Category: publishing

“No city library will be closed between now and June 30, the Nutter administration said yesterday. It was a swift and surprising turn of events in an emotional and enduring saga that has embroiled the city, the courts, library advocates and neighborhood residents who have demonstrated unwavering fealty to their local branches.” But “branches would still be facing limited hours and possible emergency closures.”

“According to reports from Book World employees, the last issue of Book World will appear in its tabloid print version on Feb. 15 but will continue to be published online as a distinct entity. In the printed newspaper, Sunday book content will be split between Outlook, the opinion and commentary section, and Style & Arts.”

“What will happen to Book Soup? Like most great bookstores, it is the product of one book lover’s taste and vision. Most of the store’s 60,000 volumes were handpicked by [owner Glenn] Goldman for a clientele he knew intimately after 33 years in the same neighborhood.” Though Goldman died this month “without a succession plan in place for Book Soup,” his death does does not dictate its end.

As publishing suffers, “there is one segment of the industry that is actually flourishing: capitalizing on the dream of would-be authors to see their work between covers, companies that charge writers and photographers to publish are growing rapidly at a time when many mainstream publishers are losing ground.”

Sebastian Barry’s “novel The Secret Scripture has its prize, in the form of the £25,000 Costa book of the year award — but only by the very skin of its teeth. In what the chair of the judges, Matthew Parris called ‘an extraordinarily close finish’, the 53-year-old Irish novelist gained the support of five out of the nine judges — with the others supportive of Adam Foulds’s narrative poem The Broken Word, set during the Mau Mau uprising in 1950s Kenya.”

“To consider the 1,700-odd pages of his Harry Angstrom saga… is to find yourself considering a work with an excellent claim as the Great American Novel, but you’d be forgiven for preferring to spend time with four or five Very Good ones.”

“Is this the end of independent comic books? That was the fear around the comics blogosphere last week when word spread of a policy change from Diamond Comic Distributors, the world’s dominant distributor of English-language comic books. The company has decided to raise the minimum advance order it needs from comic-book stores before it will agree to distribute a title.”

“Neil Gaiman, a renowned author of science fiction, fantasy, graphic novels and comics aimed at adults, won the John Newbery Medal for the year’s most outstanding contribution to children’s literature on Monday. Mr. Gaiman, 48, won for ‘The Graveyard Book,’ a story about a boy who is raised in a cemetery by ghosts after his family is killed in the opening pages of the novel.”

“Sara Nelson, the editor in chief of Publishers Weekly, the main trade magazine to the book industry, has been laid off in a restructuring by the publication’s parent company, Reed Business Information. Ms. Nelson, 52, spent four years heading up the magazine and had become a lively presence within the industry, speaking frequently on panels and advocating forcefully for books in her weekly column.”

“In recent years, as publishing houses have encouraged writers to create a robust online presence, a new team of experts has emerged. Jefferson Rabb and a handful of others are now the go-to people for book-specific Web sites and videos, and many authors are willing to shell out big money — usually from their own pockets — for the privilege of working with them.”