Why Does It Still Take So Long to Publish a Book?

For writers, few steps in the publishing process are as strange as the state of suspended animation between submitting a manuscript and seeing the book appear in stores. The sudden change in cabin pressure from writing to waiting can be jarring — and can last a very long time. “It comes as a huge shock when it happens the first time,” said the Irish writer Colm Toibin, whose first novel, “The South,” appeared in 1990, a year and a half after he turned it in. “It was all slow and strange.”

Why Does It Still Take So Long to Publish a Book? – New York Times

Fascinating Plagarism Situation

A classic, or a fraud? – Los Angeles Times

Waiting for (More)Lyra: American and the Rest of the World

Cultural insights from the box office – Opinion – smh.com.au
■ There’s a case for making part two of The Golden Compass. Its budget was $230 million. In America it made $90 million (most of its accents are British and it was labelled anti-religious). In the rest of the world it was a hit, making $330 million. It’s the world’s 75th biggest moneymaker of all time, well ahead of Passion Of The Christ (90). The Golden Compass ended on a cliffhanger. The plot can’t be resolved without American money.

Can Hollywood rise above xenophobia and lift the world off the edge?

Day trip to Auschwitz for pupils from every school in England

A good idea, I think.

From the Times:

Two sixth-formers from every school in England are to visit Auschwitz to learn about the Holocaust, under a government-funded initiative to help to ensure that the lessons of the Nazi genocide live on with a new generation.

Jim Knight, the Schools Minister, wants the teenagers who take part to educate their classmates and communities in turn by giving them their own accounts of the death camp in Poland where more than one million Jews, Roma, Sinti, gay, disabled and black people were put to death.

The Government will fund the greater majority of the cost of each student’s trip. While their school must find £100, the Education Department will find the remaining £200 per trip over the next three years….

Critics have suggested that the visits might act as a smokescreen to disguise present-day atrocities. But Mr Knight is determined that this will not happen. “We want them to see it, not as an isolated period of history, but as something real and something that can happen again and again if we let it, like it has happened since then in the Balkans, in Cambodia and in Rwanda,” he said.

This is why today he will confirm that the scheme, which has been piloted since 2006, will now be on a permanent footing receiving £1.5 million of government funding a year until 2011, with a promise of further funding in the future…