Category: publishing

You would think that the monolithic and powerful Catholic church wouldn’t have much to fear from a novel, even a bestselling one. But the Catholic leadership’s all-out assault on Dan Brown’s The DaVinci Code this week is evidence of the effect the book is having among the Catholic faithful. “Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, once a top dogma enforcer in Vatican City and currently archbishop of Genoa, broke the Vatican’s virtual silence on the book this week and told Vatican Radio that nobody should read it and certainly Catholic bookstores should stop selling it.”

The Paris Book Fair opens this weekend, as publishers take stock of their business. “Books are becoming more democratic. Fewer than nine percent of homes had no books in 1997, compared with more than a quarter in 1993. A huge study of the publishing market across the European Union has just been completed, which showed that in 2002 Britain led the way with some 120,000 new books, of all genres. Germany came in second with about 80,000, closely followed by Spain, Italy and France, all with about 60,000 to 70,000 new titles a year. In France the numbers have doubled in the past decade.”

After making a big mark as weekly columnist for the New York Times’ Arts & Leisure section, Frank Rich moves back to the op-ed page. “Mr. Rich said that he has “loved” writing his column for Arts and Leisure. But the section goes to press on Tuesdays, which has forced him to write his column days before it gets published. The delay between writing and hitting the newsstand was a sore point. “I can’t say I liked having it sit there without being able to touch it,” Mr. Rich said.

The Middle East is not the easiest place to become a groundbreaking writer, with various forms of religious and government censorship always getting in the way of creative expression. But a new generation of Arab writers are challenging old modes of thinking, and taking on some long-standing taboos.

The Catholic Church in Italy has spoken out against The Da Vinci Code. Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, Archbishop of Genoa and a possible successor to the Pope, plans a series of debates on issues raised by the novel. “It astonishes and worries me that so many people believe these lies. The book is everywhere. There is a very real risk that many people who read it will believe that the fables it contains are true.”

A new research report offers some suggestions. “More than half of non-buyers say they would buy books if they became cheaper, and if they became more accessible. The research clearly shows that discounting expands the market, with cost the most quoted reason why non-buyers are rejecting books: 21% say new books are too expensive. The high-priced fiction hardback comes in for particular abuse from non, light and medium buyers. Supermarkets emerge with credit: more than half of all adults say they would buy more books if supermarkets stocked larger ranges.”

What’s it like to be a poet these days? Pretty good, says Billy Collins. “It’s a very good time to be a poet. There are lots of prizes and opportunities to read, which wasn’t the case until pretty recently.”

“Despite occasional hot sellers such as ”The Da Vinci Code,” book sales have grown little in the past few years, and mass-market paperback sales have declined steadily. One big reason, it seems, is that baby boomers, historically the biggest mass-market buyers, increasingly find those little books too hard to read. Mass-markets are the thick, squareish paperbacks — mostly entertainment fiction — that you stick in your pocket or purse and read on the subway, airplane, or beach. It’s a tried-and-true format. But something is wrong.”

Paul Wells finds he never finishes books these days. “It is a dark burden to bear, this business of not finishing books. You start out with all the goodwill in the world. You flip the pages diligently. Your circle of acquaintances expands by a dozen or more as this cast of made-up people enters your life. And before you even find out how it all turns out for them, you set them aside. What’s your problem? You feel ungrateful, somehow. The author put his life into these people, and I can’t even stick around to see who lives or who dies? And yet, as I stare at the books in my library, I realize I have become a serial book-unfinisher.”

Britain’s public libraries are in serious decline, according to a new report, and a £650 million backlog of crucial repairs needs to be addressed soon. The lack of public funding for library maintenance has led to the “scandalous” situation, and the report calls funding for book allocation “very low” as well.