“At a certain point in my tenure at Penguin Random House I just gave up trying to understand a lot of the emails that arrived from corporate and would just hit delete, asking myself quizzically, ‘And the contribution this makes to the actual publication of actual books is . . . ?’ ” - The New Yorker
"The OED’s founders realized that such a titanic task could never be accomplished by a small circle of men in London and Oxford, so they sought out volunteers. (The OED's third editor, James Murray,) circulat(ed) a call for contributors to newspapers, universities, and clubs around the globe." - MSN (The Atlantic)
The flagship of African-American legacy media, hard-hit by the forces hammering print media over the past two decades, went bankrupt in 2019. Black investors came to the rescue, and Ebony is active on paper and online — but the wall between advertising and editorial has become unsettlingly porous. - Columbia Journalism Review
"The organization brings together well-known actors from film, TV and theater to share dramatic readings of literary works. … (Since 2003, it has) expanded its audience across continents and within classrooms through WordTheatre Campus." - Yahoo! (Los Angeles Times)
"The ads lean into the city’s quirky culture across sports, food, and the arts, and evolve quickly to respond to news events so the campaign 'can really live and breathe and be a real thing' with the goal of …, in particular, charming and inspiring millennials into engaging." - Nieman Lab
It all began in 2017, when a thrift store in Wales, put a notice in its window imploring people to stop donating copies of “The Da Vinci Code.” On average, the shop was receiving one copy per day. The plea went viral, catching the eye of the British artist David Shrigley... - CNN
A favorite on TikTok’s “BookTok” community, the series has sold over 13 million copies worldwide, and been translated into 37 languages, according to Bloomsbury. A Hulu TV adaptation is in development. - The Daily Beast
"The news is not very good," goes part of his answer, given last month in his acceptance speech for the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade. "If my work has been influenced by fables," he continued later, "there is also something decidedly fabulist about a peace prize." - The New Yorker
"Serop Simonian, the alleged leader of a suspected Egyptian antiquities trafficking ring, was arrested in Germany and transferred to France. … The 80-year-old dealer is believed to be behind the sale of smuggled Egyptian antiquities to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Louvre Abu Dhabi for a collective €60 million." - ARTnews
"A standard component in Egyptian elite burials, the Book of the Dead was not a book in the modern sense of the term but a compendium of some 200 ritual spells and prayers, with instructions on how the deceased’s spirit should recite them in the hereafter." - The New York Times
In the conglomerate era, authors like Stephen King and Danielle Steel are pressured to become advertisements for themselves, even as much of the work of authorship (the research, the fact-checking) is farmed out to a small army of aides, assistants and publicists, leaving writers with less control over their output. - Washington Post
Georgette Heyer's 1950 novel The Grand Sophy isn't exactly The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, but it definitely includes antisemitic language. That's been edited out in a new edition. Is that sensitivity to today's readers or bowdlerization? - The New York Times
One or two banned and censored books doing well on bestseller lists means little to the hundreds of other authors, and topics, that kids in some areas will never get to see. - Book Riot
