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 always quote Kurt Vonnegut. He said in the early part of his career he was dismissed as a science fiction writer and that critics tend to put genre books, including sci-fi, in the bottom drawer of their desk... It's true. I get the New York Times every Sunday. In 37 novels, I've never had a stand-alone review. I'm always in the crime round-up.
A survey of 787 members of the Society of Authors (SoA) has found that a third of translators and a quarter of illustrators have lost work to generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems. Translators are also more likely to use AI to support their work, with 37% of respondents saying they have done so, followed by 25% of non-fiction writers.
The author Lynne Reid Banks, known for her novel The L-Shaped Room and her children's book series The Indian in the Cupboard, has died at the age of 94.
I launched my podcast Making It Up nearly three years ago with the goal of interviewing writers not for any particular work of theirs, but to talk to them about their lives. I didn't want to ask them what famous author they want to have dinner with or what their top five favorite books are ... yech. Read more
Until we have a mechanism to test for artificial intelligence, writers need a tool to maintain trust in their work. So I decided to be completely open with my readers