Category: publishing

Waterstone’s says it’s important for the books chain to sacrifice profits and offer the new Harry Potter at half price. “Pre-orders for the seventh instalment were already close to the sixth Harry Potter book’s total number of sales via HMV’s businesses. For £8.99, customers will get the new Harry Potter for half price plus a free copy of Wizardology: A Guide to Wizards of the World. The offer would not lose money but nor would it bring in much. ‘At half price it’s pretty difficult to make money’.”

“How do libraries — institutions that by nature require a strict, stately style of micromanagement — assimilate self-published and occasionally category-defying dispatches from the cultural hinterlands?”

“Considering so many of us spend our days toiling in offices, where are the great novels of working life? …Work ought to occupy the literary imagination as much as sex, money, or power, and yet for the most part the Anglo-American novel has spent at least half of the first two or three centuries of its development resolutely denying its existence.”

The State of Maryland is encouraging teachers to use comic books as part of its reading program. “The state worked with Disney Publishing Worldwide and its educational division last year to develop a pilot project to put Mickey and Donald in eight third-grade classrooms. Disney took Maryland’s reading standards and created comics-based lesson plans, incorporating skills students needed to learn, such as how to understand plot and character. The kids loved it, educators said.”

“It would be easy to be cynical, and assume that a major reason for any author to stick to the same well-traversed territory is purely to do with maintaining a readership. If you’ve built up a fan base with a distinctive formula, you mightn’t want to alienate your fans with a drastic change to it.”

“Perhaps more surprising than who won this year’s National Magazine Awards was who didn’t. The New Yorker, which has traditionally dominated the awards, left empty-handed last night, losing in all nine categories in which it was nominated. The Atlantic Monthly, also a frequent favorite, was shut out as well. The big winner: New York magazine, which was nominated for seven awards and took home five.”

The long, slow death of the newspaper book review is causing no small amount of alarm within both the publishing and arts criticism worlds. “But some publishers and literary bloggers — not surprisingly — see it as an inevitable transition toward a new, more democratic literary landscape where anyone can comment on books. In recent years, dozens of sites… have been offering a mix of book news, debates, interviews and reviews, often on subjects not generally covered by newspaper book sections.”

“What is it about book clubs that turns us all so evil? They may parade themselves as grown-up gatherings, but they bear far more resemblance to a club formed by a cluster of girls in a playground; exclusion and bullying are rife.”

“Yann Martel marked Stephen Harper’s 48th birthday yesterday by giving him a present, and a letter wishing him Happy Birthday. He knows the Prime Minister may not open them. Yesterday, the Booker Prize-winning author, who may fast be becoming Stephen Harper’s most annoying pest, dropped off the second volume in his supply-the-PM-with-good reading campaign – which more honestly should be described as a guerrilla campaign to affirm the importance of the arts and literature in the national discourse.”

Woolworths department store “has accused the publishing industry of waging a campaign to block its planned acquisition of the book wholesaler Bertram, one of the largest suppliers to independent bookshops in Britain.”