Category: publishing

“Bookstore sales rose again in May, albeit at a much more moderate clip than the surprising 8% rate posted in April. For the first five months of the year bookstore sales were up 4.9%, to $6.60 billion.”

“An uncut edition of Aleksander Solzhenitsyn’s The First Circle, a highly praised and controversial novel published 40 years ago and heavily edited because of its story of a Soviet prison camp, is finally coming out in English.”

For nine years, the John Meier “has been trolling the Internet, used-book stores and libraries, as well as stalking publishing houses, in his quest to collect a copy of every English-language first edition book to win the Governor-General’s Literary Award for fiction. Through detective work, a wide network of scouts and sheer tenacity, he has managed to amass multiple copies of every winner going back to 1936, for a collection nearing 500 books.”

“Pessoa was the shy, probably celibate, at the time virtually unknown Portuguese poet who lived through a multitude of literary pseudonyms. Crowley was the larger-than-life spectacle whose recent biographer felt compelled to point out that his subject ‘did not–I repeat not–perform or advocate human sacrifice.’ “

The sci-fi author posted his American Gods, all of it, online for a month as part of a promotion. Now, from Harper Collins: “we see a marked increase in weekly sales across all of Neil’s books, not just American Gods during the time of the contest and promotion.”

“Operating revenue for the book publishing industry in Canada edged down 1.2%, to C$2.1 billion, in 2006 after increasing 3.2% in 2005 as the average household spending on books declined from C$111 in 2005 to C$108 in 2006.”

“Midnight’s Children is still a wonderful, buoyantly self-delighted novel, where east and west – Sheherazade and Tristram Shandy – meet as they never met before. But it hardly needs this poll to tell us of its qualities or its influence. The point of the ‘Booker of Bookers’ vote was not this result, but the invitation to look back down the line of sometimes forgotten winners, to see which seem to have outlived the literary fashions that they might once have exemplified.”

Ever wondered what happened to British avant garde fiction? Well, it seems to have found a home in London’s conceptual art world.

“An ereader, like all gadgets, is shiny, plastic, artificial. A book is pliable, organic, warm. And that, in the end, is the reason I suspect the ereader will be slow to become a mass-market phenomenon, if indeed it ever does. It works for me because it is an elegant solution to a specific problem – that of carrying heavy books on the Tube. But it won’t work for everyone.”

“The first folio edition, printed in 1623, was among a number of books and manuscripts taken from Durham University library in December 1998. The Shakespeare book alone would have a market value of around £15m, though the university described it as an “irreplaceable” part of north-east England’s heritage.”