The Book Council of Australia began to take shape last week when MUP director Louise Adler was announced as its chair. But what is its purpose, and how will it embrace the industry’s new voices?
As well as a souvenir of the 2015 Sydney Writers’ Festival this anthology is a compelling argument for the future of books in print. Book objects are talismans as much as vessels for the content they carry.
It’s hard to work out how funding for literature – if at all – fits into the draft guidelines of the new National Program for Excellence in the Arts. So what are the politics, and problems, at play?
Publishing is frequently a small-scale venture, comprising one or a handful of people with a vision for particular books they want to see published. Is it time to embrace ‘organic’ publishing?
Science has a reputation for vigorous hypothesis-testing in the search for truth. But when errors make it into scientific journals, the hallowed self-correction process seldom lives up to the ideal.
The University of Queensland Press caused controversy when it turned down Campbell Newman’s memoir – but why shouldn’t a publisher be entitled to principled refusal?
A sequel to Harper Lee’s classic 1960 novel To Kill a Mockingbird has been “found”, and will be published in July, her US publisher HarperCollins has announced. The sequel – Go Set a Watchman – was written…
Every now and then, the writer Josephine Humphreys has suggested, our lives veer from their day-to-day course and become for a short while “the kind of life that can be told as a story – that is, one in…
This is the second in my series of articles on print-on-demand and the growth of independent publishing in Australia. It explains the value of print-on-demand services for writers who want to self-publish…
When Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation launched a broadside at Google, claiming the company abuses its overwhelming market position in Europe, it looked a lot like a clash between web and print – the Information…
Recently on The Conversation, I described a remarkable moment of language experimentation highlighted by recent Australian poetry prizes. Panning out to a wider view of contemporary Australian poetry…
When a Google search can summon any image you like online, it seems anachronistic to hear of a print publication supposedly encountering distribution problems on the basis of its content. Yet that’s just…
The public clash between Hachette and Amazon has been making headlines for a while now, most recently around J K Rowling’s latest novel. Amazon bowed to consumer pressure after complaints that the book…
Five years ago, in the midst of the rancorous parallel importation debate the Productivity Commission undertook a thorough examination of book prices in Australia compared to comparable prices in the US…
The internet is an endless source of information. But who is liable if the information is wrong or, at least, misleading? Existing laws on publishing, information and privacy were not designed for the…