The primary goal of publishing general fiction and non-fiction was never profit - though profit was essential to stay in the game. Publishing is a vocation in which the work is its own reward, an insufficient goal for today's conglomerates.

Editors and their authors seldom form deep friendships for the same reason that psychiatrists and their patients keep their distance: The relationship requires candor that mixes poorly with intimacy.

The marketplace for books when I entered the business shortly after World War II consisted of a thousand or so well stocked independent booksellers in major towns and cities supplemented by thousands of smaller shops that carried limited stocks of mostly current titles along with greeting cards, toys and so on.

What is true for book publishing is true for civilization: the books that survive the test of time are humanity's backlist, our collective memory.

SOPA has been described as hitting a carpet tack with a sledgehammer. But technology was a sledgehammer to the music industry, one that allowed digital distributors like Apple to grow rich.

I love video games. I'm also slightly in awe of them. I'm in awe of their power in terms of imagination, in terms of technology, in terms of concept. But I think, above all, I'm in awe at their power to motivate, to compel us, to transfix us, like really nothing else we've ever invented has quite done before.

I think that integrating information to everyday objects will not only help us to get rid of the digital divide, the gap between these two worlds, but will also help us, in some way, to stay human, to be more connected to our physical world.

I am not on social media, as I don't feel the need to communicate with the outside world. People who matter to me are just a call away.