Clay Shirky Quotes

An e-book distributor is not a publisher, but rather a purveyor of work that has already been created.

YouTube is so quick and so instant, and you make a video, and you can upload it the same day, whereas with a book, you have to go through a lot of time and a lot of people and a lot of processes. So it was weird to sit down and work with other people on projects, because I'm so independent with YouTube.

With Instapaper, I can take a few months off. I can't stop publishing 'The Magazine' for two months and work on something else.

Longreads embodies a lot of what we really value with Automattic and WordPress.

I think publishers need to be the ones that publish the books and control that process: finding writers, helping them with their work, finding readers. I think writers need that.

Gutenberg made everybody a reader. Xerox makes everybody a publisher.

Publishing isn't a job anymore. It's a button.

Making a book is such a big enterprise.

I have a problem with censorship by the lawyer - by legal people by the publishing firm, and I may be changing publishers. They don't seem to want to take too many risks with living people.

I would like to shift more into writing for and producing people.

With everything that I've done with YouTube and podcasts for so many years, it's been: you can record it, edit, and then upload that day. With the book and documentary, it's been such a longer process.

The professionals are going to be joined by the average Joe. Everybody's a publisher.

The life of an editor is not a glamorous one. You're a fixer; you make things better.

I do read everything that we publish. We usually have to have two or three votes for a book before we take it on. So in that sense I suppose it is an orchestra.

First, I was a fact checker for Zagat and then I was an editorial assistant for HarperCollins publishing house.

I started my own magazine with drawings, commentary, news, film reviews and drawings.

For every issue, I send four pages of finished marginals and they select the ones they need.

Publishing in a way doesn't have a lot to do with writing, and writing doesn't have a lot to do with publishing.

Manuscript: something submitted in haste and returned at leisure.

Everything is different - except for publishing itself: getting hold of an amazing author, working to make his or her book the best and best-looking it can be, telling the world.

You can't hold up a blog; you can hold up a magazine.

We are in the business of gathering the news. We're not in the business of talking about the news.

No agent/publisher is in a position to create across a spectrum of media and distribution what major publishers can accomplish for authors.

I like businesses in transition, first of all. If ever there were a business in transition, it is publishing.

Writing an encyclopedia is hard. To do anywhere near a decent job, you have to know a great deal of information about an incredibly wide variety of subjects. Writing so much text is difficult, but doing all the background research seems impossible.