Category: publishing

“This holiday season, a new and perverse variation on this age-old standby is making the rounds at Manhattan soirées. Instead of ‘Read any good books lately?’, you are far more likely to hear: ‘Pretended to read any good books lately?’ Yes, this season it’s all about faking it—i.e., carrying around the ‘It’ book but not actually bothering to read it.”

David Gilmour wins this year’s Governor General’s award for English-language fiction for his book “A Perfect Night to go to China”. “The awards were announced Wednesday morning in Montreal and will be given to the winners in Ottawa next week by Governor General Michaelle Jean. The announcement was made in Montreal in honour of the designation of Montreal as UNESCO World Book Capital for 2005-06.”

Salman Rushdie and Nick Hornby have been shortlisted for the Whitbread Prize. “The awards recognise the ‘most enjoyable’ books of last year by writers based in the UK and Ireland and were established by Whitbread in 1971.”

One of the best (and first) publishing blogs on the net was Moby Lives, written by Dennis Loy Johnson. But Moby took a vacation this summer, and a promised return in September was delayed. Now Moby’s back – only in audio form, with interviews with such notables as David Kippen, the new director of the literature program at the National Endowment for the Arts, and Sara Nelson, an editor at Publishers Weekly.

“Apparently, the company pitched a plan to an unnamed publisher to offer short-term access (about a week) to book content for roughly 10% of the purchase price. Users could only read the book online — they wouldn’t be able to print or download the content. However, the publisher reportedly refused, saying the price was too low.”

A look at the field and likely outcome.

“The Walrus Foundation has finally obtained charitable status from the federal government, assuring the future of The Walrus magazine. The award-winning magazine, when launched in Sept. 2003, had proclaimed itself Canada’s Harper’s, Atlantic and Mother Jones — essential U.S. periodicals that are also supported by non-profit foundations. The Walrus was underpinned by $1 million annually for five years, to come from the Montreal-based Chawkers charitable foundation. But the money could not flow to the Walrus Foundation until its charitable status, too, was confirmed by Revenue Canada.”

Last week voters in Salinas, Ca., approved adding half a cent to the sales tax to keep the town’s library open. Last year the public library almost closed after losing funding. “It really struck a chord on the national level, and we became a poster child for the decline and fall of Western civilization. There was the irony of it being Steinbeck’s hometown and all that stuff, and it did begin to represent something larger than just Salinas losing its libraries.”

The NEA is launching ‘The Big Read, its plan to ‘revitalize the role of literature in American popular culture.’ Set to launch early next year, its pilot effort will fund book projects in six cities. Chairman Dana Gioia said it will be ‘the biggest federally run literature program in American history,’ a stunning comment from an administration that has pledged to shrink government. Shades of the Federal Writers Project! The inspiration behind ‘The Big Read’ is community-wide efforts in cities from Seattle to Pittsburgh that use novels to encourage public discussions on social issues.”

“Creating a virtual Library of Alexandria has long been a dream of techies and book-lovers alike. Project Gutenberg, a digitisation initiative dating back to the 1970s, currently boasts over 17,000 books in around 45 languages. This summer, European nations backed a “digital library” plan to place literary works online. For readers, the idea of being able to access the aggregate knowledge of humanity on a single device from anywhere in the world seems a benefit of mythic proportions, and the obvious next step in man’s quest —from stone slabs to papyrus to movable type to ethereal digital bits—to document the world in words and symbols.”