Category: publishing

“A tongue-in-cheek bedtime book for parents which exhorts children to ‘go the **** to sleep’ has soared to the top of Amazon’s bestseller chart a month before publication.”

The building “boasts a massive underground storage area holding 3.5 million volumes on 50-foot-high shelves. The collection is managed by robotic systems that help create an environment where scholars can scour the web for hours for academic papers and still get a hard-to-find volume from the stacks.”

“In an era when the popularity of e-books has exploded and hardcover volumes seem destined to go the way of the LP, high-priced books are holding on.”

“Tim Waterstone, the founder of the book stores that take his name, is poised for a dramatic come-back after his new, rich Russian commercial partner submitted a £43m bid for the business.”

“The interest in slamming creative writing programs soars above the niceties of measured assessment and factual demonstration, catapulted there by deep-seated feelings about the nature of creativity, which we all love, and school, which we emphatically don’t, at least not in this context.”

“Top critics Morris Dickstein and Cynthia Ozick debate who are truly the book critics today (hint: Amazon reviewers) and what this means for reviewing. Jane Ciabattari reports.”

“Soon to be extinct: one of the more hyperbolic compliments engendered by last century’s technology – ‘I could listen to her read the phonebook …’ The what?“

“Billed as the richest award for factual writing in Canada,” the $60,000 Writers’ Trust Hilary Weston Prize “and the autumn gala at which it will be announced are intended to do for the craft what the Giller Prize does for Canadian fiction.”

“The dogged determination of local users to defend their beloved libraries is impressive, but the battle is still barely begun. Currently, some 450 libraries around the UK are threatened with closure, and the number could still rise significantly later this year.”

“It may seem like a no-brainer to offer a musical component to a book about a musician, but even a few years ago, in the pre-iTunes era, it would have been prohibitively expensive for a medium-sized publishing house to create such an enhancement. Now, as the book industry struggles in part because of the digital age, the accessibility of that same digital technology becomes an irresistible tool. And the music soundtrack – digitally or not – has become a value-added offering for publishers.”