The mystery to me is that I continued writing poetry long after there was any need for that. My early poems were embarrassingly bad, and the ones that came right after, not much better. I have known in my life a number of young poets with immense talent who gave up poetry even after being told they were geniuses. No one ever made that mistake with me, and yet I kept going.
via Why I Still Write Poetry by Charles Simic, The New York Review of Books.
Textbooks are a thing of the past, says the common wisdom. Well, the common wisdom of the Technorati maybe. The problem with that thinking is that the number one publisher in the world is Pearson, a textbook publisher, who brought in $7.75 billion in 2009.
Pearson, as Tim Carmody noted in a January Wired article, owns 50 percent of the Financial Times, as well as the number two trade house: Penguin. The second largest textbook publisher, McGraw-Hill, owns Standard and Poor’s. To say textbooks are big business is like saying bullets are ouchie.
So writing the obituary for textbooks would be putting the cart before the horse. But pretending like they are not changing their shape, if not their nature, is to proclaim, from one’s buggy, that automobiles are a passing fad.
Future U: The stubborn persistence of textbooks | Ars Technica.
Agree or disagree?
In the Observer, John Naughton unloads both barrels on the “academic publishing racket” in which giant multinational publishers get free, state-subsidized research to publish, use free, state-subsidized labor for peer-review, require assignments of the scholars’ copyrights as a condition of publication, then charge astounding sums to the scientists and academics they are “serving” for the right to read the work they’re all engaged in producing.
Absurd “academic publishing racket” is past its sell-by date – Boing Boing.
For the first time since 1977, no fiction piece was awarded a prize. Nominated by the jurors as finalists were Denis Johnson’s Train Dreams, Karen Russell‘s Swamplandia! and David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King. But the board, which consists of 18 voting members and reads all the final entries, couldn’t agree on a winner—a majority vote is needed.
Yes, much of the literary world is in full-throated revolt against Amazon’s dominance — bookstores fear Amazon will pushthemoutofbusiness, authors worry about deepdiscounting, and the Department of Justice is considering the major publishers’ challenge over the price of e-books. But amid the public and private rancor, the massive e-retailer is very quietly trying to make friends in the book world. Its strategy is simple and employs a weapon Amazon has in overwhelming supply: Money.
The Brooklyn Book Festival is just one of many recent beneficiaries of Amazon’s largess. According to a list on Amazon’s site, prestigious groups such as the PEN American Center, journals like the Los Angeles Review of Books,One Story, Poets & Writers and Kenyon Review, mentorship programs such as 826 Seattle and Girls Write Now, and associations including the Lambda Literary Foundation, Voice of Witness and Words Without Borders have all received grants.