Category: publishing

“For the best part of a decade, the heirs of German writer and Nobel prize laureate Heinrich Böll worked on hammering out a deal with the city of Cologne over the transfer of his private papers to the state archives.” The handover, encompassing hundreds of boxes, happened last month. “But his papers and unpublished works may have been lost for ever after the collapse of the archives building this week.”

In difficult times, according to Bloomsbury’s blogging chairman, Richard Charkin, “people turn to quality, reliability and good value. Books represent all those things.” Historically, this fits. Penguin was conceived and reared during the Great Depression and the second world war.

“Thousands of people have come through his doors, slept in his shop, eaten at his table, and many of them still write to him, or return. There’s nothing quaint or historicalised about Shakespeare and Company. The values, the ethos and hospitality don’t change, but the shop goes forward with the times.”

Stealing pages from antique books – and even carrying off entire volumes – is all too easy and all too difficult to catch. And until recently, when thieves were apprehended, libraries tried to keep the incidents quiet. Now the British Library is leading a trend to deal with such crimes and criminals more publicly. (Article includes The Six Stages Of Stealing.)

And why? It’s figured out the experience of entering the store. “Three or four like-minded small businesses could easily share a space like this, combining their cachet and customer base into a kind of small cultural engine. Avid fans of the arts tend to spread the wealth to many different kinds of culture.”

“Just a month after announcing a restructuring that led to layoffs and the shuttering of an entire division, HarperCollins Publishers hopes to jazz up its book lists by opening a new imprint.” It Books will focus “on pop culture, sports, style and content derived from the Internet, like a planned collection of Twitter posts called Twitter Wit.“

“[T]oday The [New York] Times introduces three separate lists of the best-selling graphic books in the country: hardcover, softcover, and manga. We’ll update those lists weekly in this space, and offer a few observations along the way.”

“What kind of role Barnes & Noble will play in the digital future became a little clearer this morning with the retailer’s announcement that it has acquired Fictionwise, one of the largest independent e-book retailers, for $15.7 million plus incentives over the next two years for achieving certain performance targets.”

“When the news hit last night that Amazon was releasing a Kindle for iPhone, I jumped to get it. No matter how much I love books, I’d developed a definite longing for the Kindle. It was partly my fondness for new technologies, partly the (perhaps late) realization that e-readers are likely here to stay….” Carolyn Kellogg tries out the new app.

“As part of the class-action settlement” of a federal lawsuit over book scanning, “Google will pay $125 million to create a system under which customers will be charged for reading a copyrighted book, with the copyright holder and Google both taking percentages; copyright holders will also receive a flat fee for the initial scanning, and can opt out of the whole system if they wish. But first they must be found.” Thus Google’s $7 million advertising effort “in that relic of the pre-Internet age: print.”