Category: publishing

Two of Britain’s leading independent publishers are to join forces, following the acquisition by Profile Books of the imprint Serpent’s Tail.

Everything about India seems to be booming these days. And a new generation of writers is carving out a new place for itself on the world stage.

“Unlike onscreen e-books, which never quite caught on, downloadable audiobooks have taken off, driven by the explosive popularity of the iPod. According to the Audio Publishers Association, downloads have grown sharply, rising to 9 percent of audio book sales in 2005; that is a 50 percent increase over the previous year.”

“The OED is enlisting the public to help them trace 40 well-known words and phrases. All of them are in the dictionary with a date of the earliest evidence of usage, but researchers want to know if the British people can do better.”

“A mobile phone novel typically contains between 200 and 500 pages, with each page containing about 500 Japanese characters. The novels are read on a cell phone screen page by page, the way one would surf the web, and are downloadable for around $10 each. The first mobile phone novel was written six years ago by fiction writer Yoshi…”

Independent bookstores have been closing in droves for the last decade, with big chains and online booksellers the most often cited causes. But one indie stalwart whose shop is due to close this spring says that the problem goes beyond simple competition. From the ever-quickening pace of American life to the increasingly celebrity-based, profit-driven publishing industry, indie booksellers find themselves offering a service that is quickly losing both its suppliers and its clientèle.

“Imagine this: You go to a bookstore, browse, choose a couple of volumes. But you don’t want to carry the books around. So you ask the clerk to hold the tomes until Saturday, when you’ll come back to buy them. When you return, the bookseller hands you the items but advises you that he’s raised the prices. ‘I knew you were hot to buy them,’ the clerk says, ‘so I figured I could make a few extra bucks.’ That’s what it feels like online bookseller Amazon.com Inc. has been doing to me.”

“When it comes to spectacle, Hollywood enjoys nothing better than a nasty legal battle between two determined and egotistical adversaries: Bette Davis meets Joan Crawford, in a courtroom.” The participants in past high-profile lawsuits have “cringed to hear their private comments and inner thoughts offered up for public consumption. And so may it go if the headline-making book publisher Judith Regan proceeds with a lawsuit her lawyers have threatened against the News Corporation, which owns HarperCollins, the publishing house that fired her in December after the O. J. Simpson book and television project imploded.”

“A machine that electronically stores 2.5 million books that can then be printed and bound in less than seven minutes is to be launched early next year. It prints in any language and has an upper limit of 550 pages.”

The UK’s Royal Post Office is already making plans for delivery of the next installment of the Harry Potter series. Some 500,000 copies will have to b delivered in a single day. “While the number represents only a fraction of the 80 million items the Royal Mail delivers daily, the security — and secrecy — surrounding the work mean the books have to spend as little time as possible on warehouse floors, complicating their distribution.”