Category: publishing

A couple of scholars write a book, then watch as it languishes near the bottom of the Amazon sales rankings. How to get it higher? How about visiting Barnes & Noble stores and placing it in more prominent position? Begging producers for interviews? Taping your own readings complete with laugh tracks?..

Fans of The Da Vinci Code are endangering the historic Roslyn Chapel in Scotland. So many are visiting that the chapel is showing wear. “The fragile carvings in the 15th-century Midlothian church risk being damaged by people brushing against them and the humidity from their breath.”

Boston has always been a cutting-edge college town, and the student-run publications put out by the Hub’s universities have long been the envy of the world. So what’s the latest trend in student publishing? Well, in a word, porn.

Margaret Atwood is tired of traipsing around North America signing books. So she’s “developing a remote book-signing machine that will allow readers to get their novels autographed without the author having to traipse to bookshops across the globe. The idea occurred to her while undertaking gruelling tours with Oryx and Crake last spring.”

The 35,000 people who participated in the 2004 edition of National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo, as it’s popularly known) are a unique bunch. Call ’em obsessive, call ’em overly ambitious, call ’em hopeless dreamers, they don’t mind. Just don’t ask them to leave their keyboards – for anything – when November rolls around.

The American Library Association gathers for its annual meeting. Libraries are facing a rocky future in the US. “More than $80 million has been cut from public library budgets in the past year alone, which has weakened or closed libraries in more than 40 states. In addition to budgetary issues, about 70 percent of librarians will reach retirement age within the next 20 years. Who will take their place?”

The publisher of The Hollywood Reporter, Billboard and other trade titles says it is opening a new “wide-ranging Web site” to cover the book business and offer sales data gathered by company-owned Nielsen BookScan. Called The Book Standard, the site will launch on Jan. 27.

So the Salinas (California) public libraries are shutting for lack of money. There’s got to be a better way to fund libraries, writes David Kipen. “Of course, the danger isn’t that the next young Steinbeck will have to take a bus to borrow some Waugh. The danger, plainly, is that he’ll find something better to do. To paraphrase P.T. Barnum, there’s a Steinbeck born every minute. The trick of a literate society lies in cultivating him, carefully but generously, so that he actually grows up to be Steinbeck.”

Novelist Andrea Levy has won the 2004 Whitbread award for Novel of the Year for her latest work, Small Island. The award makes Levy the immediate frontrunner for the overall Whitbread Prize, which comes with a £25,000 award. The overall winner will be announced January 25.

Montana becomes thelatest US state to want to name a poet laureate. “Under the bill, the Montana Arts Council would supply the governor with the names of three qualified Montana poets. The governor would then appoint a poet from the list to hold the honorary post for two years. The poet laureate would receive no compensation but would promote the arts throughout Montana.”