Category: publishing

“The Dallas Public Library has launched a new program called the StreetSmart Express that lets people check out popular books and DVDs for $5 each. Other items can still be checked out by Dallas residents at no cost.”

“For those who don’t have the time to listen to an audiobook, let alone read a hardback or e-Book, HarperCollins brings you: the video book. Perhaps fittingly, the first author to get the video treatment is BuzzMachine’s Jeff Jarvis, whose book, What Would Google Do?, will be available in all the other formats as well….”

Reed Exhibitions said Monday “that it won’t hold the Toronto-based BookExpo this summer – the first time in more than 50 years that the country has not had an industry-themed spring event for booksellers, publishers, distributors and authors. Less expected was Reed senior vice-president Greg Topalian’s confirmation Monday that Reed was also halting plans for a three-day public event in October, a first, called the Toronto Book Fair.”

There are a “handful of highly intelligent, well-educated criminals who operate in the somewhat murky world of international antiquarian book traders, collectors and curators. They successfully plunder priceless tomes, manuscripts and ancient maps, while the players in this closed world – the national and international libraries, the dealers and the victims themselves – largely remain silent about what is going on.”

Wendy Cope “said the role ‘blurred the distinction’ between worldly and artistic success. Good poetry could not be composed to order, she argued, adding that any poet could write about public events without holding an official title.”

“Despite having offered bland and distractable universalism on the day that the world was watching, Elizabeth Alexander has developed a strongly polyvocal poetics over the course of her career.”

“Tempers are running high in the principality of Wikipedia, that remarkable tract of cyberspace where, as in all good democracies, the citizens rule in theory, but in practice they are held a safe distance from the levers of power. The hubbub comes in the wake of an embarrassing bout of death-by-Wikipedia, in which two American senators were marked down as dead – on Inauguration Day, no less – when in fact both were alive and kicking.”

“Over the course of the year, e-book sales were up 63.8 percent. It is in these figures that many industry analysts see hope for the publishing industry at large, which is turning slowly – and not without some grumbling – toward mass digitization. But it’s not the bigger houses, such as Macmillan or HarperCollins, that are moving the fastest.”

“It seems a ripe time for novel podcasting to grow. Traditional book publishers are struggling. Book sales are down Unlike audiobooks, novel podcasts are truncated into segments and may include ambient sounds, music as well a cast of voices playing different characters.The success of novels is democratically decided: word of mouth leads to more downloads.”

Toronto’s newest fall literary festival appears to be on shaky ground even before it holds its debut edition after the country’s largest trade publisher, Random House of Canada, and another big player, Penguin Group (Canada), announced that they won’t participate.