Books

When Andy Hunter was looking for US$1.2 million to create Bookshop.org, "It was actually an extremely lonely experience because I was wandering around New York City talking to big agents, like publishers, high-net-worth individuals or investors I thought might care about bookstores.  Read more

Increasingly, people of the book are also people of the cloud. At the Codex Hackathon, a convention whose participants spend a frenetic weekend designing electronic reading tools, I watch developers line up onstage to pitch book-related projects to potential collaborators and funders.

One day last week, after I spent the best part of an hour opening two days' worth of post at my office - I work as literary editor of the Spectator - I posted a peevish tweet: "Can we all stop publishing, for good and all, nonfiction books about the future, books about how to change your life, books about what it means to be/how we came to be human, and books about fucking Nazis?  Read more

Covers sell books. But in the case of Hillary Clinton's memoir What Happened, you can't help thinking that the book's sales in the UK are despite the jacket treatment, not because of it. Whereas the US jacket oozes the gravitas you expect from the woman who stood up to Donald Trump, the UK jacket has all the power of a shrugged "meh".

There is no shortage of pithy, heartwarming or glib adages about family. Oscar Wilde said, "After a good dinner one can forgive anybody, even one's own relations," though this year, post-election, found plenty of blood relations tossed from celebrations and family gatherings.  Read more