Category: publishing

It’s official: nobody sells more books than Oprah. “A new study confirms what many already knew: Oprah Winfrey’s book endorsements are good as gold to publishers… Of [the 45 books Winfrey recommended to her ‘book club’], only 11 had been on the bestseller list before her recommendation, and none of them had gone beyond No. 25. Of the first 11 books that Winfrey picked, all went to at least No. 4 within a week.”

It’s been less than 24 hours since author JK Rowling announced that the next installment of her wildly popular Harry Potter series would be published in July 2005, and already, the unreleased tome has rocketed to number one on the order chart of online retailer Amazon.com. The fifth volume in the series was Amazon’s most heavily pre-ordered book ever, and the new entry seems sure to surpass it.

Barnes & Noble’s CEO has reacted angrily to a suggestion by publisher Random House that it might begin selling its books directly to readers online. “The announcement of the new plans comes as the book business is suffering through a second consecutive year of almost-flat sales. The average age of book consumers continues to climb, and except for children’s and religious books, few areas of the business seem to be picking up new readers.”

JK Rowling has completed the next installment of the adventures of Harry Potter. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince will hit stores July 16 and be published simultaneously in the UK, the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa.

“After 21 years and more than 200 issues, the highly regarded Women’s Review of Books, published at Wellesley College, will suspend publication after the December issue. Editor in chief Amy Hoffman, who took over the review in 2003, cited falling subscriptions and advertising, as well as increasing costs, for the demise of the literary monthly.”

Three judges of Australia’s major book award have quit over changes in the powers of the jury. The administrators of the Mile Franklin Literary Award “adopted a charter that appoints the NSW State Librarian, Dagmar Schmidmaier, as permanent head of the jury, reduces the term of the other judges from six to three years, allows Trust to dismiss the judges without explanation, and prevents them from speaking to the media.”

“The daylight burning of the library, which the invading US military did not protect, was one of the first costly failures in the post-war chaos of occupation last year. Now it is slowly being restored. But in a country where recent history remains bitterly disputed, resurrecting the library and national archive has turned into a remarkably sensitive and political operation.”

With Google digitizing some of the world’s most important libraries, “are the days of the library as a social organism over? Almost certainly not, for reasons practical, psychological and, ultimately, spiritual. Locating a book online is one thing, reading it is quite another, for there is no aesthetic substitute for the physical object; the computer revolution rolls on inexorably, but the world is reading more paper books than ever. Indeed, so far from destroying libraries, the internet has protected the written word as never before, and rendered knowledge genuinely democratic.”

The Washington Post is buying one of the internet’s first digital magazines. “In announcing a deal to acquire Slate from Microsoft Corp. for an undisclosed sum, said to be in the millions of dollars, Post executives said they would keep Jacob Weisberg as editor and most of the 30-person staff.”

Eew… ArtsJournal’s editor scored only 9 of 15 in this year’s Guardian books quiz… We’re sure you can do better…