Category: publishing

The British public has declared (through an online survey) that George Orwell’s 1984 is the definitive book of the 20th century. Also making the list were The Great Gatsby, The Grapes of Wrath, and, um… Bridget Jones’s Diary.

The book business totaled $35.7 billion in 2006, a 3 percent increase over the previous year. The number of books sold rose to 3.1 billion, an increase of just half of one percent.

How many book titles are published in a year? The use of a new counting methodology has increased the number of new titles released in 2005 to 282,500, and Bowker estimates that in 2006 that number hit 291,920, a 3% increase over 2005.

“Two agentless authors will have novels out this fall after winning a contest sponsored by Simon & Schuster, Borders Group Inc. and the social media site Gather.com… [The] contest allowed contestants — at no charge — to submit manuscripts to Gather.com, where readers narrowed more than 2,600 entries to five. “

The annual BookExpo convenes in New York to dissect all things book. “Sales have been flat in 2007 and the number of independent bookstores continues to shrink, from 1,660 last spring to 1,580 this year, according to the American Booksellers Assn. Three BookExpo panels will focus on another troubling subject, newspaper reviews, in the wake of cutbacks at the Los Angeles Times and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, among others.”

“We had planned to expand our books coverage and were looking for an editor, and when we heard Teresa was available, we called her right away. Books and authors are a mainstay of our content and important to our readers. We have supported the Southern literary tradition throughout the magazine’s 46-year history.”

When a Kansas City bookseller decided he wanted to thin out his collection of thousands of books, he found out he couldn’t even giv them away. Libraries and thrift shops said they were full. “So on Sunday, Tom Wayne began burning his books in protest of what he sees as society’s diminishing support for the printed word.”

“Why has investment banking, instead of soldiering in Iraq or drug abuse, become the issue of the day for talented young American novelists?”

As Helvetica enjoys its moment in the spotlight, “Slate asked a number of prominent writers to tell us what font they compose in and why. Courier was the clear favorite among our unscientific sample, but Times New Roman, Palatino, and something called Hoefler Text had their champions as well. (It seems to come down to whether a writer’s formative experience came on an Olivetti or an Apple.)”

“In the collection of the British Library there are two Gutenberg Bibles, two copies of Magna Carta, five copies of Shakespeare’s First Folio and now something new: your e-mail messages. Or at least ones like them. Throughout this month the library, in partnership with Microsoft, has been collecting e-mail notes that ordinary Britons and others have sent — 13,807 so far — as a way of capturing a sense of life in the 21st century.”