Category: publishing

“A mysterious rush of bets on the Man Booker Prize for Fiction has seen the novelist Hilary Mantel installed as early favourite after 95 per cent of all wagers on the contest were placed on her.”

The Australian “government has refused to lock down a position on the contentious debate about lifting the ban on the importation of cheap overseas-produced books, but has said the priority is the viability of the Australian publishing industry.”

A Facebook group called “People for a library-themed Ben & Jerry’s flavor!” has attracted nearly four thousand members, and is bent on petitioning the ice-cream company into submission. The logic behind the cause is unassailable.

“Does the blogging crowd have more wisdom than the panel? Can we come up with a more interesting shortlist than the judges? Can we pick a better winner? Or will we, indeed, choose the same one? Let’s find out.”

“[J.M.] Coetzee has been given odds of 3/1 to take the award for a third time by Ladbrokes, well ahead of the only other author to have previously won the prize, AS Byatt, who trails in at 10/1 for her much-praised The Children’s Book. ‘Coetzee is the field’s big name and we anticipate that literary punters will be quick to back the author’s bid to create history,’ said Ladbrokes spokesman Nick Weinberg.”

“Reed Business Information is putting Publishers Weekly and its affiliated publications, Library Journal and School Library Journal, up for sale. The sale of the group is part of RBI’s strategy to divest most of its trade magazines in the U.S.”

“Over the last few weeks, the writers of a pair of Civil War-era histories about the anti-Confederate inhabitants of Jones County, Miss., have been trading barbs in an unusual public spat. It began when the author of one book, rights to which had been sold to Universal Pictures and the filmmaker Gary Ross, discovered that Mr. Ross had spurred the publication of a new and somewhat sexier work on the same subject.”

“In one of the longest-running probate battles in Pinellas court history, a judge on Friday declared the will purportedly signed by Kerouac’s mother — the mom who inherited Kerouac’s belongings at his 1969 death — to be a forgery. … She died in 1973. Her will left everything to Kerouac’s third wife, Stella, who in turn gave everything to her own siblings when she died in 1990.”

Editorial: “Google’s effort could create new interest in millions of out-of-print books, which would be made available at no cost at public libraries,” even as authors and publishers would benefit financially from revenues generated elsewhere. But “the Department of Justice should make sure adequate protections are built” into Google’s right to orphaned books, while the company should “do a better job of showing how it will respect privacy” of readers.

“The ACLU and other organizations are turning up the heat on Google to protect readers’ privacy. The groups are concerned that Google’s plan to significantly expand Google Books does not come with a policy to keep users’ reading habits safe from prying eyes. … The ACLU worries that the monitoring of readers’ online browsing and buying activities will expand along with the number of titles.”