Category: publishing

“Vancouver-based Raincoast Books announced Monday that it will cease publishing Canadian-written titles by the middle of this year in addition to shedding as many as a dozen client publishers whose books it was distributing across Canada, closing the Toronto warehouse it opened in 2001 and laying off 10 to 15 per cent of its total staff.”

Since the 90s, Japan’s publishing business has been in steady decline. Still, “the number of bookstores in Japan is huge: approximately 17,000. (By comparison, the United States, with more than twice Japan’s population, has about 6,000 bookstores, though books can also be purchased in supermarkets and drug stores there.) That figure is going down year by year.”

“From time to time, I’ve decided this is a bad habit. I must read the whole biography, I tell myself. But I can’t. Much as I try, I can’t force myself to read anything until our hero is working on his or her first novel or play, and leaving the world of parents, school or university behind.”

The idea that literature can make us emotionally and physically stronger goes back to Plato. But now book groups are proving that Shakespeare can be as beneficial as self-help guides.

“There is a tacit understanding in our culture that one must read a book in order to talk about it with any precision. In my experience, however, it’s totally possible to carry on an engaging conversation about a book you haven’t read – including, and perhaps especially, with someone else who hasn’t read it either.”

“I think it’s fair to say that MIT Press was the first university press to make a serious commitment to graphic design, as well as to architectural publishing. Thirty years later, there are more players, but the depth and longevity of MIT Press’s commitment to design publishing and practice remains quite exceptional.”

“With laptops now an ubiquitous presence on college campuses and textbook prices ever on the rise and suddenly a hot issue, technologically inclined students seem poised to change their study habits — and save a lot of money — by forgoing scribbles in the margin and trading in their highlighters for cursors.”

Tom Wolfe has left his publisher of 42 years, Farrar, Straus & Giroux and sold his next novel to Little, Brown & Company. “People involved in the negotiations said on Wednesday that Mr. Wolfe’s advance for the new book was close to $7 million.”

“New printing technologies are making published authors of legions of aspiring writers, a population that once toiled for years on tomes that might not see the light of day. The vast majority of today’s instant authors may sell only a few dozen copies of their books, but on-demand publishing is letting thousands realize the ambitions of generations of would-be writers.”

As part of efforts to transform the emirate into the cultural lodestone of the Middle East, the Abu Dhabi Authority for Culture and Heritage, or Adach, has chosen 100 books to be translated into Arabic.