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IPFS News Link • Books

The book is out of its cover so authors must adapt

• http://www.ft.com, John Sutherland

Amazon enrages authors", screamed one headline after the firm decided to pay some novelists only for the pages of their books that readers actually read. 

One doubts that authors, as a class, often get enraged about anything other than the puniness of their advances, the nastiness of reviewers and the fact that Ian McEwan and Alain de Botton sell so many more books than they do. But what is certain is that writers will adapt as creatively as they always have to the book world they find themselves in.

Sir Walter Scott, nicknamed the Wizard of the North, was the inventor of the three-volume, hugely expensive 19th-century novel. It was not the kind of book you would want to drop on your toe, and it took an infuriatingly long time for the narrative to get going. One cannot imagine Sir Walter passing the pay as you go test.


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