Category: publishing

Canadian novelist Yann Martel has been hand delivering a monthly book selection to Prime Minister Stephen Harper, in an effort to get the Conservative politician to appreciate the arts. It’s a clever idea, perhaps, but not everyone is impressed with Martel’s initiative. “There’s something very snooty about the idea. How would you like to see a book pop up in your mailbox every couple weeks as a sort of bookish taunt?”

What are this year’s newly-sanctioned official words? ” ‘Muffin top’ is one of hundreds of new words and phrases, along with ‘wag’, ‘size zero’ and ‘hoodie’, that have entered the language and are listed in the Collins English Dictionary’s 9th edition, published today.”

“On Friday, a San Jose federal judge awarded attorney fees to a Stanford University English professor whose suit against the estate of James Joyce was settled recently. The awarding of fees in an out-of-court settlement, while not typical, is not unprecedented…. But Carol Loeb Shloss’ suit against the Joyce estate sheds light on an ironic, and maybe inevitable, trend in intellectual property: As copyright becomes harder to defend, many copyright holders are becoming less realistic about the limitations of their ownership.”

“Mark Frutkin’s ‘Fabrizio’s Return’, a novel set in 17th and 18th century Italy, claimed the $20,000 2006 Trillium Book Award during a Monday luncheon at the University of Toronto’s Hart House. It was the 20th year for the Ontario book prize.”

“Welcome to the paradox known as BEA, which exists to bring authors, publishers and bookstore folk together, but at which few books are actually sold. There are exceptions, of course. Small-town bookstores that don’t get many visits from publishers’ reps, for example, may take the opportunity to place orders. But to spend a few days at BEA with a buyer for an urban independent bookstore chain such as Olsson’s, which consists of six stores in the Washington area, is to observe the less quantifiable but no less important kind of transactions occurring there.”

This year’s annual BookExpo once again grappled with technology. Tina Brown doesn’t think much of the digital book giveaway. “Giving an author’s book away for nothing on the Web as a way to market books seems a mirage to me. All it does is feed the hungry angles of journalists and bloggers who plunder it without any of the author’s context or nuance and makes the reader feel there is nothing new to learn from the genuine article when it finally limps on its weary way to a book shop.”

“Ray Bradbury still has a lot to say, especially about how people do not understand his most literary work, Fahrenheit 451, published in 1953. It is widely taught in junior high and high schools and is for many students the first time they learn the names Aristotle, Dickens and Tolstoy. Now, Bradbury has decided to make news about the writing of his iconographic work and what he really meant. Fahrenheit 451 is not, he says firmly, a story about government censorship.”

“The conservative works on display at BookExpo America, which ended Sunday, could be seen as a tribute to the diversity of right-wing publishing and the movement in general. But, publishers say, they’re really a sign of an industry, and of a political movement, wondering what to do next.”

Writers line up to deliver rapid-fire three-minute pitches to editors at America’s largest book fair. One of those attracting most interest from the agents was a petite 15-year-old blond schoolgirl pitching what she called “a survival kit for kids turning into teenagers.”