“In contrast to the UK’s famous three-for-two deals, the French state fixes the prices of books and readers pay the same whether they buy online, at a high-street giant or a small bookseller. Discounting is banned. The government boasts that price controls have saved small independent bookshops from the ravages of free-market capitalism that were unleashed in the UK when it abandoned fixed prices in the 1990s.”
Category: publishing
Editors At Australia’s Leading Newspapers “Resign”
“The clean-out of editors comes ahead ahead of a major restructure of the two metropolitan broadsheets which will see the end of the traditional news-gathering model and a new structure of five geographical editors-in-chief of Sydney, Melbourne, Canberra, Brisbane and Perth.” Last week, the newspapers’ publisher announced 1,900 layoffs at the papers.
Should Summer Ever Come To London, Here’s Where You Can Sit And Read (Outside) In Peace
Graves, fountains, pubs and towers – and recommendations for books, too, from author Iain Sinclair.
Time For Books To Go Locavore?
Richard Russo, who has a locally sourced and print-only book coming out, thinks books could go the way of local heritage tomatoes.
Why Is ’50 Shades of Grey’ So Popular? Because Kindles Don’t Kiss And Tell
“It is the biggest e-reader success story yet, and its record-breaking sales have been attributed, in part, to the fact that it is possible to consume erotic fiction on a Kindle without anyone knowing your naughty secret. It’s the 21st-century equivalent of hiding a dirty book inside a respectable newspaper, and what’s more, it can be purchased instantly and anonymously at home.”
Who Remembers National Book Award Finalists? The Internet, Of Course
On a new National Book Foundation site that commemorates all of the finalists and winners, “the fun is in happening upon the lesser-known, like the The Balloonist, MacDonald Harris’s 1977 novel ‘about a Swedish inventor and his two companions who embark on a hydrogen-balloon voyage to the North Pole at the end of the 19th century.'”
Why Should E-Books Have To Be Like Books? Why Not Like, Say, Trading Cards?
Reading an e-book “still feels like, well, reading a book: tabbing through pages, digesting information linearly.” But the tech company Semi-Linear’s new Citia iPad app “reinvents long-form non-fiction for the tablet, turning books into something that resembles less a sequence of chapters and more a digital spread of sharable, customizable, collectible cards.”
The Short Story That Changed The New Yorker And Messed Up Mary McCarthy’s Marriage
Frances Kiernan on McCarthy’s “The Weeds”.
Penguin Makes Deal With New York Libraries For E-Books
“If successful at the New York Public Library and the Brooklyn Public Library–two of the country’s largest library systems–Penguin said it could offer similar deals to libraries across the U.S., including school and university libraries. And the deal could prompt other major publishers that currently don’t sell e-books to libraries to soften their stances.”
There’s A Place Where People Still Flock To Bookstores – France
“The French, as usual, insist on being different. As independent bookstores crash and burn in the United States and Britain, the book market in France is doing just fine. France boasts 2,500 bookstores, and for every neighborhood bookstore that closes, another seems to open.”