Category: publishing

“The ability and desire to read are really functions of a society that values them for their own sake, not as an afterthought in the selling of books and advertising. Yet, even though there’s no end to America’s literacy groups and the soliciting of donations, the concern persists that reading skills nationwide are getting worse. Perhaps what’s needed is the acknowledgment that reading and the writing of good books needs to be encouraged after the literacy program ends.”

January will see a new novel by Norman Mailer, his first in ten years. “The title of the new book is ‘The Castle in the Forest,’ Random House said in a statement. It said a synopsis was not available.”

“The adjective ‘serious’ was never precisely defined, but it was understood to describe those readers who could be counted on to go to a bookstore at least once a week and buy one or two titles on each occasion, mixing purchases of fiction with those of non-fiction. Since then — a time some publishing types like to call the B.C. Era (as in ‘Before Chapters/Indigo’) — that estimate has dropped, I’m told, to between 1,600 and 2,000, the result, one imagines, of the competing distractions-attractions of the Internet and the rise of digital media.”

A goal of Wikipedia is to create articles in as many languages and cultures as possible. But “how do you create an online encyclopedia when few native speakers have access to the Internet? What use is an encyclopedia when literacy rates among a language’s speakers can approach zero? And who should control the content of an encyclopedia in a local language if not enough native speakers are moved, or able, to contribute?”

Douglas Coupland has launched a withering attack on CanLit. “There is a grimness around CanLit — the same sort of grimness that occurs when beautiful young adults are forbidden to leave home and are forced to tend to aging and dying family members, when they are forbidden to lead their own lives.”

A number of new collectives are recording public-domain books and releasing them on the internet. “At its worst a free audiobook can sound like a teenager reading aloud in high school English class. At its best it can offer excellent sound quality and skilled narration infused with a passion for the text. In between is a world of competent readings, sometimes spiced with affected accents, mumbled words and distant car horns and reflecting all manner of literary interpretations.”

There’s a growing audience for a category of book publishers call “young adult.” But the new readers aren’t kids, it’s adults. “Children’s books have a more upbeat ending, and a lot of people are looking for that. They want something a little more entertaining or fluffy, so they come to the kids’ section, only to find out that these books are not necessarily fluffy at all. Like Harry Potter – it makes you think.”

The Miami School Board has decided to continue to try to ban a children’s book on Cuba from school library shelves. “The board voted 5-2 to appeal a federal judge’s temporary order barring the district from removing the children’s book, along with 23 others in the series. The district wants to remove “Vamos a Cuba” (“A Visit to Cuba”) following a parent’s complaint that it failed to accurately depict the reality of life under Cuba’s communist government.”

“Stephen King, Doris Kearns Goodwin and former Vice President Al Gore were among the nominees announced Tuesday for the second annual Quills Awards — people’s choice prizes trying to catch on with the public. Publishers have complained that readers showed little interest in last year’s awards and that the Quills had no discernible affect on sales.”