Matter for the Long Run | Knowledge@Wharton
Book publishing is a business and increasingly a technical one, but at its heart it is an art, writes Peter J. Dougherty in this opinion piece. He is the editor-at-large at Princeton University Press,
👓 An Interview with John O’Brien | Dalkey Archive Press
The following interview was conducted in-house at two different times, in 2000 and 2004. The purpose of the interview was to provide a very readable documentation of Dalkey Archive Press’s mission and history. It was amended in 2004, and likely will be amended again in the future, to reflect changes in the culture that have an impact on the work we do.
Highlights, Quotes, Annotations, & Marginalia
subversive ❧
December 19, 2018 at 05:10PM
uncomfortable ❧
December 19, 2018 at 05:11PM
There is no sense that this particular novel has its place among-and should be evaluated against-a whole history of other novels. ❧
December 19, 2018 at 05:14PM
As with all of the arts, literature was once upon a time entirely made possible through patrons. This goes at least as far back as Shakespeare and Ben Jonson. They were able to write because their patrons provided them financial support. And this was of course true of all of the other arts. Beginning in the middle of the nineteenth century, however, literature and commerce got mixed. ❧
December 19, 2018 at 05:18PM
While many people say that such and such a book changed their lives, you can be sure that they could not tell you who published the book. The identification is with the book and its author, not the publisher. ❧
December 19, 2018 at 05:25PM
My models were New Directions Press and Grove Press. ❧
December 19, 2018 at 05:32PM
Michael Orthofer at the Complete Review ❧
December 19, 2018 at 05:35PM
Academics will probably bristle at this thought but, at least in relation to literature, all you have to do is look at the courses that are offered featuring the literatures of other countries. Not only don’t they teach these literatures, they don’t read them. ❧
December 19, 2018 at 05:38PM
I think only the philistine mind thinks that art needs a social or moral justification. ❧
December 19, 2018 at 05:46PM
A prerequisite for war, as well as bigotry, is that one sees a people or a country as a stereotype, as something sub-human or non-human; this is why politicians spend so much time trying to create stereotypical images for those countries they want to go to war with. ❧
December 19, 2018 at 05:48PM
Small publishers are oftentimes awful at getting their books out to people, even though of course the marketplace determines many of the limitations. ❧
December 19, 2018 at 05:51PM
🔖 JSON-LD And You – Google Slides | Aram Zucker-Scharff
A presentation on Google Docs.
Hi, I’m Aram Zucker-Scharff and now that we’re settled in, I’ll take a minute to introduce myself. I’m the Director of Ad Tech Engineering at The Washington Post, where I work with teams across the organization to help the Post make money and, through our Arc platform, help other publications make money as well. But I’ve taken a long road to this point, I started off as a journalist, then an editor, a social media manager, a product manager, a freelance strategy consultant and developer and last a full stack developer. I even spent some time being very bad at selling ads.
I dug around a bit and didn’t see any video from this session.
🎧 This Week in Google 481 Stoned on Cheese | TWIG.tv
Foldable Phone, Online Civility
- The Samsung Developers Conference Keynote features a foldable phone, SmartThings IoT, and Bixby innovations.
- Android will support foldable phones.
- Google employees stage a walkout over sexual harassment
- Tim Berners-Lee's Contract for the Web
- How to encourage civility online
- YouTube Content ID
- Facebook and "White Genocide"
- Young people are deleting Facebook in droves
- Facebook's holiday pop-up store
- Everybody gets free Amazon shipping
- Amazon's new HQ2(s)
- 8 new Chromebook features
- Google Home Hub teams up with Sephora
- Ajit Pai's FCC is hopping mad about robocalls
Picks of the Week
- Jeff's Number: Black Friday home tech deals
- Stacey's Thing: Extinct cables, Alexa Christmas Lights
While most people are forced to rely on Google as their silo of choice for video and specifically live streaming video, he points out a painful single point of failure in their system with regard to copyright rules and Google’s automatic filters that could get a user/content creator permanently banned. Worse, as Leo indicates, this ban could also extend to related Google accounts (YouTube, Gmail, etc.) One is thus open to potential chilling effects of intimidation, censorship, and deplatforming.
Leo discusses the fact that he’s not as beholden to YouTube because he streams and hosts all of his content on his own website and only utilizes silos like YouTube as ancillary distribution. In IndieWeb parlance what he does is known as POSSE or Post to your Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere and this prevents his journalism, commentary, and even his business from being ravaged by the whims of corporate entities whose rules he can’t control directly.
The discussion starts at 1:05:11 into the episode and goes for about 10 minutes for those who are interested in this particular sub-topic.
This idea also impinges on Cal Newport’s recent article Is YouTube Fundamental or Trivial? which I read the other day.
👓 The Weekly Standard, a conservative magazine critical of Trump, to shutter after 23 years | CNN
The Weekly Standard, the magazine that espouses traditional conservatism and which has remained deeply critical of President Donald Trump, will shutter after 23 years, its owner Clarity Media Group announced Friday morning. The magazine will publish its final issue on December 17.
📺 Jeremy Keith on Taking Back The Web (Opening Keynote) at Voxxed Thessaloniki 2018
In these times of centralised services like Facebook, Twitter, and Medium, having your own website is downright disruptive. If you care about the longevity of your online presence, independent publishing is the way to go. But how can you get all the benefits of those third-party services while still owning your own data? By using the building blocks of the Indie Web, that’s how!
Hat tip: Jeremy Keith
👓 Robert Rauschenberg, Erased de Kooning Drawing, 1953 | SFMOMA
From 1951 to 1953, Robert Rauschenberg made a number of artworks that explore the limits and very definition of art. These works recall and effectively extend the notion of the artist as creator of ideas, a concept first broached by Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968) with his iconic readymades of the early twentieth century. With Erased de Kooning Drawing (1953), Rauschenberg set out to discover whether an artwork could be produced entirely through erasure—an act focused on the removal of marks rather than their accumulation.
Hat tip: graffiti story, body art
👓 The Biggest Scam in Publishing? | Good e-reader
The digital publishing revolution is so old that a great many reading consumers might not be able to envision a time when they couldn’t simply pop online to order a book, download a new title from their favorite author, or use an app or PDF for supplemental book material. eBooks and digital publishing have simply become a part of everyday life for many people.
Reply to Greg McVerry about academic samizdat pre-print server
I don’t recall though, are either of them open source, or do we need to re-build by hand?
👓 Illegal and Dirty Election Tricks in Pasadena and Altadena | ColoradoBoulevard.net
Illegal inserts found inside the print edition of ColoradoBoulevard.net in Pasadena and Altadena (Photo – Staff). The “No on 10” campaign is accused of spreading misi...
👓 A trip through the peer-review sausage grinder | Ars Technica
From the archives: Peer review is a scientific institution; here's its purpose.
👓 Our book launch was botched and it’s been crazy at work trying to fix it | Signal V. Noise
I’m trying to remember when it was last this crazy at work. Before we spent a month fighting poor planning and terrible execution on the publication of our new book It Doesn’t Have To Be Crazy At Work. Was it when we got DDoS’ed over two days and were fighting to keep Basecamp on the internet? Was it when we touched the third rail and spoke about customer data in public? Or do we have to go all the way back to the early days when Basecamp went down whenever I, as the only technical person at the time, would get on an airplane?
👓 Meeting subscribers where they’re at | Ben Werdmüller
Yesterday I upgraded my laptop to OSX Mojave. Among the improvements: a desktop version of the iOS news app, which is slick. I checked into it a few times yesterday, and I expect I will again today. Under the hood, it's a highly-curated feed reader. There's a proprietary API, but a lot of content is...