Within only a few weeks, I came across all sorts of news refering to big publishing conglomerates and small indiependent houses who launch or announced  new approaches to putting books onto the internet. And at the same time, a new debate about eventual business models has started – anywhere between giving away all the stuff for free [...]

The revolving debate about what culture may lose as books migrate from a shelf onto a screen – or if digitizing books is a good thing, or just plain vil – I was amused to come across this story related by Plato in Phaedrus 275 A: “When the god Thoth first offered the craft of [...]

Here you can find Paulo Coelho’s new megaseller “The Witch of Portobello” – for free. Oh, and yes, it is entirely legal. Courtesy of Harper Collins, Coelho’s US publisher. Why they give away Coelho’s new book digitally? In order to sell it on paper, of course. And Harper decided, as of today, to start putting [...]

Apologies for being a lazy blogger, but here I can report on a curious and multi facetted battle in German print culture. A few weeks before Jonathan Littell’s originally French novel “Les Bienveillantes” (“The Kindly Ones”) is due for release in German translation at Berlin Verlag, the prestiguous conservative broadsheet Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) starts [...]