Category: publishing

Books by David Byrne, Colin Beavan and Stephen Elliott will hit the shelves with “cover art [that] is not printed on dust jackets but instead stamped directly onto the boards that hug their pages. The result is a handsome, eye-catching look that reflects a heightened awareness on the part of publishers that books these days cannot be counted on to simply sell themselves. “

“After years of being pilloried by the Vatican and conservative Christian groups for, among other things, promoting Satanism, the boy wizard is getting a second look by those very groups. And academic journals are teeming with new interpretations of J. K. Rowling’s series as Christian allegories.”

“Already, in Edinburgh, they’re calling Friday evening ‘the James Tait Blackout’ – the night when a generator failure at the Book Festival meant that Britain’s oldest literary awards were presented at an hour-long ceremony hardly anyone could either see or hear…. It had all started so well.”

“Author and journalist Lynn Barber has withdrawn from a literary festival after the local council refused to include a photograph of her smoking in its brochure for the event. Her ferocious interview technique earned her the soubriquet Demon Barber, but this is the first time she has been branded a potentially corrupting influence.”

“Too tired to cook, Justin ate 5-10 Oreos, called it dinner, leapt into his filthy car, and sped to Politics and Prose Bookstore. The muggy August air stuck to him, or he to it. He slipped into the bookstore a little before 7 p.m., smelling of Camel cigarettes and eyeing his mp3 recorder skeptically. He listened to James Wood speak about character – what it is and why it’s so hard to decode — for an hour.”

“The book, given a huge lift from the recently released movie “Julie & Julia,” sold 22,000 copies in the most recent week tracked, according to Nielsen BookScan, which follows book sales. That is more copies than were sold in any full year since the book’s appearance.”

“Here in LA I have seen the future, and it is literate. So let’s all open bookshops, make them glorious places to hang out, and stay open till midnight at the weekend. And if all else fails, get Dave Eggers in.”

“Built on marshland, former flood plains and paddyfields 30km north-west of Seoul, Paju Book City is an attempt to create an ambitious new town based exclusively around publishing.”

Some publishers are for Google’s agreement on digitization of books; others not. “Even if it goes forward, the deal has fueled talk of possible alternatives in Europe.”

It’s Dan Brown’s “The Da Vinci Code.”