Category: publishing

“In an age when some families ban the word ‘killed’ or come up with creative euphemisms to mask the death of goldfish, it’s not hard to see why a toy company would reduce Rapunzel’s story to its prettiest parts. Real life, presumably, packs enough trauma for children to think about later. Yet something important is lost when a child’s introduction to fairy tales comes in such whitewashed form.”

“The latest book organisation method making them all Dewey-eyed on the internet is to sort them so the titles form a (fairly) coherent sentence, phrase or message.”

Audio books are big business. “Nearly $1 billion worth were sold last year, meaning 15 percent of all books sold these days are the kind that read themselves.” But casting the reader is fraught with peril…

English has never had its Académie Française, but over the centuries it has not lacked furious defenders against foreign “corruption”. There have been rearguard actions to preserve its “manly” pre-Norman origins, even to reconstruct it along Anglo-Saxon lines: “wheel-saddle” for bicycle, “painlore” for pathology. But the omnivorous beast is rampant still.

“A survey of more than 1,500 parents by books charity Booktrust found that only one in three parents are reading to their children daily, down from 43% two years ago. The average four to five-year-old spends twice as long watching TV every week as they do reading with their parents, while secondary school starters spend more time doing their chores (46 minutes) than reading with their parents (41 minutes).”

“Our goal is to make the first textbook in which Russian history will look not as a depressing sequence of misfortunes and mistakes but as something to instill pride in one’s country. It is in precisely this way that teachers must teach history and not smear the Motherland with mud.”
http://www.tnr.com/booksarts/story.html?id=27ab9fbc-6e71-4795-8608-5875a0ce6fb6

“The Literary and Historical Society of Quebec – the oldest learned society in Canada – says it was merely trying to do some ‘weeding’ when it decided to put 1,500 books from its library collection up for auction.” But public outrage over the sale has forced a postponement, and may yet cancel the sale altogether.

“The book business as we know it will not be living happily ever after. With sales stagnating, CEO heads rolling, big-name authors playing musical chairs, and Amazon looming as the new boogeyman, publishing might have to look for its future outside the corporate world. ”

“The British-based Poetry Archive has released statistics that visitors to its website are now viewing a total of more than one million pages a month. More than 125,000 individuals – or ‘unique visitors’ in web jargon – have visited the site, which hosts poems and audio readings by the poets themselves.”

The long list – 12 men, three women – was chosen from 95 books submitted by 38 publishers for consideration by this year’s three judges – 1996 Giller-winner Margaret Atwood, former Ontario premier and current federal Liberal MP Bob Rae and Irish novelist/short-story writer Colm Toibin.