Booksquare

“In the 21st century … libraries aren’t just passive repositories … and librarians aren’t just those little old ladies who say ‘shhhh!’ We’re people on a mission.”

• A novel leader

However, it’s important that people understand the free download concept isn’t a frivolous act. It’s a key part of our promotional campaign, along with radio and press promotion, live shows, and videos. It’s a bet that the resources of the Internet can make possible a new way for musicians to find their audience – and forge a meaningful artistic career built on support from cooperative, not adversarial, relationships.

• Why We’re Releasing Our New Album for Free on the Internet, with special thanks to O’Reilly Radar for serving as today’s inspiration

“Some women writers take offense at being lumped into the category, but I really don’t,” says Hsu Gee. “It’s all just marketing, at the end of the day. Publishing is a business and, you know, it’s like Laurence Fishburne told Keanu Reeves in ‘The Matrix’: If you’re going to play in this world, there are certain rules you have to follow. The physics of the real world doesn’t necessarily apply.”

• Bridget Jung’s Diary

But even those figures raise questions, given the long time it takes for a book to complete its sales life, first as a hardcover and then as a paperback. Indeed, publishers are burdened by the law of returns, which is unique to the book world. To the despair of many in the business, bookstores can return unsold copies of a title to publishers for full credit. This means that a book with an impressive first printing, accompanied by a media splash, could wind up tanking if many copies are returned.

• Trust Them, It’s a Hit

Books, like clothes, music (should a bit of sound leak from our hi-tech earphones) and general demeanour, say something about who we are, who we would like people to think we are and who we ourselves aspire to be. It’s why the stereotype of the saturnine young man with the slim volume of poetry in his pocket exists, why publishers agonise so feverishly about book jackets and why I once nudged a friend on the tube in a chic part of west London to look at a pale, solemn young woman engrossed in a volume of Wittgenstein at 8.30 in the morning. Oh yes, he replied airily, we get a better class of reader round here.

• We’ve Got A Ticket To Read

In a town like London there are always plenty of not quite certifiable lunatics walking the streets, and they tend to gravitate towards bookshops, because a bookshop is one of the few places where you can hang about for a long time without spending any money.

• Bookshop Memories (inspired by Robert Gray’s essay in today’s edition of Shelf Awareness, not yet posted online)

Evelyn Waugh once said that the golden rule of book reviewing is that you should never give a bad review to a book you have not read. This is now seen as rather old-fashioned and romantic. No book reviewer ever has time to read the whole book, not for the money they are paying you. The vital thing is to give the impression that you HAVE read the whole book.

• Masterclass: how to write a book review

One might concede that Harry Potter is not great literature. But to witness the sheer pervasiveness of its appeal, which pays no attention to age, gender, language or cultural differences, and still to claim that it has little merit seems hugely wrong-headed.

• JK Rowling: The Mistress of All She Surveys

In one way I’m just writing my way through my life, although I am playing a game of catch-up. Some writers do this but they are starting off younger. People are always saying how old I was when I wrote my first novel. But yes, some people who start writing in college have a longer trajectory — there is the college novel, the “I’ve just fallen in love” novel, the divorce novel, the “what life is like with children” novel.

(Yes, we’re cheating this week with two quotes from the same piece. We like to keep you on your toes. Also we liked both so much, making a decision was beyond our ability.)

• Powells.com Interviews – Kate Atkinson

My agent actually told me that One Good Turn wasn’t put on the longlist for the Booker because it was regarded as genre fiction, and I just thought, “Oh, for heaven’s sake!” It is so elitist! To me, it’s like Gertrude Stein’s “A rose is a rose is a rose” — well, I say a book is a book is a book. There are good books, bad books, mediocre books. Why is it necessary to say it’s not any good because it is a crime novel, a romance, or whatever? Jane Austen wrote romance for heaven’s sake. Dickens wrote crime novels.

• Powells.com Interviews – Kate Atkinson