Monday, February 28, 2011

Ouch ...

... American Publishing: A Lesson From Tolstoy's Inkwell. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

What the public wants (certainly the literate public) is not the book jacket, or the typeface, or the quality of the paper, or the "feel" of a book -- what the public wants is the blood and guts of the author, the contact of the reader's mind with the author's mind -- and the most efficient vehicle for that contact is now the electronic book, the E-book.
Methinks that's so. But what I found most disturbing in this piece was this: "Most copy editors don't read books, they use software to locate possible grammar and punctuation problems." I was for several years a copy editor of books. I cannot imagine not reading every word of a manuscript.

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