Month: November 2007

Trouble at Quebecor

Quebecor was for years the other big domestic print company, the competition to R. R. Donnelley. But the company appears to have fallen on difficult times. It canceled…

The book is dead

and Brian Dettmer is performing the autopsy. LINKS (the first three are the artist’s galleries) Packer Schopf Gallery Toomey-Tourell Gallery Haydee Rovirosa Gallery 3 Percent: The Most Unusual…

Bad Sex

The Literary Review has announced its nominees for the 2007 Bad Sex Award. The award supposed draws attention to “the crude, tasteless, often perfunctory use of redundant passages…

Digital divide

I was talking with someone the other day about website statistics packages. The image above comes from Google Analytics. As you can see, Right Reading has yet to…

86 recommended travel books

Conde Nast commissioned a distinguished group of writers to nominate their favorite travel books. Participating authors included André Aciman, Monica Ali, Julia Alvarez, Tom Bissell, Geraldine Brooks, Vikram…

Vector Magic

VectorMagic is an “online tool for precision vectorization.” In other words, it is an autotracer that converts pixel-based images (photos, screen captures, etc.) to vectors, which can then…

Best book covers

Since I posted about the best magazine covers of the year, why not have a look at book covers too? When I first saw this selection of “the…

Language Wars

Language Hat has been following the arguments about Russian translation that have been taking place at the NYT Reading Room blog. Are the renderings of Richard Pevear and…

Is copyright corroding our society?

That’s what Stanford professor Larry Lessig says in this lecture (it takes about 19 minutes and it’s well worth watching the whole thing — but in any case…

Style Trends in Fiction

For the past couple of years amazon.com has been including a feature it calls “text stats” on many of its book pages. Among the statistics presented are “readability…

On Taste

In a previous post I mentioned that Norman Mailer was not a writer particularly to my taste. Just after writing that I came upon an account of a…

Norman Mailer has died

It’s a shame he will not be around to read his obituaries, as his favorite subject was himself. It was never a subject that particularly interested me.

3,778 overdue books returned

And they were 126 years overdue. The books were taken by Chile from Peru during the 1879-1883 War of the Pacific. The Guardian reports: Nivia Palma, national director…

Madam Mayo

C.M. Mayo will be reading at Alta on Saturday. Her site, Madam Mayo, is a good blog for those interested in Latin American (especially Mexican) literature and the…

The year’s best magazine covers

According to the Magazine Publishers of America’s 2007 American Magazine Conference Awards, that is. This Texas Monthly cover won for “best coverline.”

Mainstream and alternative book publishing

Five publishing conglomerates now control 80 percent of book publishing industry sales. The big fish are Bertelsmann, Viacom, Longman-Pearson, News Corporation, and Verlagsgruppe Georg von Holtzbrinck. Bertelsmann, based…

X-Rite and Pantone

X-Rite acquired Pantone several days ago for $180 million. Panton has been the leader for print color matching for decades. X-Rite produces a variety of color calibration software…

Extended Live Archives and WordPress 2.3

The Extended Live Archives plug-in for WordPress that I mentioned in a previous post is not compatible with WP 2.3, because the WP file structure was changed to…

Digital humor

There are 10 kinds of people in the world: those who understand binary and those who don’t.

New Worlds / New Words book launch

I don’t think I’ve mentioned here the book launch that will be held tonight at 6:30 for our new anthology of Latin American literature. The venue is Chronicle…

Book Design: Persian Ceramics

I’m in the beginning stages of designing a new book about Persian ceramics. It will be a small book (for an art book), at 9.5 x 10 inches…