There were some changes in the types of books that made the bestseller lists in 2002. Of 120,000 books published last year, 421 books made the bestseller lists, “down a bit from the record set in 2001, when 433 books made a first landing. The previous high was 385 books, back in 2000. The only weekly list that had more players in 2002 was hardcover nonfiction, where a record 90 books made an appearance, breaking the record of 83 books set in 2001. There were 126 hardcover fiction first appearances last year, down just one from the record 127 in 2001.”
Tag: 01.13.03
That’s Rich – Frank Goes Back To A&E
So is Frank Rich’s move from the New York Times’ Op-ed page to the A&E section a promotion or a demotion? “Knowing that I had no interest in running a department and never had,” Rich says, NYT editor Howell Raines said “he would exploit my ideas to advise him and a new culture editor.” Which makes Erlanger the manager and Rich, essentially kibitzing, a sort of “nanny-in-residence” to the former Berlin bureau chief, as one Times reporter put it.
Some Public Interest In The Copyright Wars?
Is progress being made in the battle over making copyright as “public-friendly” as possible? Perhaps. “Technologically speaking, at any rate – tomorrow is not on the side of the copyright control freaks. Information doesn’t want to be free, but customers definitely want it to.” And “at long last, tech companies are speaking up against the threat not just to their customers’ rights but to their own ability to innovate and sell products. The entertainment people are hardly discouraged. They have far more clout than any other parties in this war, and they’ve used it.”
Maori Protest Tom Cruise Movie Filming
Maori elders have told the makers of a £70 million film starring Tom Cruise that they cannot film a New Zealand volcano crucial to the script because it is sacred. Spokesmen for several of the region’s Maori tribes have complained that ‘there has been no financial recognition of their interest in the mountain’.”
State Of The Book Biz – Circa 2002
What sold? Familiar names…”John Grisham, James Patterson, Danielle Steel, Stephen King and Mary Higgins Clark had a total of 15 books on last year’s hardcover fiction charts; that’s 16.6% of all available slots in the course of the year.” The five biggest publishers accounted for 77 percent of all books on the Bestseller lists…
Big Jazz Bands Meet In Toronto
“Running a big band in a world with no patience for jazz requires an odd combination of benevolence and ego. To survive the economics of dividing jazz’s subsistence wages among 15 or more musicians, you have to really love music at the same time you have to be convinced the world needs to hear your tunes…”
Death Of HipHop? I Don’t Think So…
HipHop is 30 years old. But to read many critics, you’d think it was on life-support, if not already measured for the coffin. Hmph! “For music critics, the only assignment greater than proclaiming the arrival of something new and great is announcing the death of a once sacred cow. But, in this case, it is both lazy and, more importantly, wrong.”
The Art World’s Most Powerful – A List
The British magazine ArtReview has made a list of the 100 most powerful people in the art world. “British collector Charles Saatchi is No. 1; Ronald Lauder, who just opened his own museum in New York, is No. 3; and No. 9 is former Sotheby’s chairman and major stockholder Alfred Taubman, who is spending an enforced vacation at Uncle Sam’s spa, convicted of price fixing.” Only one artist cracks the top ten…
A Matter Of Rights – Why Movies Aren’t Online
Even if they wanted to put movies online, movie studios aren’t able to, and it’s not likely to happen for a long time. Why? “Clearing rights to movies is the biggest single hurdle to Internet video on demand today. The studios would like to give us more, but can’t clear the titles. There are strange clauses attached to almost every film because the Internet either wasn’t contemplated or the contracts were loosely worded.”
Teaching As Intellectual Pursuit
Shouldn’t teaching be the subject of research? Not just what is taught, but how teaching works… “That is, teaching as intellectual work, which can be discussed, reviewed, critiqued, adapted, and built upon by peers. Part of that includes a belated recognition that the way people teach is related to what they teach; generic ideas on pedagogy have their use, but any serious effort to professionalize teaching in higher education, and to make it intellectually respectable as a topic of scholarship, has to be discipline-specific.”