‘Publishing’ Archives
The End of Reading (Print)
Publishers are experimenting with add ons like photos, author notes, even video in order to attract higher prices for ebooks, but one wonders at what point they should just get on with it and make the movie. Thriller writer David Balducci is bidding his enhanced ebook Deliver Us From Evil (due out April 20) will justify a US $15.00 price tag. [...]
Book Publishers Responsible for Recession
It's amazing what some people will say to get a little attention. Lawrence Osborne's article, with its designed-to-provoke title Why Publishers Fail, on Forbes.com doesn't exactly blame publishers for the whole of the recession. What he does suggest is that publishing is a paradigmatic industry, so arcanely enigmatic that no one, not even the [...]
How Much is a Book Worth?
If the hardcover edition is out of print and the artist is famous, prices become astronomical. Take, for example, this catalog for a small 1999 exhibition of Gerhard Richter's watercolors. Originally listed at US $60, the hard cover is sold out (out of print or OOP in the lingo) so in the Amazon an unblemished copy is worth a whopping $1,736, a [...]
Border Crossings
With the entire publishing industry howling around them, it's nice to see somebody taking a counter-intuitive approach. Border Crossings magazine has enlarged its pages while continuing to pack 160 of them with rich text and images reproduced in full colour. It is also is somehow able to produce artists' projects; in the current issue a multi-page [...]
Death, with Musical Accompaniment
Art often refers to other art. Indeed, it could be argued that the best art always carries subtle, and sometimes not so subtle, reference to its predecessors. I think it was Adorno who observed that even within modernism, which we think of as being essentially about breaking with the past, there was the reference to antiquity, a melancholy longing [...]
Nomads – No Stone Unturned
The catalogue for Nomads, an exhibition that ended August 30 at the National Gallery of Canada, is so completely designed it seems to want to shame all lesser efforts. Its lux quality reflects the superb exhibition itself, but also the very excess that the various works in the exhibition parody. (more...)
Let them read newspapers
"The government of France is taking unprecedented measures to help the ailing French print industries. According to an AP story, French president Nicolas Sarkozy -- consistent with recommendations from a 3-month study of the industry's health released January 8 -- announced: Free one-year newspaper subscriptions will be given to all French [...]
Jack’s Publishing – how publishing is depicted in movies
Publishers are represented in movies as much as anyone I suppose. In The Shoe Fairy (2006) directed by Robin Lee, the protagonist, a girl named Dodo, works for Jack, a publisher of children’s and pop-up books, who is always folding origami. Dodo does all the menial jobs in the office from cleaning toilets to picking up drawings from the [...]
