As 2022 began, the U.S. trade publishing business was dominated by what has been called the Big Five—Simon & Schuster, Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, Hachette Book Group, and Macmillan. - Publishers Weekly
— that there's "an immediate drop in content." The drop isn't exactly a surprise, but what one lead researcher found "shocking" was that the fall, and the staffing cuts that lead to it, happen so quickly after acquisition. - Nieman Lab
The account tracks the ways that writers strive to express the same thing differently, with examples taken mostly from newspapers and magazines around the world. - The New Yorker
"The midsize publishing community has greatly contracted and, as I think about the businesses that still make up this community, I am struck by the fact that they all share two important attributes." - Publishers Weekly
John McWhorter: "They miss that their book bans are just as tinny, just as local to petty concerns of our moment and just as, well, unjust. And by revving up its own cancel culture, the anti-woke right is providing the woke left with bulletin-board material." - The New York Times
For governments, the quip that "a language is a dialect with an army and navy" is more-or-less true — so Czech and Slovak, Hindi and Urdu, Serbian and Croatian are different languages. For linguists, dialects are mutually intelligible and languages are not. So what of Cantonese — or Ukrainian? - The Conversation
"Conservative activists in several states, including Texas, Montana and Louisiana have joined forces with like-minded officials to dissolve libraries' governing bodies, rewrite or delete censorship protections, and remove books outside of official challenge procedures." - MSN (The Washington Post)
By 1915, Vroman’s could count traveling dignitaries, engineers, scientists, men of finance and New York book editors as customers. Anticipating their requests, the store carried more than 30,000 titles of fiction and nonfiction and boasted the “largest selection of Bibles in Southern California.” - Los Angeles Times
Chicago Public Schools quietly banned and removed the famous graphic novel in 2013. In 2023, a graphic novel will be published that "follows a group of Chicago high school students who fight back against the attempts at censorship in their own school." - Book Riot
Under a program called Books UnBanned, anyone in the US aged 13 to 21 may request a free eCard from the BPL, gaining access to hundreds of thousands of ebooks and audiobooks. The library has even selected a list of the most banned books to make readily available. - Book Riot
Until the middle of the century, its most visible work was crafted by outsiders from the East or Europe, bewildered by what they perceived as the otherness of Southern California, its sun and light, its palm trees. That all began to shift in the 1960s with the emergence of the Watts Writers Workshop. - Los Angeles Times
So's the entire publishing industry. "(The chain's) unique role in the book ecosystem, where it helps readers discover new titles and publishers stay invested in physical stores, makes it an essential anchor in a world upended by online sales and a much larger player: Amazon." - The New York Times
This practise has been brought to light, in part thanks to a TikTok trend whereby some readers have been posting videos about doing just that, even sharing tips on how to do so. Amazon allows readers to return ebooks up to 14 days after purchase, even if the whole book has been read. - Melville House
The so-called Birds' Head Haggadah (ca. 1300) belonged to German parliament member Ludwig Marum, one of the earliest Jews to die in the Holocaust. His grandchildren (three of them survivors themselves) are suing the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, where the book has been since 1946, for restitution. - The Art Newspaper
