Category: publishing

“The global economic recession has given retailers and distributors a much greater incentive to go hunting for deals. As a consequence, one of the few burgeoning areas of the book business not in the digital domain is the remainder and hurts market.”

“I feel that as writers we shouldn’t necessarily be granted an exemption,” UK children’s laureate Anthony Browne said. “If all people who work with children have to be vetted by the police then we shouldn’t be an exception. It seems a bit odd that we have to pay for it, though.” Meanwhile, the outrage among children’s authors continued.

“So far, few consumers think books should be free – a fact that I attribute to the klugy Kindle and its affordable Amazon store. … But that could change in a matter of months if the book industry insists on 1) jacking up the price of e-books and 2) withholding potential best-sellers from the e-book market.”

“The book, which [publisher] Quirk said would be 60% Austen and 40% tentacled chaos, sees Elinor and Marianne Dashwood contending with giant lobsters, rampaging octopi, two-headed serpents and other ferocious sea monsters as they set out on their quest for love.”

“[John David] California’s grip on the material is about as steady as, say, a nonagenarian’s on a heavy paperweight. Among the more ludicrous aspects of the novel is that California imitates Salinger’s style by having the 76-year-old C think and talk exactly as Holden did at age 16.”

“No topic is more hotly debated in book circles at the moment than the timing, pricing and ultimate impact of e-books on the financial health of publishers and retailers. Publishers are grappling with e-book release dates partly because they are trying to understand how digital editions affect demand for hardcover books. A hardcover typically sells for anywhere from $25 to $35, while the most common price for an e-book has quickly become $9.99.”

Prime minister Paul Rudd’s government wants to change a law which bans Australian booksellers from importing a given title if a domestic publisher is to release that title within 30 days of its publication elsewhere. The Australian Society of Authors responds that “[r]emoving the territorial copyright of books will simply destroy our hard-won literary culture.”

“A newly discovered but unfinished novel by Graham Greene … is being serialized in The Strand magazine beginning this week and will appear in four more quarterly installments. The magazine hopes to commission someone to write an ending for the novel, a murder mystery called The Empty Chair that Greene began in 1926 and then apparently abandoned.”

“Sourcebooks, a leading independent publisher, will not release a big upcoming title in e-book format until six months after its hardcover debut, The WSJ reports. In the past, Sourcebooks has released digital formats of its books along with the print copies,” but the publishing house’s CEO says cheap e-books cannibalize the hardcover audience.