Category: publishing

Google has temporarily suspended its project to scan libraries of books after complaints from publishers. “Google wants publishers to notify the company which copyright books they don’t want scanned, effectively requiring the industry to opt out of the program instead of opting in.”

The Denver Public Library has pulled thousands of Spanish-language books fromk its shelves after complaints the books might be inappropriate.l “About 6,500 fotonovelas, popular in Mexico and other Latin American countries, have been temporarily recalled from Denver Public Library branches. The review could be completed by next week. The Denver library system, which includes a large Spanish-speaking population, has been offering the fotonovelas for about 15 years but started receiving complaints last week after a local radio host said some books contained ‘shocking’ illustrations.”

“More mass-market paperbacks are still sold each day than any other type of book; last year consumers bought 535 million of them. But that number has steadily declined for a decade and is down 11 percent in the last five years, while the overall number of books sold has fallen just 7 percent.” Why the drop? “”We’ve been losing the foundation of our customer base because their eyesight is getting worse, and the books are getting harder and harder to read.” So major publishers are publishing big print editions.

“Britain’s multiculturalism rests on political correctness. This means the mediator becomes more important than the message. Minority writers get a disproportionate amount of space on the bookshelves, but what is being said is seemingly willfully neglected. That partly explains why so many–including their neighbors and much of the British establishment–were surprised to find that three homegrown British Pakistanis became suicide bombers.”

“The dictionary contains many more insulting words than compliments. It has 350 ways of insulting someone, but only 40 compliments such as lush [meaning very good]. There are 50 ways to describe attractive women, including eye candy and cutie, but only 20 ways of describing good-looking men; Greek god being an extremely handsome man.”

“Enjoying a quiet mutation for the past 30 years, comic books have morphed into something bigger and more complex than the hulking icons of the mid-century. The phrase ‘graphic novel’ is now commonly used to distinguish longer and more complex works from the teen travails of Archie et al” and they’re finding big adult audiences.

Nominees for this year’s Booker Man Prize have been chosen. “Four previous winners – Ian McEwan, Kazuo Ishiguro, Salman Rushdie and JM Coetzee – have made the 2005 longlist, as has Julian Barnes They are up against debut author Marina Lewycka’s A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian, winner of two comic fiction prizes. White Teeth author Zadie Smith has also made the list with an as yet unpublished third novel, On Beauty. The longlist features 17 books chosen from 109 entries.”

Ten US universities are offering digital versions of assigned books this fall. “Alongside the new and used versions of Dante’s “Inferno” and “Essentials of Psychology” will be little cards offering 33 percent off if students decide to download a digital version of a text instead of buying a hard copy. That’s not a bad deal for a cash-strapped student facing book bills in the hundreds of dollars. But there are trade-offs. The new digital textbook program imposes strict guidelines on how the books can be used, including locking the downloaded books to a single computer and setting a five-month expiration date, after which the book can’t be read.”

High school reading scores haven’t improved since 1999. Why? “Faced with declining literacy and the ever-growing distractions of the electronic media, faced with the fact that —Harry Potter fans aside — so few kids curl up with a book and read for pleasure anymore, what do we teachers do? We saddle students with textbooks that would turn off even the most passionate reader.”

The Quill Awards were supposed to enjoy some populist panache. “Designed as a kind of People’s Choice Awards to the National Book Awards’ stuffy Oscars, the Quills promise to put readers themselves in charge, ‘to reflect the tastes of the group that matters most in publishing – readers.’ A closer look at the Quill Awards, however, shows that they are really designed to serve a different constituency: publishers themselves.”