Category: publishing

Is the rise of internet bookselling killing off the experience of browsing for a good book? Margaret Atwood, for one, says that it is, and that online retailers are missing out on “the sales that they wouldn’t expect to make, but make because somebody sees this beautiful cover and they pick it up and read the front flap.”

“(R)ough-and-tumble Hollywood business tactics, including lawsuits and personal attacks, are permeating New York’s traditionally more genteel book world.” The reason? Movie and TV rights. “Ever since ‘Gone With the Wind,’ studios have been vying for the rights to bestsellers that could become the next ‘Da Vinci Code’ or ‘Harry Potter.’ Increasingly, they’re also seeking out quality material. … The fight for the inside literary track can be brutal, and agents live in constant fear of being out-hustled.”

“Writers’ offspring tend to go into the family business with far less regularity than, say, the children of doctors or lawyers, and it seldom happens that over the long haul, and in the deepening shade, the younger equals or outstrips the elder — the way that Anthony Trollope, to take a famous example, bested his mother, Fanny. The exception these days is the curious writerly firm of Amis & Amis, founded by Kingsley, who died in 1995, and now run by his son Martin.”

The Chicago Tribune is moving its Sunday books section to Saturday. “With the switch to Saturday, we will also usher in a new era of the Tribune’s coverage of books, expanding our coverage of books, ideas and the written word throughout the newspaper and across the week.”

“This kind of list, of course, always provokes a lot of tea-leaf reading — as well as high-minded dismissals of its “problematic” nature. This year, one source of discussion is how many of the list’s 21 writers were raised abroad or are nonwhite. Are stories of transnational identity where the literary action is these days? (Some things seem never to change, though: More than half of the chosen writers live in New York City, and the only Southland writer is Maile Meloy, who lives in Los Angeles.)”

“It is Granta’s second go at the US landscape, the last being in 1996 when it impressively plucked out such names as Jonathan Franzen and David Guterson, who have gone on to great things.”

“After nearly four centuries of Shakespeare scholarship, with countless editions of the complete works and acres of scholarly debate about ‘good’ and ‘bad’ quartos (the form in which some of the play texts first appeared), you might think that the First Folio would have been subjected to the rigours of academic scrutiny. But no. Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen are, apparently, the first to have the exceedingly good idea of providing a fully edited version of Shakespeare’s work, as it first appeared in print.”

Two years ago Penguin Australia hired a new editor from the UK. Since he got the job, Ben Ball has turned the business of literary advances on its head. And the other publishers aren’t happy about it…

Following a major restructuring of its newsroom, the Atlanta Journal Constitution has eliminated the books editor position formerly held by Teresa Weaver.

“The thing that strikes me as most ridiculous about first editions (or first printings, if we’re being as anally exact as many of their collectors) is that they should be worth so much more than other almost identical versions of the same book. Very often all that distinguishes a valuable first printing from a near worthless second is one small digit on the title page. It’s a strange way of distinguishing worth and there’s something unappealing about the way book collecting prioritises the rarity of a book over its contents or even its appearance.”