Category: publishing

“Returns are the dark side of the book world, marking not only failed expectations, but the crippling inefficiencies of an antiquated business. It’s a problem that’s only getting worse. The industry’s current economic model pushes publishers to generate a small number of blockbuster hits. But picking winners is a quixotic enterprise, and as publishers ship an ever-increasing number of books to stores, hoping to hit the jackpot every time, stores are sending an ever-increasing number back.”

“People no longer pretend to laud the poet or his craft. The Poet was once the man who wrestled with the Olympian concepts and brought them down to Earth mortal-sized morsels for the Saturday Evening Post. Poetry was the expression of truth and/or beauty professed through the rigors of language and form. When poetry meant Kipling, it had a certain valor and heft in the public mind. Now, that was a poem. By God it rhymed and you could march to it. Then came the new poets who shed the old styles as a useless encrustation of the old dead past, and they lost their claim on the popular mind. Now poetry was seen as a way to detail the author’s tormented, neurotic, indecisive inner life — by means of gassy exhalations devoid of form or discipline. I should know; I wrote miles of that stuff in college.”

Book Expo America attracts 30,000-plus booksellers, authors, editors and journalists to talk publishing. “The event briefly reconverts a modern business of e-mail, phone calls and faxes to a human one of smiles and handshakes, laughs and shared meals, and lots of giveaways: book bags, galleys, tchotchkes, and the heavy tomes exhibitors don’t want to repack and mail.”

Two men who stole copies of the new Harry Potter book due out later this summer and tried to sell them to newspaper reporters have been arrested. When one reporter tried to recover the book from the men for police, shots were fired…

There are more books available than ever before. And people are still buying. But will booklovers still browse book stores? “People are spending less time in the back of the store, looking through the philosophy section, and more time at the tables for `recommended books’ in front. They’re looking for someone to narrow their choices.”

The continuing decline of reading for pleasure in America is well documented, but doesn’t seem to have been matched by a decline of available reading material – quite the contrary, in fact. “The number of new titles published last year, 195,000, increased by 14 percent over 2003, according to a new report… The biggest chunk of the increase was in adult fiction.” But with fewer adults than ever buying and reading new fiction, the strategy on the part of publishers seems more than anything like a desperate attempt to throw as many titles as possible against the wall, and hope that one or two might stick.

Why is super editor Judith Regan bringing her publishing house from New York to LA? “Over the last 20 years, she explains, New York has turned into a city that’s better suited to bankers, Wall Street lawyers and the superrich than it is to publishers. Artists are fleeing, creativity is dying, and the rents keep going up.”

The New Yorker magazine is issuing its complete archive of issues on DVD. “The collection, titled “The Complete New Yorker,” will consist of eight DVD’s containing high-resolution digital images of every page of the 4,109 issues of the magazine from February 1925 through the 80th anniversary issue, published last February. Included on the discs will be “every cover, every piece of writing, every drawing, listing, newsbreak, poem and advertisement.”

Ernest Hemingway’s house outside of Havana has been listed in the US as “endangered.” “The house’s exposed position and the tropical hurricane climate of Cuba has left the building with serious structural problems, with experts calling it a preservation emergency”.

Albanian novelist Ismail Kadare wins the first Man Booker International Prize. “I am a writer from the Balkan Fringe, a part of Europe which has long been notorious exclusively for news of human wickedness. My firm hope is that European and world opinion may henceforth realise this region… can also give rise to other kinds of news and be the home of other kinds of achievement in the field of the arts, literature and civilisation.”