Category: publishing

Oprah Winfrey’s selection of a grim, terrifying, post-apocolyptic novel for her national book club has raised some eyebrows, but Gail Caldwell says that “in a year when a former presidential contender is being touted at the Oscars for a documentary on climatic ruin, Oprah’s attention to [Cormac] McCarthy’s novel makes a fine (and hardly risky) bid for planetary conscience.”

Seattle comic book publisher Fantagraphics is being sued. But “as fans answer Fantagraphics’ latest plea for help, artists have begun to donate their work for eBay auctions to benefit Seattle’s alternative comic-book publisher in its defense against a lawsuit by author Harlan Ellison.”

“Far from fading away in the Age of Google, which has begun digitizing millions of books from university and other libraries, and despite the almost universal availability of vast online resources, circulation and visits at college and research libraries are on the rise. Campus librarians now answer more than 72 million reference questions each year — almost twice the attendance at college football games. In other words, this is not the beginning of the end for campus libraries, but the dawn of an exciting new age.”

“If you doubt that Borders has had a profound effect, not just on the book trade, but on how readers interact with one another and with texts, then keep an eye out for a remarkable new documentary called Indies Under Fire: The Battle for the American Bookstore… Protesters complain that Borders is imposing cultural uniformity across the United States by destroying small businesses. The representatives from Borders respond that the stores are competitive for the simple reason that they are attractive and well-stocked.”

Memoirs are everywhere; everyone writes them. “What has been most striking to us at Slate is how many memoirs these days are anything but coming-of-age stories; instead, they tackle issues and subjects larger than the self.”

Cormac McCarthy, one of the country’s most revered and press-shy authors — a man only slightly more accessible than J.D. Salinger — will give his first ever television interview, lured by the long arm of Winfrey, publishing’s biggest hit-maker and a media superstar.

“When readers chose to read an online story, they usually read an average of 77% of the story, compared to 62% in broadsheets and 57% in tabloids. The survey, in which 600 newspaper readers from six different newspapers were studied, utilized electronic eyetracking equipment that readers wore while they read broadsheet, tabloid and online editions of newspapers.”

A British court has upheld a ruling that DaVinci Code author Dan Brown did not steal elements of his bestselling novel from a non-fiction work, as alleged by the authors of The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail.

“David Nasaw has been named the winner of the $50,000 New-York Historical Society American Book Prize for his biography, ‘Andrew Carnegie’ (The Penguin Press).”

“A geological engineering company said Monday it has agreed to help in an archaeological project to find the island of Ithaca, homeland of Homer’s legendary hero Odysseus. It has long been thought that the island of Ithaki in the Ionian Sea was the island Homer used as a setting for the epic poem ‘The Odyssey,’ in which the king Odysseus makes a perilous 10-year journey home from the Trojan War.”