Category: publishing

The seven brothers and sisters of the Minot family are all writers. “Taken together, their books constitute a kind of New England ‘Rashomon,’ divergent and sometimes conflicting accounts of their collective past. And while no one would want to read their novels as coded autobiography or reduce them to dispatches from the family front, the Minots themselves keep revisiting the subject of their childhood as if it were possible to rewrite life.”

University presses usually sell in small numbers, but that doesn’t mean they don’t want bigger audiences. So why aren’t these presses taking more advantage of digital technology?

Google wants to digitize the world’s books. Publishers are balking. “The problem is that to compile the index Google uses for its search engine, it has to scan the entire book. Publishers claim this infringes copyright and want Google to ask permission for each book. The trouble is that only 20% or so of books are in print and because many titles are “orphaned” when publishers go out of business, finding out who to ask for permission could take years.”

Movie trailers are effective at building hype for movies. So why not for books? “HarperCollins has produced close to a dozen trailers since early February. The motivation is ‘to drive early word of mouth’. To that end, the publisher submits the videos to book bloggers, as well as sites like Google Video and YouTube.com.”

“Travelling Guide is written in the style of a guide-book, but is not intended for affluent Western tourists. It is a piece of controversial art which aims to ‘subvert the language and purpose of the format’, speaking directly to Romanian travellers and illegal immigrant workers, helping them through border controls, ports and stations into Western Europe. It contains instructions on acquiring forged identity papers, fake UK national insurance numbers, includes a bar chart grading the risk factor at each crossing point, instructions on breaking into shipping containers and safety tips.”

Britain’s free library service is an endangered species. “In the first six months of this year alone, 21 (1.4%) of the country’s libraries have closed, five are due to close and 67 are under review for closure. So a plan to spruce up and make libraries semm more “exciting” has begun. “The idea was to make them more exciting and convenient for users as ‘models of a future library service with reading at its heart’. The transformations – each costing £90,000 – are designed to turn them into national showcases demonstrating how catastrophic declines in book borrowing and visitor numbers could be reversed.”

More and more authors are producing audio versions of their own books. Some are calling on celebrity friends to help out, producing versions with large casts…

“Nominally a bookstore, for nearly 30 years Editorial El Mundo has purveyed so much more. There was a time when this corner was the gateway to an American life for generations of immigrants, the place in Washington where they metaphorically landed first. Editorial El Mundo was where they found help decoding the new land. It set an example for striving. Now the corner isn’t so important.”

Nobody really believes those hyperbolic blurbs on the fronts of books, do they? And yet, perhaps there’s a way to decipher the blurb code that can give some indication of what’s in the pages?

“Beckett, who died in 1989, lived to see the full flowering of his fame, and the retiring Irishman was forced into a spotlight he had no desire to stand in. But what were the chances that this spotlight would shine on him in the first place? He was an obscure writer writing in a foreign language about obscure figures living in a very foreign world.”