Category: publishing

“Coliseum Books, the Midtown Manhattan store known for its knowledgeable staff, has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.”

“It isn’t on the fringe anymore. Nowadays doing the right thing can also pay off for publishers. It works in three ways. You have happy, committed employees with a mission.You know you are getting the message out and helping to save the planet. And being green adds green to the bottom line.”

It’s looking like this will be a banner fall for the publishing industry, but some observers are wondering if there may be more good books than the marketing apparatus can handle. “The situation has publishers trying novel marketing and publicity strategies as they struggle to get attention for their authors.”

Can hip-hop culture be a tool to encourage greater literacy among ethnic minorities? Some London rappers think it’s essential. “What deters people [from reading] is that they are forced to do so much of it at school. It has the stigma attached to it of boredom. But Tupac [the late US rapper] said when he came out of prison that the knowledge he gained was from reading books.”

“Spurred by Google’s initiative and by the lower costs, higher profits, and immense reach of unmediated digital distribution, book publishers and other copyright holders must at last overcome their historic inertia and agree, like music publishers, to market their proprietary titles in digital form either to be read on line or, more likely, to be printed on demand at point of sale…”

Books by bloggers haven’t sold well despite considerable hype. “I think that (publishing bloggers) is something you have to scrutinize very carefully. If a blog gets the attention of the public, then we are at the point knowing that we really have to look at it and determine if there’s something beyond it. Having a popular blog isn’t enough to get a book deal anymore.”

“An unpublished Robert Frost poem, a tribute to a friend killed during World War I, has been rediscovered and will appear next week in the fall issue of the Virginia Quarterly Review.”

The Venezuelan leader held up Noam Chomsky’s book last week at the UN. It soared to No. 1 on Amazon, “and publisher Henry Holt last week announced a new printing of 25,000. On Wednesday, with Chomsky at No. 2 on Amazon, another 25,000 paperback copies were commissioned.”

Haruki Murakami has won the second Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. “The €35,000 (£23,000) prize, which is awarded to new collections published in English during the last 12 months, is the world’s richest short story prize.”

“When Alfred Nobel, the Swedish inventor of dynamite and more powerful explosives, died in 1896, he bequeathed the bulk of his fortune to create five annual prizes honoring ingenuity. The chemistry, medicine and physics prizes have come to be widely regarded as the most esteemed in their fields. The two others, literature and peace, are more controversial. Yet in a little known story, the Nobel Prizes, the first of which will be announced on Monday, almost never came to be, largely because of the unsophisticated way Nobel drew up his will.”