Category: publishing

“Along with the UK and the US it publishes around 200,000 new titles and new editions a year, well ahead of the nearest rivals, Japan, Russia and Germany. It is by far the largest publishing market by volume – officially about 6bn units a year, but many more when pirated copies are taken into account.”

“‘Hell at the Library, Eros in Secret,’ which opened at [Paris’s National Library] last month, offers a peek at its secret archive of erotic art, putting on display more than 350 sexually explicit literary works, manuscripts, engravings, lithographs, photographs, film clips, even calling cards and cardboard pop-ups… Sadism, masochism, bestiality, inflated genitalia and the most imaginative sexual fantasies and athletic poses are given their due.”

For the first 11 months of the year, bookstore sales were up 0.8%, to $14.65 billion.

“Library users in England borrowed just under 269 million books in the last financial year. That is down 34 per cent on the amount borrowed back in 1997. And scare stories about library closures continue to hit the headlines.”

“After winning the Forward prize for best collection an unprecedented third time in October, the poet was tonight named the winner of the 2007 TS Eliot prize, making him the first author ever to take the UK’s two top poetry awards in the same year.

“Last year, a graphic novel, American Born Chinese, won the American Library Association’s prestigious Printz Award for excellence in teen literature. Yesterday morning, as the ALA announced the top children’s lit prizes here at the Convention Center, the one for top ‘picture book,’ the venerable Caldecott Medal, went to . . . a 544-page novel?”

“The stroke of a pen at the Library of Congress — which rebranded 700 years of Scottish literary tradition as ‘English literature’ — has in recent weeks generated a spluttering uproar in Scotland. And last week, faced with Celtic fury, the American institution made an undignified U-turn.”

“Why was it so important to so many authors to remain unnamed? The perplexed compilers of the dictionary guessed that the usual motive was “some kind of timidity, such as (a) diffidence, (b) fear of consequences, and (c) shame”. Yet this does scant justice to the ambitions of some of the authors who used anonymity.”

“Allegations this week that Cassie Edwards, a popular romance novelist with more than 100 books to her name, inserted large chunks of unattributed material into her work blossomed into a controversy that led Signet Books, one of her publishers, to announce on Friday that it was examining all of her work that it has published.”

“Self-publishing was once a consolation prize for a pipe-dreamer. But today it’s possible for writers to bypass publishers, then score lucrative contracts with them once their books are proved.”