The Canongate Books boss on the success of Letters Live, performances of notable correspondence by leading lights of stage and screenJamie Byng, 46, son of the 8th Earl of Strafford, grew up in Hampshire and studied at the University of Edinburgh. After graduating he joined Canongate Books as an intern and bought out the struggling Edinburgh publishing house two years later, aged just 25. His successes include the UK publication of Yann Martel’s Life of Pi, which won the Man Booker prize in 2002 and sold more than 3m copies. In 2013 he set up Letters Live, “a celebration of the enduring power of literary correspondence” based in part on Shaun Usher’s Letters of Note books. Letters Live returns to London’s Freemasons’ Hall on Thursday 10 March.How did Letters Live come about?In 2013 we published two books about letters on the same day. One was Simon Garfield’s To the Letter, which is a history of letter-writing. The other, Letters of Note, grew out of Shaun Usher’s website, which compiles great correspondence throughout history. We decided to promote both books by getting people to read out letters in a live setting. Nick Cave had a letter in Shaun’s book and he’s a good friend, so it was very straightforward to call him up and say “How’s about it?” Gillian Anderson went totally nuts for a Katharine Hepburn letter to Spencer Tracy. Everyone I asked who was around – Benedict Cumberbatch, Matt Berry, Neil Gaiman, Bruce Robinson – said yes. Continue reading... Continue reading at 'The Guardian'
[ The Guardian | 2016-03-06 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Rudi Lehnert asked if there’s a way to open and read .epub books in a browser. Most of the ebooks I read are in the .epub format, primarily because I’m allergic to Digital Rights Management. (An .epub can have DRM, but they usually don’t.) A handful of e-tailers sell unprotected .epub books,... Continue reading at PC World
[ PC World | 2014-02-24 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Earlier this month, there was yet another lengthy public debate about Upworthy, the two-year-old publisher that has become one of the most popular sites on Facebook due to its knack for overselling its bite-size content with "curiosity gap" h ... Continue reading at Editor & Publisher
[ Editor & Publisher | 2014-02-17 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Technical books, with charts and graphs, have always been a challenge for e-readers like the Kindle. DCL, working with MIT Press, believes it has come up with a solution. Continue reading at Publishing Perspectives
[ Publishing Perspectives | 2014-02-17 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Got a kid with an insatiable appetite for books? You may want to sign up for Oyster, then. The subscription ebook service has just launched a children's section, giving young readers all the titles they can handle. The deal also brings Disney... Continue reading at Engadget
[ Engadget | 2014-02-13 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Microsoft's getting ready to follow Amazon, Apple, and Google into the reading game with an app for Windows to peruse ebooks, magazines, and comics. The new app appears be part of Microsoft's cross-platform Xbox entertainment services, which currently include Xbox Music and Video. Microsoft... Continue reading at PC World
[ PC World | 2014-02-11 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Open Road Integrated Media has signed an agreement to acquire E-Reads, the digital publisher founded by Richard Curtis in 1999. Continue reading at Publishers Weekly
[ Publishers Weekly | 2014-02-10 00:00:00 UTC ]
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BBC stations celebrate bumper final quarter of 2013, as record audience figures for Chris Evans push Radio 2 to new highNick Grimshaw's audience numbers are finally moving in the right direction, with the BBC Radio 1 breakfast DJ adding more than 700,000 listeners in the final three months of... Continue reading at The Guardian
[ The Guardian | 2014-02-06 00:00:00 UTC ]
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After a woman recently turned herself in to American authorities and confessed to participating in setting several fires, a judge ordered she read both 'Goliath' and Mary C. Wood's 'Nature's Trust' in addition to serving a prison sentence and completing community service. Continue reading at The Christian Science Monitor
[ The Christian Science Monitor | 2014-01-30 00:00:00 UTC ]
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From biographies to technical studies and step-by-step guides, here are 10 books that you should look for in the next few months.Of course, we think you can learn a lot online. But, if you're looking to take a deeper dive, there is often no substitute for the kind of thoughtful analysis you can... Continue reading at Fast Company
[ Fast Company | 2014-01-29 00:00:00 UTC ]
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I had the luck to have two books published by Tom Rosenthal. He combined the sharpest of editorial eyes and a penetrating critical intelligence with warm encouragement and support. Working with him, I got to know and love an exceptional personality. But, as I discovered, beneath his powerful,... Continue reading at The Guardian
[ The Guardian | 2014-01-23 00:00:00 UTC ]
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The Pew survey found that e-reading increased as well but that more adults read a print book in 2013 than in the previous year. 'Print remains the foundation of Americans’ reading habits,' the report stated. Continue reading at The Christian Science Monitor
[ The Christian Science Monitor | 2014-01-18 00:00:00 UTC ]
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The Internet has been disrupting the businesses of publishing and bookselling for the past two decades. Continue reading at Publishers Weekly
[ Publishers Weekly | 2014-01-17 00:00:00 UTC ]
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New research by the Pew Internet and American Life Project shows that the percentage of American adults who read an ebook in the past year has risen to 28 percent, up from 23 percent in 2012. Yet the tree book isn't dead yet, at least in the popularity sense, as the results show most ebook... Continue reading at Betanews
[ Betanews | 2014-01-16 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Turning literature into a numbers game makes some sense for the book trade, but none for readersWe may be halfway through January already, but the spirit of new year is still in full swing over in San Francisco, where the 2014 Goodreads Reading Challenge goes from strength to strength to... Continue reading at The Guardian
[ The Guardian | 2014-01-16 00:00:00 UTC ]
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E-books are rising in popularity, but according to the Pew Research Center, print remains the foundation of Americans’ reading habits. Continue reading at Publishers Weekly
[ Publishers Weekly | 2014-01-16 00:00:00 UTC ]
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For the past 15 years or so, poets and poetry lovers around the world have earmarked January 17 as a day to pay tribute to the late poet and pacifist William Stafford (1914–1993) with public readings from his works. Continue reading at Publishers Weekly
[ Publishers Weekly | 2014-01-10 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Last week, Ruth Rendell claimed that reading novels is a dying art. Sadly, she might have a pointNo one can say precisely why John Williams's novel Stoner has become a bestseller almost 50 years after its first publication. After all, plenty of books, "forgotten" or otherwise, are recommended by... Continue reading at The Guardian
[ The Guardian | 2014-01-05 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Reading a novel stimulates the brain for days, US researchers have found. The study,... Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2013-12-30 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Much as we admired the potential of the YotaPhone in our recent review, we just couldn't overlook its lack of support for popular e-reading platforms like Amazon Kindle and Google Books. That problem hasn't been solved just yet, but things are ... Continue reading at Engadget
[ Engadget | 2013-12-24 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Mark Coker of Smashwords, which recently inked a major content deal with Scribd, weighs in on how the all-you-can-read model changes the way we read, how authors make creative choices, and how everyone gets paid.Is a "Netflix for ebooks" nearing viability? Yesterday, Smashwords, the largest... Continue reading at Fast Company
[ Fast Company | 2013-12-20 00:00:00 UTC ]
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