PRECIS OF VOLUME 17 ISSUE 3

• How do you summarize the deep transformation that overtook British publishing in the last thirty years of the 20th century? Eric de Bellaigue, who was forecasting the future before this transformation began, says that "deregulation and access to capital" changed the rules.
• The ebook reached some kind of a climax in the year 2000 under stimulation from horror author Stephen King. Microsoft predicted that ebook sales would reach $1bn by 2004. Richard Guthrie, who has been studying the ebook before, during and after this climax tells what really happened.
• Jeremy Lewis, editor turned author, relates his kaleidoscopic career in a sparkling autobiographical essay. "The grass," he says, "has become less green in publishing."
• With everybody talking to everybody on the web, where do libraries stand? In the age of this "Web 2.0", libraries have to get in on the act says Jack M Maness, librarian and bibliographer of Computer Science at the University of Colorado. "The global proliferation of blogs and wikis," Maness says, "has enormous implications for libraries."
• In the second of the series on "The personal library as doppelganger", Dutch publisher and book scholar Laurens van Krevelen tells how his library of surrealism came into his life and became his personal frame of reference.
• Two pioneers of South African publishing - Marie Philip and James Currey - were interviewed by Isabel Essery on the political opposition they encountered at the beginning. The interviews demonstrate that politics and publishing have been inexorably linked throughout South Africa's history, and still are today.
• Gordon Graham, to his mild embarrassment, appears both as reviewer and reviewed in this issue of LOGOS. He gives high marks to Michael Zifcak's autobiography My Life in Print, and his own secret history of what happened to Butterworths in its transition between family ownership and takeover is positively reviewed by Eric de Bellaigue.
• Richard Abel, in characteristic vigorous and authoritative mode, reviews Melvyn Bragg's 12 Books That Changed the World.
• And Graham concludes the issue by wondering why British and American publishers are at war over a quarrel to which he has the answer.

Back to Current Issue >>