Author/futurist David Houle says:
“There were more books published this week than there were in all of 1950,†he said.
Houle told the room full of publishers that the physical book had a great run as an artifact, but encouraged them to embrace the current era of digital publishing to pave the way for future generations.
2011 National Book Critics Circle Award Finalists Announced:
Fiction
- Teju Cole, Open City (our review, excerpt)
- Jeffrey Eugenides, The Marriage Plot (How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Write The Marriage Plot, our review, excerpt [pdf])
- Alan Hollinghurst, The Stranger’s Child (our review, The Millions Interview: Alan Hollinghurst Answers his Critics, excerpt)
- Edith Pearlman, Binocular Vision (excerpt)
- Dana Spiotta, Stone Arabia (our review, excerpt)
Nonfiction
- Amanda Foreman, A World on Fire: Britain’s Crucial Role in the American Civil War (excerpt)
- James Gleick, The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood (Ben Marcus on The Information, excerpt)
- Adam Hochschild, To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918 (excerpt)
- Maya Jasanoff, Liberty’s Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary War (excerpt)
- John Jeremiah Sullivan, Pulphead (Staff Pick, excerpt [pdf])
2011 National Book Critics Circle Award Finalists Announced (via The Millions)
The 2012 shortlist for the International Arabic Fiction Prize has been released… which is worth $50,000 and an English translation and publication to the winning author.
The nominated books are:
The Unemployed by Nasser Iraq
Toy of Fire by Bashir Mufti
The Vagrant by Jabbour Douaihy
The Druze of Belgrade by Rabee Jaber
The Women of al-Basatin by Habib Selmi
Embrace on Brooklyn Bridge by Ezzedine Choukri Fishere
An essay in the February issue of Harper’s Magazine, “Killing the Competition: How the new monopolies are destroying open markets,†by Barry C. Lynn, includes Amazon in a growing list of American corporations that are pushing “monopolization of our private markets.†Included are Apple, Google, Intel, and Pixar (which together colluded to prevent employees from getting jobs at other firms), the Brazilian food giant JPS (which sets chicken prices throughout the South), the advertising giant WPP (one of four large advertising holding companies), and Anheuser-Busch InBev and MillerCoors (which together control 90 percent of domestic beer distribution).
Lynn writes that many in the book business fear Amazon in the same way as “the chicken farmers of the Sweedlin Valley†fear JPS.
Harper’s includes Amazon in its “new network†of monopolies; major publishing CEO calls Amazon’s CEO “dangerous” (via Melville House Books).
An anonymous insider at one of New York’s big six publishers thinks so. According to a letter posted on pandodaily, and headlined a “confession,†the biggest issue is not that Amazon has made publishing margins razor-thin, it’s that Amazon is now attempting to publish the bestsellers that “cover our fixed costs†itself.
Will Amazon kill the “big six†publishers? (via Melville House Books)