Category: publishing

“The picture book, a mainstay of children’s literature with its lavish illustrations, cheerful colors and large print wrapped in a glossy jacket, has been fading. It is not going away but publishers have scaled back the number of titles they have released in the last several years, and booksellers across the country say sales have been suffering.”

There’s been a flurry of poetry news lately (well, relatively speaking, of course). And poetry seems to have become popular again on the internet. So do we really need a National Poetry Day?

“The jurors plowed through 98 titles in total, coming up with a long list of 13 last month, from which they are set to consider five for the award ceremony in Toronto on Nov. 9. Only one title by a major publisher, David Bergen’s novel The Matter with Morris, a Phyllis Bruce/HarperCollins book, made the top five.”

“Nearly 250,000 people are due there this week with an unprecedented mixture of fear and excitement. The reason is digital. E-books have hardly forced us to find some other use for our shelves, yet this was the year the big beasts of the book and internet world decided they were the future.”

It’s 2 meters by 3 meters big. Yours for a cool 100,000 dollars, Australian publisher Gordon Cheers said that the last book even close in size to his 128-page volume was the Klencke Atlas, produced in 1660 as a gift for Charles II of England.

“Talk of the ‘ebook’ that has dominated the Frankfurt Book Fair in recent years has given way in 2010 to excited chatter about the so-called ‘enhanced ebook’, a mixture of the traditional book, audio, video and game.”

“At a time when the digital revolution has thrown the mission of libraries into question, the New York Public Library is planning to name Anthony W. Marx, the current president of Amherst College, … as its new president.”

“American novelist Philip Roth dislikes e-books and the distracting influences of modern technology, which he feels diminishes the ability to appreciate the beauty and aesthetic experience of reading books on paper.”

“Probably all of the volunteer-run, big library book sales around the country have discussed the issue of hand scanners, and probably there are yearly re-hashings of the discussion. Some libraries have forbidden the scanners at the sales (though smart phones can and do provide the same data, just a bit more slowly; are they to be banned as well, and how would that accomplished?).”

In the UK-based venture And Other Stories, “instead of a bunch of editors and sales people deciding what is worth reading, a series of reading groups, editors and translators meet to decide what is fit for publication. Over the next year, they plan to publish four books using this editorial approach.”