Publishing world

At 8 p.m. on March 22, the capital of the American book publishing business all but shut down. Two days earlier, Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York had announced stay-at-home orders that would temporarily shutter all in-person businesses throughout the state that were not deemed essential-bookstores, libraries, and publishers among them-in order to combat the Covid-19 pandemic.  Read more

A new interactive article from the New York Times examines just how white the publishing industry actually is. And despite the number of high-profile books from non-white authors in recent years, the demographic data is bleak: according to their data, 95 percent of published authors are white.

Book publishing in 2020 was a story of how much an industry can change and how much it can, or wants to, remain the same.

"A lot of what has happened this year - if it were a novel, I would say that it had a little too much plot," said Simon & Schuster CEO Jonathan Karp.  Read more

When the Department of Justice interviewed me in late 2012 as part of its investigation into the pending merger of Random House and Penguin, I was both surprised and heartened-the very fact that DOJ attorneys were talking with a small publisher suggested that they understood the dark potential of such a deal.  Read more

Wonderful people in bureaucratic straitjackets - that's publishing, writes Martin Lindstrom

The time was 5pm, and I had one hour left to meet the deadline for my next big book.  Read more