Microsoft founder Bill Gates and Craig Newmark, founder of the seminal classified website Craigslist, weighed in this week with their thoughts on the future of reading and newspapers. These enemies of hard copy were clearly in their print is dead mode.This years annual convention of The Newspaper Association of America featured Newmark being interviewed by Charlie Rose. A controversial choice to say the least since Newmark's brainchild Craiglist has single-handedly destroyed the classified advertising revenue stream that has fed newspapers for decades.He spoke of the need for newspapers to use their high profit margins to pay more attention to investigative...
A Full Service Bookshop
While the traditional bookstore model continues its death spiral I trust there is a core group of booksellers out there who are actively searching for the right combination to ensure both the survival and the success of "the bookshop."Simply trying to maintain the status quo is a failing proposition (feel free to substitute newspaper book review sections for traditional book store model, they are interchangeable).The independent bookstore has put up one of the better fights to date of any independent business in our corporate culture but it cannot ultimately win the battle without significant revision. We might have lost half...
Visuals. A Rockwell Kent Design and a Writer’s Method
1933, Houghton MifflinJarrett's first novel, a mystery. Follows a book of short stories she wrote under the pseudonym Faraday Keene.Her book bio includes this :"Unlike most writers, she thoroughly enjoys every minute she is at work. Her favorite method is to spread her papers over a grand piano and write standing up. This follows a long solitary walk during which she has organized her material"
More Book Review Fodder. Frank Wilson’s Epiphany
Frank Wilson, the book review editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer and one of the few truly wired book editors was driving home from a Elmore Leonard/ Chuck Palahniuk doubleheader at the library last night when he was struck by this musing on the Palahniuk reading:"I kept thinking on the way home how newspapers are desperate to attract younger readers, but haven't a clue as to how popular this guy is with just the people they're looking for. Never have I had a greater sense of just how out of touch newspapers have become."300 people showed up for Leonard and an...
Counterpoint Comes Home
Publishers Weekly reports that the Counterpoint imprint has been purchased by a small group the includes its founder Jack Shoemaker. The imprint had been owned by Perseus who has been busy trying to incorporate their newest bankrupt prize Publishers Group West into their mix. It will now live with Winton, Shoemaker & Co. a newly formed group that includes two of Shoemaker's cornerstone authors Gary Snyder and Wendell Berry.Originally called North Point Press then Counterpoint and finally Shoemaker and Hoard the press has always published with a social conscience and with integrity. Two attributes that tend to get compromised when...