The Truth About Celebrity Books, Or Why Publishers Are Evil Geniuses

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Though it won’t come as a surprise to anyone, our least favored reading material is a celebrity biography/autobiography/ghostwritten claptrap. Very few of these people are fascinating enough to sustain a feature-length article, much less an entire book. Why publishers continue to throw good money after bad books confuses us. Oh right. Money. Power. Fame. Fortune. A lot of quick sales with very little effort. By most accounts, celebrity books lose money. But just enough of them make just enough of a profit that publishers continue to throw unseemly advances in the path of the latest famous person. What publishers don’t […]

Square Pegs

Cranky Post About Sex And Politics

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The Village Voice has a fascinating article about the rise of yaoi — fairly graphic male-on-male manga — and how it resonates with straight American women. This isn’t exactly breaking news by any stretch of the imagination; there is a growing group of women who consider themselves part of the romance genre who write yaoi, and given that there’s an adherence to some of romance’s conventions, this makes sense. What makes this article so interesting to us is not that there is an appetite for this type of manga in this nation — it is the clear delineation between fantasy

Square Pegs

The Funny Thing About Circular Arguments

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We figure we’ll be sitting on the sidelines while the battle of new media compensation is waged in Hollywood — been there, done that, as the kids say — but that doesn’t mean we can’t make great sport of the fight while it’s brewing. Let us begin with the “for purely promotional purposes” argument. And yes, this matters to people who write books. We wouldn’t lie to you. If you’ve been following the news about digital media (and we have no reason to believe that you don’t), you know that this YouTube phenomenon is causing entertainment executive to break out

The Business of Publishing

The Scent Of A Book

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Despite the social whirl that was BookExpo America, we made it a point to attend the bash thrown by Unbridled Books. They have been nothing but kind in their sharing of books, and we thought to repay this generosity by, well, eating their food and drinking their wine. Hmm, sounds like someone got the short end of the relationship. With eating and drinking comes making merry, and we spent the evening chatting and trying to work our brand-new camera. Then it happened…someone dared to ask our true first name, which, alas, always leads to a lengthy discussion (“Did your mother

Books/Mags/Blogs

All We Want For Christmas Is Standard Standards

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If we were the type to eat our words, we would be, yes, considering swallowing all of the things we’ve said about the publishing industry and their slow movement into the modern world*. Just this week, near the end of 2006, a mere dozen or so years after the dawn of the Age of Amazon, the industry has…wait for it…announced the release of a new digital book standard. Just in time for Christmas! As with all major announcements, this one came with tongue-ready acronyms: the Open eBook Publication Structure (OEBPS) and Open eBook Publication Structure Container Format (OCF) were released

The Future of Publishing

On The Last Refuge Of Those Without A Plan Of Their Own

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One of the issues at stake is the way Google presents the search results: They are shown graphically as a ragged-edged piece of paper, as if torn from a book. That angers the French publishers because it portrays their work as just one step away from the trash can, said Tessa Destais, a spokeswoman for La Martinière. “We know that Google is powerful, but they have to show some respect for books,” she said Monday. French publishers join Google booksearch lawsuit

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