Category: publishing

“Fader magazine has made its entire summer music issue available for download on iTunes, in what it says is a publishing first. The full issue is free to download as a PDF file, which offers a digital copy of every page — article and ads — in the magazine. It’s accompanied by a 47-minute podcast featuring music covered by the magazine. The leap off the page and into an area of the Web typically reserved for audio files is one considered natural by Fader, which has covered emerging music since 1998.”

Tim Spalding created a website where “members can create library-quality catalogs of the books they own and display their collection to fellow online bookshelf browsers. He launched LibraryThing.com in August as a way to bring the organizational joys of the librarian to a wider array of book nerds. Ten months later, his concept has blossomed into a vibrant community with 47,670 registered members – some paying – and a user-created catalog that includes more than 3.6 million volumes. In theory, that makes LibraryThing the 58th largest library in the U.S.”

A Georgia public library system that was going to stop buying Spanish-language books has decided (after public outcry) to continue buying. “We heard from people on both sides of the issue and we heard from a lot of the press. We are choosing to restore that line item. … We were not trying to send any signal, but everyone seemed to think we were.”

Anyone who’s ever bought a book in North America has seen the dual pricing model displayed in the corner of the dust jacket: one price for American buyers, and a considerably higher one for Canadians. The reason for the discrepancy, of course, is that the Canadian dollar has traditionally been far weaker than the greenback. But the American dollar is plummeting these days, and with Canada’s loonie now worth upwards of 90 U.S. cents, consumers north of the border are crying foul over having to pay a 30-40% premium on books.

“The granddaughter of the creator of children’s character Winnie the Pooh has failed in an attempt to regain the copyright on stories about the bear. Clare Milne was challenging a series of licensing arrangements in place since the books were created in the 1920s. In 1983 the present owner – the estate of literary agent Stephen Slesinger – signed a deal blocking AA Milne’s family from ever regaining control… Milne died in 1956 but bequeathed the ownership of the copyright to a trust rather than to his family.”

In case anyone was hoping that JK Rowling might reconsider her decision to make the next book in her wildly popular Harry Potter series the last, any such ideas can probably be put to rest with the revelation that two of the principal characters will die at the book’s end. Rowling says that she has known how she would end the series since years before she even had a publisher for the first book.

“When The New York Review of Books made its début–Volume 1, No. 1, dated February 1, 1963, appeared in the midst of a four-month-long printers’ strike at the Times–the idea for an intellectually vigorous books magazine was so perfectly cooked, and its founding editors, Barbara Epstein and Robert Silvers, so skilled and connected, that an extended family of friends and sympathizers rushed to fill the chairs at a vast table of contents.”

“The literature of Jamaica, which has a population of about 2.5 million and a relatively small publishing industry, has existed as much off the island as on it until now. Traditionally Jamaican literature has been grounded in folklore and rural byways, or has consisted of chronicles of colonialism and of the island’s violent political conflicts.”

Bookstores are filling up with new books on political themes. “Ten years ago, political books didn’t sell very well. Now, in the last three or four years, the sales are off the charts. Look at the last election with the Al Frankens, Michael Moores, Bill O’Reillys. The publishers know this and they’re responding.”

A suburban Atlanta library system has a new policy that is angering Georgia’s large immigrant community: the library will not buy any new books in Spanish, starting now. The county library board had previously set aside $3000 per year for the purchase of Spanish-language material, but the subsidy was eliminated “after some residents objected to using taxpayer dollars to entertain readers who might be illegal immigrants.”