Category: publishing

Waterstone’s made the list. “In contrast to the more familiar forecasts for star literary novelists – from Kazuo Ishiguro to Zadie Smith – produced by Granta for each decade since the 1980s, the new compilation is far more varied and down to earth.” More important, perhaps – the booksller is in a position to promote its future stars.

An online service provided by the University of Pennsylvania allows users to download recordings of the work of hundreds of poets past and present, free of charge. Included in the 10,000-strong collection of recordings are rare readings by Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound, and the site has already registered more than 8 million downloads.

American Heritage, which has brought history to life for more than 50 years, announced this week that it is suspending publication. “The magazine has always been a bit of an anomaly among American publications. The circulation is currently 350,000, or as high as it has ever been,” but the magazine has been for sale for months, and no one in the industry appears to believe it has a future.

“Six English-language books and five French titles are on the short list for the 2006-07 Trillium Book Award,” which honors the best literature produced by writers in the Canadian province of Ontario. “The winners are to be announced on June 4, with the recipients awarded $20,000 each.”

“UK education secretary, Alan Johnson, who yesterday launched his campaign for the Labour party’s deputy leadership, announced this morning that every state secondary school in England will be able to choose 20 of the titles in order to set up a dedicated ‘boys’ bookshelf’ in the library.”

“Jackson County’s libraries closed on April 6 after Congress failed to renew the Rural Schools and Community Self Determination Act, which pumped $23 million into county coffers annually.” So library supporters proposed a tax levy to reopen the 15 libraries. But this week residents rejected the levy in a special vote.

“In America there is an industry wide scaling back of book reviews and book sections, from the San Francisco Chronicle to the Orlando Sentinel. As Stephen Colbert joked on the satirical show, The Colbert Report, ‘You will read what Oprah tells you to, and you will like it’!”

“BookSwim aims to be the ‘Netflix of books.’ Since 1998, Netflix has become the king of online DVD services by renting batches of DVDs via the mail for a fixed monthly fee, and letting subscribers keep the movies as long as they like. That’s how BookSwim is meant to work. For $15 to $20 per month, the company will send your top five book choices. Return three books in a prepaid envelope, and your next three choices will be mailed to you.”

“Little magazines have the lifespan of gerbils and goldfish — you can shower them with love and attention but still count on them dying in three years. For a literary journal like the New Criterion to have survived a quarter century is equivalent of a man reaching the age of 100: He stands as a triumph of the life principle, no matter how much of a codger he may now be.”

“It used to be that books had the shelf-life of a container of yogurt. Nowadays it seems more like hamburger meat. If a book doesn’t make it to the New York Times bestseller list within the first several days of arrival, it never will. … It’s easy to blame the bookstores, or the heinous overlords of newsprint, for the problem. But publishers, and even authors, deserve a little of the blame — especially when they pretend that marketing doesn’t matter.”