Category: publishing

Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s 1932 novel Sunset Song has been picked – after a six-month exercise – as the best Scottish book ever. But was this public contest worth anything? “Is there any point in the exercise in the first place? Does it lead to a debate or is it just another example of a dumbed down culture unable to discuss any topic unless it has been reduced to a list?”

Ho hum. This summer was a snooze in the publishing world. “Maybe it was the heat, the lack of a juicy controversy or an exciting book, for that matter, that made the past few months unmemorable for most readers.”

It’s a well-peddled myth that the publishing industry is a cartel. “Curiously unsatisfied with the idea that being a successful novelist requires the ability to write books that a consistently large number of people are prepared to buy, jaded scribblers search instead for an explanation that will permit them to retreat with their pride and delusions intact.”

There are 1082 books in Peguin’s Classics collection. “The Penguin Collection raises a number of issues, not least being what exactly is a classic? A book few have read, but which remains in print centuries after it was issued? Does a classic have to have had a social impact, say, Sun Tzu’s The Art of War or Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass? Must it sell a zillion copies – Judith Krantz’s Scruples and Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code would qualify, though neither are in this package – or is a classic defined by the amount of joy it brings to any reader, like the Hi-Lights constituency? Or should a classic be a book that changes the way we read?”

Some in the book industry are grumbling that the rich Quills Prize is just a reward for popularit. “But worried publishers, and the Quills organizers, say that show biz is just what publishing needs. Book sales have been in the dumps for several years, and with newspaper review space dropping, publishers are desperate to get public attention. The Quills appear after a year in which the National Book Award, funded largely by the publishing industry, drew sneers and grumbles for nominating five poor-selling novels by relatively unknown writers. The Quills idea is that if consumers participate in naming the best books and get to see the winners announced on national television, they’ll have a heightened interest in books.”

The FBI has demanded records from a library in Connecticut under authority of the Patriot Act as part of an investigation. “Because of federal secrecy requirements, the ACLU said it was barred from disclosing the identity of the institution or other details of the FBI’s demand, but court papers indicate the target is a library in the Bridgeport, Conn., area.”

Fantagraphics Comics was almost broke two years ago, but a project to publish the complete Peanuts cartoons was a big hit and turned the company around. Now it’s made a deal to publish the complete Dennis the Menace in 25 columes ove 11 years…

San Francisco Chronicle book critic David Kipen has been named the National Endowment for the Arts’ new director of Literature. “Among his new responsibilities, Kipen will design and lead national leadership initiatives, develop partnerships to advance the literature field, and recommend panelists and manage the review process for literature applications.”

Readers have been served a double helping of pirate books in the last couple of months, for reasons that defy analysis. The cowboy and the gangster, twin pillars of America’s self-image, continue to inspire screenwriters and novelists, although the cowboy, these days, seems to be limping as badly as Walter Brennan. But what can explain the allure of pirates?

More and more American public libraries are offering audiobook downloads to be “borrowed”. “A patron with a valid library card visits a library Web site to borrow a title for, say, three weeks. When the audiobook is due, the patron must renew it or find it automatically ‘returned’ in a virtual sense: The file still sits on the patron’s computer, but encryption makes it unplayable beyond the borrowing period. The patron doesn’t have to do anything after the lending period. The file expires. It checks itself back into the collection. There’s no parts to lose. It’s never damaged. It can never be late.”