Category: publishing

The Canadian dollare has been rising in value against the US dollar. Theoretically that means book prices ought to be coming down. “Savvy consumers have been objecting about the big price difference between the U.S. dollar price printed on the back of a book and its Canadian dollar equivalent.”

“To hear some people tell it, author Dan Brown stumbled on the literary equivalent of turning lead into gold. They say his was a formula that mixed clumsy, forgettable sentences with breakneck pacing, lectures on art, history and religion, sinister conspiracies, evil villains, puzzles and cliffhanger chapter endings to produce literary gold. While some like novelist Salman Rushdie called the book “typewriting” and others, like critic Laura Miller, called it “cheesy,” book industry professionals refuse to sneer, saying this was far from a case of good things happening to a bad book.”

“A first-time author has bypassed the traditional route of getting an agent, and is publishing a collaborative thriller on eBay. The novel is being written one page at a time, one writer to a page. As each installment is finished, the chance to create the next is offered for auction on eBay. So far, 17 pages have been completed, with 234 to go, and while the quality of the writing might charitably be described as variable, there is no shortage of plot.”

Once, book parties “were as central to the book-publishing experience as collecting blurbs and freaking out over your book jacket. How else could you get through this self-induced ordeal without imagining the scene: reviewers and critics and editors and writers. . . . The hugging, the raised glasses, the rueful toast by one’s editor about how long the book took, the copies displayed on a mantelpiece. Not so now. In these cost-cutting days, the book party is no longer to be counted on as a well-earned prize.”

“The Hay Festival, which began in 1988 as an insane glint in the eye of its organizer, Peter Florence, has expanded and expanded to become one of the world’s best-known and most exciting literary events — the ‘Woodstock of the mind,’ as former President Clinton, a participant several years ago, put it. (Think of it as a literary Sundance festival, minus the Hollywood swag.)”

In an author’s note in his sequel to his best-selling (but discredited) “A Million Little Pieces,” james Frey now acknowledges that “significant” parts of “My Friend Leonard,” a best-selling story about his friendship with a gangster, were also invented.

For the first time in 20 years, the UK has published more books that the US has. “U.S. output dropped for the first time since 1999 while the number of British titles surged 28 percent, according to new data from research firm Bowker. Britain, with one-fifth the population of the United States, has long been the world’s largest publisher of new books per capita in any language, but a steep decline in U.S. publication of general adult fiction and children’s books helped boost the UK’s total volume to the top English-language spot. UK publishers issued 206,000 new books in 2005 compared with 172,000 in the United States, which saw an 18 percent drop in production.”

“Our current students are unused to paper and attribute the frustration they feel when they use it as a mere lack of usability when in fact they simply haven’t figured out how it works. Older scholars, meanwhile, tend to forget about paper’s unique utility because using it has simply become second nature to them.”

Book sales are down. So publishers have started cutting down on the number of books they publish. “The number of new books and new editions of old works published last year dropped to 172,000, about 18,000 less than in 2004. Publishers, especially small and middle-sized ones, all cut back.”

“Cody’s Books, the venerable independent bookstore that has served generations of UC Berkeley students, has announced that it will close its flagship store on the south side of campus because of declining sales and competition from chain stores and the Internet.”