QUILLBLOG

The publishing industry: this week in quotes

“Many people in the beleaguered industry are hoping that [The Apple Tablet] will do for reading what the iPod and iTunes did for music. A survey among booksellers claimed that an Apple e-reader would one of the main factors that will help push digital publishing forward.” – Thomas Rogers via Salon.com

“The fact is: My septuagenarian mother is delighted with her first-generation Kindle and my sixty-something-year-old mother-in-law is delighted with her Kindle 2 and my 14-year-old nephew is delighted with his iPod touch…If I were to guess, out of all the aforementioned people who already own devices, the only one likely to spend money on an upgraded device anytime soon will be my teenage nephew. That’s not a very large percentage of current owners willing to re-invest in this newest generation of devices, the ones we’ll be hearing about over the next week.” – Edward Nawotka, in an editorial on publishingperspectives.com

“Writing about writing is the best way I know to discover what I think about a book and what I think about what other people think about it. Sometimes reviews bring new readers and sometimes they don’t. Tony Hoaglund’s book Donkey Gospel published by Graywolf didn’t receive one review yet became widely read. A positive or opinionated review in the NYTBR can bring many readers, but reviews in smaller magazines do not have much effect.” – poet Emily Warn, on Lemon Hound

“I spend an inordinate amount of time doing nothing. I don’t even think it can be called daydreaming.” - Joyce Carol Oates, via Paris Review.

“I’m beginning to see just how irrelevant our prejudices about new technology really are. Books are wonderful partly because they have been an unchanging corner of our lives in a world that thrusts change on us every day. But anything that reassures us by being constant should also make us anxious, because there are no exceptions anymore — everything is being transformed in the digital age.” – Peter Scowen on the Globe‘s book blog