Category: publishing

“The number of books sold in Canada rose six per cent in the last quarter of 2008 compared to the same period last year, while revenues rose two per cent, according to figures released Monday. … Last year, Canadian publishers were pressured to lower book prices to more closely match the U.S. sticker price when the Canadian dollar was trading at parity with the U.S. dollar. Sales are considered to have increased as a result of those lower prices.”

“Poetry is the least flashy of art forms, and rarely gets to sit centre stage. However, tomorrow … Elizabeth Alexander, a professor of African-American studies at Yale, will take to the stage and recite a poem after President Obama gives his inaugural speech. At that point in the proceedings, people may be desperate for a break, but I suggest we all pay attention.”

“After 82 years in business, Milwaukee’s iconic Harry W. Schwartz Bookshops is shuttering its four bookstores, succumbing to the economic downturn and technological changes that are redrawing how people read and shop for books.”

“In the eighteenth century, the death of a newspaper signalled the death of liberty. What it signals now is harder to know, especially because there’s death, and then there’s death. If, one day, ink-and-print is dead and gone, newspapers will endure, wraiths of ether. The newspaper didn’t stay dead in the age of the American Revolution, either.”

Regularly plundered by social diarists for titbits of gossip, free warm wine and soggy canapes, invitations are dwindling as publishing houses pull in their horns. Many have ordered a ban for all but the big-hitting books, leaving it to authors themselves to foot the bill.

“His posthumously published book 2666 has been hailed as ‘the finest novel of the present century’ and yet, until recently, the English-speaking world knew little of Roberto Bolaño. The colourful life and early death of the hard-living, rebellious Chilean writer are the stuff of literary legend, but does the work live up to the hype?”

Farhad Hakimzadeh, an Iranian-born philanthropist and bibliophile has been sentenced to two years in prison for carefully slicing pages, plates and maps from rare books in the British and Bodleian Libraries and adding the pages to his own private collection.

“A library card has become a hot property in the Seattle region — area public libraries are experiencing a surge in circulation. While busy libraries in one of the nation’s most literate cities are nothing new, some librarians credit (or blame) the recession for a dramatic upswing in business. … Nationwide, libraries have reported similar or greater increases.”

“Google isn’t the only organization taking steps to make important works of literature available online. The Morgan Library & Museum in New York has invited technicians and scholars to create a digital facsimile of one of its Gutenberg Bibles, the library has announced.”

As the intrepid boy reporter celebrates his 60th birthday, it seems that le tout France is up in arms over a (tongue-in-cheek?) newspaper column asking this: “A callow, androgynous blonde-quiffed youth in funny trousers and a scarf moving into the country mansion of his best friend, a middle-aged sailor… and whose only serious female friend is an opera diva… And you’re telling me Tintin isn’t gay?”