The Twilight of the Book Industry? Maybe Not.

Right in the middle of the excitement about the opening of the latest movie based on Stephanie Meyer’s phenomenally selling Twilight series, it’s interesting to think about what all of this hoopla says about books and where we are with them now.

When the film, The Twilight Saga: New Moon, opens later today, it is expected to break ticket records. The first film, Twilight, grossed more than $190 million in North American revenues after it opened last year.

While much is said about just why Meyer’s series is so beloved, what interests me today is what this rabid outpouring is saying about the book industry.

Let’s face it: one way or another, book publishing has had a rough year. Much of it self-inflicted. Between shaky international financial news and the uncertainty many parts of the industry are forecasting through the final arrival of the electronic book, the industry has been stumbling. And through the stumbles we hear the chanting of cynical voices about the death of the book. It has always been thus, but now it’s more.

And then there is Twilight. And then there is The Lost Symbol. And then there is just about anything J.K. Rowling would care to put her name on. Others, as well. Books that create excitement and cause line-ups and watercooler chatter. And no: bestsellers do not an industry make, but they sure don’t hurt anything. For one thing, a book that is discussed, is talked about, is pressed on even friends who usually do not read gets a culture talking about books. More importantly, it spreads the very real joy of reading around. It gets people reading who might not otherwise have had a chance to be properly exposed to the full body experience of being immersed in a good story and the emotional virtual reality that reading offers.

The publishing industry, like so many others, is going through changes. Sure, things in the future are going to be different. But millions of girls and young women excitedly sharing a book that they feel simply must be read indicates a certain vibrance for that future. And not all change is bad.

National Bookstore Day Today: Let’s Shop!

Let’s face it: bookstores have had a pretty rough ride this year. Between the (cheerfully monikered) economic meltdown (cue scary music now), the rising tide of electronic books and the hardcover price wars of earlier this autumn, there must have been at least a few days in 2009 when some booksellers just didn’t even want to get out of bed.

All of this leads us to the Publishers Weekly-sponsored National Bookstore Day, the idea being that bookstores are front and center on one day: November 7th. Says PW:

Event organizers are hoping promotions tied to the day will attract local and national media coverage -- and, in turn, draw new customers into bookstores. “The number of stores already signed up meets our rosiest hopes for this first year. Many of the stores celebrating National Bookstore Day are recognized nationally as leaders, so we're gratified that this idea has been endorsed by these savvy booksellers,” said Ron Shank, PW group publisher. Among the offerings that bookstores are planning are author signings, children’s activities, discounts, extended hours, free refreshments, marathon “read-aloud” events, raffles and writing contests.

Though the idea is laudable, here at the 11th hour, National Bookstore Day doesn’t seem to have gained the traction garnered earlier this year by American thriller author Joseph Finder’s grassroots “Buy Indie Day.”

Even so, every conscious step taken moves us in the right direction. The message is one to cherish and remember: books are important. So are the people who buy, make and sell them. The place books have in our lives is of value: it’s meaningful to us. And if we take all of this as read, it behooves us to do everything in our collective power to keep independent bookstores not only strong and out there, but going. And how do we do that? We try to raise awareness. We raise readers. We spread the word.

And then we shop.

What Bloodletting in the Newsroom Means to Books

Newsgathering as we know it is having its toughest year in memory. With so many readers skidding in the blood of the newspapers they’ve loved for decades -- forever -- and newsies finding themselves increasingly wondering what the hell the next cycle might bring, even the very best and brightest of the newsgathering breed are wondering what the future will look like.

In the shadow of this bloodletting, the vultures are gathering. No matter what happens to our free presses, we need our news. And if we can’t get it in the way we’ve always gotten it, well ... some of us are prepared to take it any way we can.

You cannot expect self-interested parties -- publishers, booksellers, even authors -- to disseminate unbiased stories about themselves and those they represent. It just doesn’t work that way. And yet, as traditional media fail, that’s exactly what we are increasingly seeing. For instance, Barnes & Noble’s Review. As good as its editorial material often seems to be, does a bookseller really have any business positioning itself as as part of “the press”? Publishers are playing, too. For instance, Penguin U.S. has just launched a full suite of what it’s calling “online programming.” Last month, Kristin O’Connell, Penguin’s director of online marketing, sent out a release letting us know that most of the online “content” now available through Penguin is “created, written, shot, edited and produced by more than 30 Penguin Group (USA) executives and department team members who are closest to the content, some having worked directly with the books.”

You can tell from both O’Connell’s release and the material itself that it was created with pride, and that’s all right. But can it be created without bias? I don’t think it can. How can those “closest to the content” be expected to share an uncompromised vision with us, their potential readers or viewers? They cannot. It is, after all, not their job to do that. It is their job -- I’ll just say it straight out -- to sell us stuff. And to be good at that job -- really, really good at it -- they can never do anything but pretend at journalistic integrity. That’s just how all of this works.

There is a mad blurring going on in the media today. Born of a kind of desperate clutching for something that makes sense when held against traditional standards of doing things. In all parts of the media, people are trying to find order in chaos. And they will. Of course they will. Just maybe not right now. Right now we need to find our way. Whatever happens, though, we need our newsgatherers -- our unbiased, independent, traditional newsies. Period.

Right at this moment I’m not sure how those newsies will be getting their goods to us in five years. But I do know one thing: we must avoid the trap of taking too much of our news and information, and too many of our book reviews, from those who have the most to gain by giving all of those things to us.

BookExpo: Tony Buchsbaum’s Notes from the Floor

For the past three days, I have been on the exhibit floor at BookExpo America 2009 in New York City. Open only to people in the book trade, BEA is the place to be if you love books.

Usually, there are something like 25,000 people. Many are manning booths; many more are ducking in and out of them. The point? For publishers to show independent booksellers, the press and competing publishers what they’re cooking up for the next six months or so. There are usually mountains of advance copies, free for the grabbing. And, of course, there are authors everywhere, autographing sessions and the usual assortment of trade-show gimmes, from candy and pens to notepads, T-shirts and posters.

This year, two things altered the BEA experience. The dodgy economy resulted in far fewer books. Gone were the mountains of galleys, replaced by, well, modest hills of them. Some of the big publishers, notably Random House, didn’t offer books unless an author was there to sign them (long lines, anyone?). This meant less shoulder pain -- but it also meant much less excitement on the trade show floor.

Some years, a really big book makes its mark on the show; becomes the one everyone is talking about: The Prince of Tides, Presumed Innocent and The Horse Whisperer are good examples from the past. One big book was the other thing that changed BEA 2009 -- and the closest anyone got to it was the big banners in the entrance hall. That’s right: Da Vinci Code author Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol, coming from Doubleday in September. More than one publisher told me they’d moved planned books to other times of the year, to avoid being crushed by it.

What else were attendees talking about? Electronic books. The general consensus was that content was king, and how we read is beside the point. (Personally, I like the feel of paper. Plus, the batteries in a book never run out no matter how long your flight is delayed.)

In terms of author sightings, it seemed there was at least one at every booth, every moment of every day. Without looking too hard you could see James Patterson, Dr. Ruth, Diana Gabaldon, Michael Lewis, Robert Goolrick and James Ellroy, to name just six of hundreds. They were all happily signing books. Who did I stand in line for? Jeff Kinney, author of the Diary of a Wimpy Kid series. My son was over the moon later that afternoon, when I presented him with an autographed copy.

Next year, BEA’s organizers say the trade show will change again. Traditionally held over a weekend, in 2010 it will move to mid-week. Whether the mountains of books will return is anyone’s guess. My own suspicion is that it’ll be up to the economy. And Dan Brown.

Finally, the oddest thing: Usually there’s a constant crowd of people registering. This year, every day, the crowd was reduced dramatically after the morning rush -- and by Saturday afternoon there was no one in line to get in. The people behind the counter were just sitting there with nothing to do. And I kept thinking: Why didn’t someone get them something to read?

John Sayles Looking Forward to Some Time in the Sun

Like a lot of publishing-related stories this week, the dek of a Los Angeles Times piece on John Sayles’ inability to sell his latest novel seems intended to cast gloom on an economy embittered industry.

“The writer-filmmaker is shopping a sprawling work of historical fiction,” writes John Getlin, “but no big publishers are buying. Such is the cautious state of publishing today.”

It seems to me that this is the kind of reporting that has a whole generation irritated with news gatherers. While the piece is well-written and there is input from numerous sources, it seems to have an agenda. Book Expo gets underway in New York in a few days. As a result, you can’t throw a rock without hitting a story about all the doom and gloom in publishing, though most of those stories only use the numbers that back up their claims, ignoring the ones that show that, not only are portions of the publishing industry surprisingly robust but, in certain sectors, we begin to see that reading is having something of a Renaissance.

But back to John Sayles wandering about with his magnum opus tucked under his arm:

“I’ve been done with it for six or seven months, and it’s out to five or six publishers,” he said quietly. “But we haven’t had any bites yet.”

John Sayles, Oscar-nominated creator of “Return of the Secaucus 7,” “Lone Star,” “Matewan” and other movies, is having trouble getting a book deal.

The situation is almost entirely traceable to the publishing industry's economic woes, and it’s raising eyebrows, because Sayles was an accomplished fiction writer long before he made his first film. Weighing in at a whopping 1,000 typed pages, “Some Time in the Sun” is his first novel since 1990’s “Los Gusanos.”

Later in the piece, though, we’re told that when it comes to books, Sayles’ sales have never been that great. “Sales records matter more than ever, and some publishers are reluctant to take chances on writers such as Sayles, 58, whose previous books got rave reviews but were never bestsellers.”

The book is 1000 manuscript pages -- which would put it around 250,000 words: a toe breaker by anyone’s calculations. Not to mention expensive to produce: all those page. The author is well known, but his books are esoteric. And, clearly, the reading public that gobbles up the latest Dan Brown novel doesn’t want to be bothered with a lot of stuff like thinking. And, to make matters worse, the book is historical fiction of the most meaningful kind. That means that, when published, Some Time in the Sun might be an important book, it might even be a brilliantly reviewed book, but it probably won’t be a bestseller. (Historical fiction is never a bestseller, unless it is, then everyone forgets that rule. For a while.)

Now here’s the thing: publishing is made out of Cinderella stories. Listen to the bestseller back stories and you’ll hear it: tale after tale just like this. Only concluding with a happy ending: finally a book deal followed by a film deal followed by tears at the awards ceremonies. I’m thinking that’s where this is going, ultimately. Of course someone will publish Sayles’ book. Of course it will be fantastic and so be well-reviewed. And the rest, well, we’ll have to see. The point is, I’m not as confident as Getlin and some of his sources that this book would have found a home a year or more ago and that this is a more “jittery moment” in publishing history than any of those that have gone before.

“Some Time in the Sun,” writes Getlin “...blends vivid human portraits with historical events and brilliantly captures individual voices.... it spotlights African American and white soldiers fighting in the Philippines, fast-buck artists who help create the motion picture industry, and features cameos by Theodore Roosevelt, Mark Twain, William Randolph Hearst, Damon Runyon and other historical figures.”

It sounds amazing. I’m looking forward to the news still to come on this book. The small press that buys and lovingly publishes it, the throngs that read it and rave and tell their friends. I’m looking forward to seeing Cinderella ride again.

Death of the Book: Again with the Falling Sky?

Maybe the people most tightly wound into the book industry are not the most objective when it comes to pronouncing on the health of the book in our culture. That is, they can tell us how they see things now, but they have sunk too far into the “business” end to separate out the “book.”

That’s what I was thinking as I read Elizabeth Sifton’s carefully thought out article in the June 2009 edition of The Nation. Sifton, senior vice-president of Farrar, Strauss, Giroux offers up a deeply considered piece on where she feels the market is now. Unfortunately -- and like so many others -- there are just so many trees in the way: it’s difficult to see the forest. At all.

Do books still have their power? Over the past twenty years, as we’ve thrown ourselves eagerly into a joy ride on the Information Superhighway, we've been learning to read, and been reading, differently; and books aren't necessarily where we start or end our education. The unprofitable chaos of the book business today indicates, among other things, that slow, almost invisible transformations as well as rapid helter-skelter ones have wrecked old reading habits (bad and good) and created new ones (ditto). In the cacophony of modern American commerce, we hear incoherent squeals of dying life-forms along with the triumphant braying and twittering of new human expression.

But, as Sifton herself points out, the industry has been predicting the death of the book for... well, almost forever. And still the book hangs on. Why? So many reasons, really. Portability, ease of use, a classic and proven design. And anyone who wonders if the generations just now heading to reading age will care about reading or will be swept away in a sea of Tweets and Facebook status updates need only utter a short mantra: Rowling, Meyer, Gaiman. Kids are reading. Of course they’re reading. Kids love their books. Treat them right, and those same kids will be reading when they themselves have kids. And why? Because books are good. Reading rocks. And you can reinvent the wheel or build a better mousetrap but nothing will ever duplicate the direct-to-unconscious hit of reading a good book.

Sifton again:

What now? Publishers are battening down, and chain stores are struggling, having staked so much on nationally merchandised dreck, having committed themselves to imitating the look of the big indies but never quite matching their tighter local focus and skill in “hand selling” genuine books to readers. Anyway, the entire world of American retail business is veering toward obsolescence. Must books now find their way in cyberspace?

Yes, yes: point taken. The way books find consumers is changing, at least in part. The way they are published and marketed is changing. Elements of the business of books will change. But the book itself? The book will survive: of course it will.

Of course it will.

International Book Fair Offers Bright Spot During Bleak Times

The 54th International Book Fair got underway today in Warsaw, with 500 exhibitors and thousands of visitors taking part in what is said to be Europe’s second largest show of its kind.

The fair takes place at Warsaw’s Palace of Culture and Science until May 24th. Nearly all of Poland’s publishing houses as well as representatives from over 30 countries were on hand when the fair opened today on a wave of optimism.

“The crisis did not influence our fair,” spokesperson Roman Czejarek told Polskie Radio. “It seems that it will be a big celebration with a great deal of drive, a rich offer of accompanying events, crowds of visitors and an impressive number of book premieres.”

The Polskie Radio piece is here. China View offers a brief look here.

National Black Book Festival Will Attract Wide Audience

Dozens of authors and thousands of readers will converge on Houston’s George R. Brown Convention Center on May 16 and 17 for the National Black Book Festival.

Featured authors will include Roland S. Martin (Speak Brother! A Black Man's View of America), Mary B. Morrison (Noire, Single Husbands) and Persia Walker (Harlem Redux, Darkness and the Devil Behind Me).

The National Black Book Festival is held in conjunction with the Houston Black Expo and attracts attendees from all branches of book-related fields including authors, publishers, book clubs, libraries and individual readers.

A pavilion of authors will offer book signings and discussion sessions with featured authors; workshops and seminars, a spoken word poetry slam and book club giveaways. Check the Web site for event times and ticketing information.

Giving Away the Cow: Google Book Search Settlement

Up until now, we’ve stayed out of the fray over the proposed Google Book Search Settlement. For me, this has in part been due the fact that I’ve had a gnawing sense of unease that can border on panic whenever I contemplate what they’re proposing. The sheer audacity of what Google wants to undertake with this knocked the wind out of a lot of people’s sails. Certainly, the whole time this has been going on I’ve been sort of shaking my head, not quite believing what I was seeing and hearing.

In a very simple nutshell, Google wants to scan millions -- millions mind you -- of books and store them digitally, making them available, basically at their whim. OK, that’s possibly a gross oversimplification, but you get the idea: what they’re proposing could change everything.

Why does it all come back to newspapers for me these days? But it does. And here we are again: With the futures of many papers in jeopardy, one of the things I’ve been hearing from that industry in the last month or so is that they made some bad decisions about a decade ago when newspapers decided to give away the cow and then ended up being surprised when their readers kept wanting free milk. I don’t want to be sitting here in another decade listening to publishers saying: Oh, drat. Maybe we shouldn’t have done that. But I stand here in my near panic watching while they gather the cows, preparing to set them free for 60 bucks a head. It’s enough to make your hair stand on end.

Now thunder clouds are gathering from all angles. The most recent of these comes by way of David Needle at Internet News who quotes Internet Archive Founder Brewster Kahle in a recent column:

Kahle said he’s especially driven to protect books because “books are how we think in long form. They’re generally written by one person ... and can put across a big idea.”

He lamented the rise of Amazon and Google as the primary distribution points of books and their content. Kahle said he thinks Google’s efforts to digitize vast amounts of public domain and other books to make them more widely available is laudable, but he criticized the proposed settlement (now under review) with book publishers because it gives the search giant the right to digitize and control the distribution of out of print books that aren’t necessarily out of copyright.

Another monopoly?

“It creates another monopoly,” said Kahle. “It doesn’t make sense for them to be locked up by Google, it’s very screwy.”

Going forward he warned the settlement might “determine the future of books and paid content.”

Meanwhile, Arts Technica is reporting that Google’s plan has libraries worried:

The deal Google cut with publishers to settle their copyright infringement suit would give a green light to the search giant's book-scanning services and turn it into a retailer of out-of-print books. But resistance to the deal has been growing, as a variety of parties are realizing that the settlement gives both Google and the Book Rights Registry created by the deal enormous power over the dissemination of the scanned material. The latest groups to weigh in represent research librarians, who are worried about the deal's privacy implications and the lack of guarantees of current and future access. The solution, in their view, is to structure the settlement in a way that guarantees the court the right to intervene in the future.

See, that’s the thing: it isn’t that Google is evil. And it might not be that Google’s plan is bad. But it will change things. And how? Well, we don’t exactly know. But when you look at, say, how the music industry has been altered by technology over the last decade and if you look at my favorite news-gathering example you can see that even something built slowly over many, many years -- even generations -- can be torn down very easily if you slide away the right -- or the wrong -- bricks. Like a lot of people, I’m not so sure that concentrating all the control in one place is such a great idea.

This controversy is far from over and -- certainly -- there’s a lot more to know than I’ve shared here where I’ve been talking a lot about cows and sails and nail-biting panic. If you want to build a more lucid picture, Library Journal has put together an impressive page of links on the topic. Some time spent here will fill in all the blanks.

I don’t know what the correct answer is to this one. Heck: some days I’m not even completely sure I’m understanding the question. But I do know this: there are some very important issues in play here. Some would even say precious or sacred. Caution at this point seems not only prudent, but also necessary. We have so very much at stake.

The Changing Face of P.O.D.

This is what micropublishers have been dreaming about for decades, really. One machine that does it all and makes it possible to have books printed and delivered, a single copy at a time. Is this what Print On Demand technology will look like in the not-so-distant future? From The Telegraph:

Crime and Punishment may take the average reader several months to complete, but Britain’s first “book vending machine” can print you a copy in just nine minutes.

A freshly-bound edition of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s classic -- ordered by The Daily Telegraph -- was one of the first tomes to drop out of the Espresso Book Machine when it opened for business for the first time yesterday.

The novel is one of more than 400,000 titles including many rare and out-of-print books that can be printed on demand at Blackwell bookshop on Charing Cross Road in central London.

The bookstore of the future, then, might look very different, indeed. Not shelf upon shelf of books, but row upon row of machines churning out custom copies for waiting customers. Between that and the electronic streams of the e-books whizzing by, it’s possible that, a few years hence, bookstores will be very different places, indeed.

While that idea makes me a little sad, it has a hopeful edge. Back at Blackwell, The Telegraph’s copy of Crime and Punishment was better than all right:

The hefty work that skidded out of the chute, while slightly sticky to the touch, looked and felt like a standard edition, even down to the correct ISBN number on the back.

The paper and ink are the same quality used in larger presses, and the binding appeared flawless.

Phill Jamieson, head of marketing at Blackwell, said that the firm was uncertain how the £68,000 machine -- one of only three such printers in the world -- would be used during its three-month trial period.

And the moral of the story? It seems entirely possible that the death of the book so many have been forceasting will never come. We love our books. Witness the many thousands of readers that pass through January Magazine every day, not to mention other online magazines and blogs and discussion groups and book groups and all of this without even leaving the online world.

At their core and at heart, books themselves will not change. However, how the publishing industry delivers our books, how they sell and market and get them to the consumer, all of that might change quite a bit.

Consider a world without remainders. Now that doesn’t sound so bad.

Ten Points For Mr. Happy

We’ve been predicting this for a while, but now The New York Times is agreeing with us, so it must be true. (Right? Right?)

According to Motoko Rich, recession weary consumers may be cutting back on many luxuries, but one they’re willing to pay for is a happy ending.

At a time when booksellers are struggling to lure readers, sales of romance novels are outstripping most other categories of books and giving some buoyancy to an otherwise sluggish market.

Harlequin Enterprises, the queen of the romance world, reported that fourth-quarter earnings were up 32 percent over the same period a year earlier, and Donna Hayes, Harlequin’s chief executive, said that sales in the first quarter of this year remained very strong. While sales of adult fiction overall were basically flat last year, according to Nielsen Bookscan, which tracks about 70 percent of retail sales, the romance category was up 7 percent after holding fairly steady for the previous four years.

Motoko goes on to say that these numbers might be helped by the fact that the category generally offers up many titles in the less expensive mass market format. And romance isn’t the only area to be lit by the glow of a recession-era bounce:

Such escapist urges are also fueling sales of science fiction and fantasy, said Bob Wietrak, a vice president for merchandising at Barnes & Noble. Mr. Wietrak said sales of novels with vampires, shape shifters, werewolves and other paranormal creatures were “exploding,” whether they were found in the romance, fantasy or young-adult aisles, where Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series continues to dominate and inspire look-alike books like the House of Night teen novels by P. C. Cast and Kristin Cast.

The New York Times piece is here.

Books in Canada “Staple Not a Luxury”

Amid all the doom and gloom everyone keeps forecasting around the global economic crisis, it’s lovely to be able to share some really good news, not only for retailers, but for literacy.

BookNet Canada, the not-for-profit agency that watches book-related goings on in Canada, reports today that Canadian book sales have continued to show steady growth in the first quarter of 2009 over the same time period last year. Sales volume is up 6.7 per cent in the first three months of this year.

Michael Tamblyn, BookNet Canada’s CEO, sounds optimistic for the industry. “This was when the other shoe was supposed to drop, after Christmas when gift sales were no longer a factor. But in the face of declining book sales in the US and UK, we are still seeing steady performance in English-language Canadian book sales in Q1.”

Tamblyn feels that the numbers might indicate a change in perspective. “For the time being, Canadians continue to view books as a staple, not a luxury.”

BookNet offers up reporting information here.

Belarusian Wine Retailer Tweets His Way to Lucrative Book Deal

This is the sort of news that seems intended to annoy people who follow the book industry closely and who have, in recent weeks, tired of hearing about cutbacks and layoffs and other fallout laid at the feet of economic downturn. From a Wall Street Journal piece by Sara Nelson:

HarperStudio has signed a seven-figure, 10-book deal with Gary Vaynerchuk, a 33-year-old Belarusian-born wine retailer from New Jersey, who, except for a talk show appearance here and there, is basically unknown in mainstream media circles.

But in the world of the Internet, he is a Twitter phenom, with 145,000 followers hanging on his every tweet. What began as a daily video blog about wine has become a self-help, business-advice juggernaut, with “Garyvee” as chief engineer. As he describes himself online, “I love people, and the hustle.” The first book in his series, “Crush It! Turn Your Passion into Profits in a Digital World,” lands in stores in September.

It’s an interesting piece and Nelson asks the seven-figure 10-book deal question:

But is a marketer/blogger, who cheerfully admits he doesn’t read books, going to be able to sell them to other Internet types who probably don’t read much either?

Plus, essentially, why buy the cow when Twitter keeps tweeting up the milk for free?

With past blog-inspired bombs to measure against and anticipating the literary merit of a fortune cookie, one would think the answer would be fairly obvious. The fall book season will tell, though.

Nelson’s piece is thought-provoking and right here.

Barbarians at the Gates

As an observer of the woes to publishing and literacy coming from the effects of the global economic meltdown, I was dismayed to read that reading and book-selling in general are under severe pressure. In fact one of the reasons I’ve not posted for a while is that I have been busy keeping my own business interests afloat when many around me are looking for government life-rafts.

To cope with the despair and pervasive gloom, I find reading novels to be the best form of escape in these surreal times. In my opinion -- and that of many other observers -- reading is integral to a healthy society, especially in the young. However, even any positive news relating to books and publishing in today’s business environment is bittersweet. For many book buyers, there has never been a better time to snag bargains especially in the used-book market as many people cull their bookshelves, looking to convert printed words into cash. Last week Forbes reported that Portland, Oregon-based Powell’s Books is seeing a huge surge in people selling their old books. While bookselling has never been more challenging and the woes from the United States have started to spread to the United Kingdom, there was a surreal story that The Guardian reported on Saturday of a most bizarre book sale:

In the end it was difficult to say whether it was a book lover's wildest, happiest dream -- or a worst nightmare.

From dawn till dusk yesterday thousands of bibliophiles, not to mention a good few traders who were looking to turn a quick profit, plundered a giant warehouse brimming with free books.

Some loaded up their cars with mostly second-hand novels, biographies, reference books and magazines.

Others, including ones who had travelled hundreds of miles to join in the legal looting, drove vans straight into the heart of the warehouse and crammed in their choice of dog-eared treasures.

Those who had no cars carried books home in sagging bags and crates, pushed them away in shopping trolleys or in prams or wobbled away on bikes.

Tables, chairs, bookshelves were also carted out. The south-west had not seen anything like it since the scenes of plundering on Branscombe Beach in Devon when the container ship Napoli spilled crates of goodies on to the shingle.

The frenzy was the result of a book retailer moving out of a warehouse it leased on a trading estate in Bristol but leaving its books behind -- hundreds of thousands, possibly millions of them. The owners of the warehouse, which covers more than an acre, invited local people to help themselves to any books they wanted.

The Daily Mail opted for high drama and shocking photos:

The treasure hunters stand knee-deep in Danielle Steels, Len Deightons and Jeffrey Archers, hoping to find more exotic literary fare.

This is the scene at a huge book warehouse whose contents are being given away after they were abandoned.

Seeing the photographs makes me wonder if the barbarians really are inching over to our gates. The Chinese have a famous proverb which doubles up as a warning “May you live in interesting times.” Seeing those photos reinforces my view that we certainly do.

Translating Their Way to Publishing Success

We’ve had enough hard news from the publishing trenches of late. Good news was bound to come eventually. We just didn’t expect it from such an unlikely source.

Imagine: a small New York-based publisher kicking things up old-school by translating little known European works of literary fiction and publishing them and making a profit without the aid of either vampires or magical boys. Impossible? One would think so. The New York Times’ Motoko Rich says no:

It does not sound like a recipe for publishing success: a roster of translated literary novels written mainly by Europeans, relying heavily on independent-bookstore sales, without an e-book or vampire in sight.

But that is the formula that has fueled Europa Editions, a small publisher founded by a husband-and-wife team from Italy five years ago. As large New York publishing houses have laid off staff, suffered drastically reduced book sales and struggled to adjust to a digital future, Europa turned its first profit last year and is enjoying a modest but growing following.

The company, which operates out of a pair of tiny offices near Union Square in Manhattan, also has its first best seller with “The Elegance of the Hedgehog,” a French novel by Muriel Barbery narrated by a secretly intellectual concierge in a fashionable Parisian apartment building and a precocious preteen girl who lives there with her wealthy family. Filled with philosophical ruminations and copious references to literature, art, film and music, the book is in many ways as much of a surprise hit as its publisher.

The piece is lengthy, detailed, interesting and here.

Regional Book Events Make Nothing But Sense

I felt very honored to be asked to give a presentation about my most recent book at the Western Book Rep Association’s spring Book Fair in Victoria, British Columbia yesterday. It’s a great event and I met a lot of interesting and passionate people; people who care about books.

The WBRA does this twice a year: one in late winter in Victoria, then one in summer in Vancouver. It’s very intimate but superbly functional. A small trade fair. Some professional development. I’m not sure how many people attend, but I would guess it’s under 500 in total. Perhaps even fewer. Honestly: were you to attend the entire event from start to finish, you would have a reasonable expectation of meeting everyone if you were so inclined. So “intimate” really does cover it. I was only there for one evening and one morning but in that time, I heard a lot of laughter and a good number of interesting conversations. It’s a great event.

Like a lot of Canadians in book-related industries, I’ve been giving a fair amount of thought to the state of trade book events in this country of late. I even editorialized a bit about it in this space last week. Because, of course, BookExpo Canada -- the Canadian sister fair to BookExpo America that was held by the same company -- died a fairly unlamented death recently. Unlamented because, according to most of the people I’ve spoken with about it, BEC came out of the gate broken and just kept getting worse. Bottom line: it was expensive for most people to get to and since its usefulness for booksellers was never that clear, it got to be less and less important to the industry. And now it’s gone. The only question now is: what happens next?

Since Reed announced BEC’s death, several people have mentioned how powerful small, regional exhibitions can be. Having now experienced WBRA’s wonderful Book Fair I completely get that. At the Book Fair, a handful of invited authors spend a generous amount of face time with the people who will ultimately be selling their books to the public. Since it is a regional fair, those same booksellers enjoy meeting the actual reps who manage their accounts and perhaps the occasional sales V.P. who has come out to add their expertise. That’s a very different story than one finds at the large centralized bookfairs of yore, where senior executives could be counted on to spend very little time at the booth, opting instead to give their time to larger clients. Which means that most booksellers -- i.e. most small independent bookstore owners -- quite often ended up at the booth talking to whatever publishing company staffer could be tricked into spending time there.

In a country as large as Canada, small regional book events are the logical next step. Richer experiences for booksellers and publishers and less investment for everyone, in terms of both travel and venue outlay, it’s an idea that makes nothing but sense.

Meanwhile, the book industry in Canada is aquiver with discussion about what will take the place of the BookExpo, for several years the central bookfest. Some of those answers might come in Toronto in June at BookCamp. The Quill & Quire blog adds the 4-1-1 here.

Video Book: What’s Wrong with this Picture?

HarperCollins has a new solution for people who lack the time to read: the video book. Paid Content reports:

For those who don’t have the time to listen to an audiobook, let alone read a hardback or e-Book, HarperCollins brings you: the video book.

Way to go, Harper: sounds like you just invented television.

The piece in question is here.

Meanwhile, still on the HarperCollins front, BookArmy, the book recommendation site the company has been scheming on for a while, has been put on hold while Authonomy, the social networking site they launched last September, continues to chug along.

Not Much Surprise About BookExpo Canada’s Demise

Though some media are acting surprised by Reed Exhibitions’ pulling the plug on their BookExpo Canada event in June and others are chalking it up to yet another bite from a hungry economy, it seems to me that the answer is somewhat more simple. The book industry in Canada never seemed that comfortable with the Reed-run events, which were always essentially little more than smaller, lamer versions of Reed’s big U.S. book event.

The fact is, the Canadian book industry is different than the one that serves the American market. There are some important differences in both the culture of the book industry in both countries as well as the culture itself. Who would even imagine that simply scaling down and laming up a formula that works well in one country is going to work in another, different one? The idea defies logic.

I never heard anyone going into raptures about BookExpo Canada, the way some exhibitors and attendees can about the U.S. event. In fact, the reverse was true: you’d hear lots of grumbling and dissatisfaction and not a lot of scurrying about on the Reed end to put things right.

Like many of the book industry shifts that are being attributed to the economy, the end of BookExpo Canada is happening now, but it was a long time coming and no one I’ve talked to sound either very surprised or exceedingly disappointed.

Part of this is due the fact that good things are on the horizon: things that make sense in this economy and the culture of the Canadian market. Bookbrunch UK talked to Kim McArthur, “the effervescent founder and President and Publisher of McArthur & Company,” who said she was in favor of an event modeled on the American Booksellers Association’s Winter Institute. Says McArthur:

It was really impressive -- two days of educational seminars for booksellers, with a keynote breakfast with industry leaders (Morgan Entrekin of Grove Atlantic, Bob Miller of Hyperion, Nan Graham of Scribners). Participating publishers of all sizes, from the smallest indie to the largest multinational, had two rounds of ‘speed dating,’ pitching their spring lists to the 500 booksellers in attendance, going from table to table where the booksellers were sitting.

McArthur even feels it may still be possible to organize a Canadian event for this year.

According to Publishers Weekly, Susan Dayus, executive director of the Canadian Booksellers Association, said she still believes “there is a need for a national gathering of booksellers, publishers, authors and others connected to the book industry.”

She said the CBA is looking at the possibility of launching a new event this year. She noted that the association had always held its annual general meeting in conjunction with a convention and said the CBA will immediately begin exploring the feasibility of putting some sort of show together, but was uncertain what form it would take.

The Bookbrunch article is here. The PW piece is here.

Rare Books Roadshow

Would you love to get your mitts on a book late rocker Jim Morrison created with his own doomed hands? What about a handwritten manuscript fragment by Marcel Proust? Or maybe you’re sitting on a book that you just know is valuable and, short of chasing down the Antiques Roadshow, you don’t know what to do with it?

If any of these questions makes your heart pitter patter, start making plans to get to the 42nd annual California International Antiquarian Book Fair which gets underway later this month at the Concourse Exhibition Center in San Francisco. With over 240 rare booksellers from around the world converging on the Bay area, this is the largest antiquarian book fair in the United States.

Dealers will be offering rare and antiquarian books, manuscripts and other related materials priced from just a couple of bucks to hundreds of thousands. Collectors will find early printed books and manuscripts, illustrated books, fine bindings, early American and European literature, modern first editions, books for children, maps, autographs, ephemera and antiquarian books on every imaginable subject.

Those with questions about their own treasures can bring their rare books to the fair on Discovery Day, February 15th between 1:30 and 3 pm for a free appraisal. Experts will offer informal appraisals for up to three books. As part of the Discovery Day activities two related sessions are available: “Book Collecting 101” and “What is This Book Worth” should both offer a wealth of information for the new collector.

The California International Antiquarian Book Fair runs from February 13th until the 15th. You can visit the event Web site for full information.

All the King’s Men

The big news in the book world yesterday was the announcement -- long rumored -- that The Washington Post would discontinue the dead-tree version of its long-running book section. From Motoko Rich of The New York Times:

In another sign that literary criticism is losing its profile in newspapers, The Washington Post has decided to shutter the print version of Book World, its Sunday stand-alone book review section, and shift reviews to space inside two other sections of the paper.

On the surface of things, that announcement sounds somewhat scary. But once you get past Rich’s sky-is-falling opening paragraphs, you see that the situation is not quite so dire as it seems. For one thing, Book World will continue to be available in the newspaper’s Web version. For another, it will put in occasional appearances “as a stand-alone print section oriented around special themes like summer reading or children’s books.”

The fact is, book reviews aren’t the only things getting hit in the newspaper business these days: the entire industry is in crisis. The biggest problem: fewer people are reading newspapers. Advertisers know this, and so fewer of them are willing to pony up their currently scarce dollars to put an ad in front of maybe not that many people.

In the death spiral in which the newspaper business currently finds itself, shrinking book review space is the least of the industry’s worries. And, truly? It’s the least of our worries, as well. Newspapers in crisis mean reporters’ jobs in jeopardy and a threat, ultimately, to the way news sections are supplied with their material. And without real journalists digging up real news for real newspapers, we are ultimately going to be in real trouble. Really.

One of the things that just kills me is that the whole loss of book review space was avoidable. Book industry leaders, in their infinite wisdom, decided some time ago that, of all the products in the world that could be sold by advertising, theirs was immune. Newspapers aren’t cutting review space because they don’t like books: they’re cutting it because advertisers aren’t supporting said space. You don’t see broadsheets cutting their entertainment sections, do you? And why? Because movie companies know how to sell their products and keep the review pipeline open at the same time. Here’s the Times again:

As it happens, Book World never garnered much advertising from publishers, who generally spend very little on newspaper ads. Publishers now focus their marketing dollars on cooperative agreements with chain bookstores, which guarantee that certain books will receive prominent display at the front of stores.

So the problem of shrinking review space is solvable: if publishers started advertising their products in newspapers, said papers would happily increase the space devoted to book coverage. That’s just how it works: there is always a predetermined advertising-to-editorial ratio. And everyone goes away happy.

Meanwhile, back in reality, books coverage is really the teensiest problem on the print media’s plate. With readers falling away by the busload, newspaper publishers are busily rethinking everything about their business. People still need news, we know that. But how to get it to them? Television has proven to be a candy floss medium for news delivery. And bloggers can’t function in a vacuum. I mean, truly: imagine Watergate in the era of blogs. Wonderful! Now imagine it without Woodward and Bernstein. You see what I’m saying? Without them, we’re sunk.

So don’t go away sad or even mad. Go away and think about how you’d like news -- real news -- delivered. We need it: that’s clear. What is not yet known is exactly what form it will take. But whatever one it does? I’m betting books coverage will be a part of the package.

Is Publishing Broken?

Though a lot of people have been forecasting doom and gloom for the publishing industry, some of us have remained confident that not all change is bad. As we remarked in our Best Books of 2008 feature back in December:

The sky is falling. And it has been for some time. The past 12 months have produced the sorts of calamities that can start panics. And it seems that, as delighted with the economy as everyone seemed to be 12 and certainly 24 months ago, they are now willing to believe it’s all coming apart. The reality is this: you must have downs. If you did not, how would you even recognize the ups? It’s all physics. There’s change ahead? Sure. But there’s always change. That’s just how we humans roll.

In the new issue of Time Magazine, on sale today, Lev Grossman offers up a sharp assessment of publishing as we find it at the earliest part of the 21st century. As Grossman points out:

A lot of headlines and blogs to the contrary, publishing isn’t dying. But it is evolving, and so radically that we may hardly recognize it when it’s done. Literature interprets the world, but it’s also shaped by that world, and we’re living through one of the greatest economic and technological transformations since -- well, since the early 18th century. The novel won’t stay the same: it has always been exquisitely sensitive to newness, hence the name. It’s about to renew itself again, into something cheaper, wilder, trashier, more democratic and more deliriously fertile than ever.

But what, exactly, does that look like? As Grossman points out, there are many possibilities. It’s enjoyable to look over his shoulder at his crystal ball. While he’s about it, he considers some of the things that aren’t right with the industry:

What’s the Matter with Publishing?

It isn’t the audience. People are still reading. According to a National Endowment for the Arts study released on Jan. 12, literary reading by adults has actually increased 3.5% since 2002, the first such increase in 26 years. So that's not the problem. What is?

Grossman’s piece is lengthy, well considered and it’s here.

Making Tracks for Abu Dhabi

It will be interesting to see if the international economic downturn has much impact on the 19th annual Abu Dhabi International Book Fair, to be held this year on March 17th to 22nd.

Dubbed the “Middle East’s fastest growing book fair,” the 2008 event hosted 482 exhibitors from 42 countries. The Gulf News sounds optimistic:

Hundreds of book publishers from around the world are due to take to participate in this year’s Abu Dhabi book fair from March 17 to 22, organizers said.

The 19th edition of the fair is expected to be the largest this year with variety cultural programmes said Mohammed Khalaf Al Mazroui, General Manager of Abu Dhabi Authority for Culture and Heritage (Adach): “The fair is becoming one of the fast growing book fairs in the Middle East and it is becoming more professional and attracts more publishers and intellectuals” he said.

The Web site for the event assures potential visitors that Abu Dhabi is plenty safe and that, should they decided to make the trek, they won’t lack for activities:

Abu Dhabi is fast becoming a beacon of culture in the Middle East, North Africa and Central and Western Asia. Recent developments include a campus of the Sorbonne, a future New York University Campus, branches of Sotheby’s and Christies and a satellite of the New York Film Academy. In addition, plans have been finalised for the Saadiyad Island Cultural District in Abu Dhabi, including the first branch of the Louvre outside of Paris and the world’s largest Guggenheim Museum.

Dangerous Book Recalled

Unlike other books that have been called “dangerous” throughout history, Taunton Press’ 3rd edition of Wiring a House isn’t likely to lead to inflammatory ideas. Still -- and arguably -- fear of fire might be exactly what’s involved in a recent recall of two of the publisher’s books. From CBC:

Taunton Press is recalling about 64,000 copies of Wiring a House, 3rd Edition and Wiring Complete, Expert Advice from Start to Finish because the book includes incorrect information about how to install and repair electrical wiring, the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission said Tuesday.

Taunton Press’ own recall notice -- for both Wiring a House, 3rd Edition, by Rex Cauldwell and Wiring Complete, by Michael Litchfield and Michael McAlister, is here.

In fairness, it should be mentioned that Taunton produces some really fantastic -- and completely not dangerous -- books and magazines. Their main Web site -- complete with prominent links to the recall notice -- is here.

Amazon Gobbles Used Book E-Tailer

On a day when the stock market was bleeding, Amazon announced that it had acquired the Canada-based used book e-tailer, AbeBooks. A press release dated December 1st said that Amazon was announcing:

the completion of its acquisition of AbeBooks. AbeBooks is an online marketplace for books, with over 110 million primarily used, rare and out-of-print books listed for sale by thousands of independent booksellers from around the world. Amazon.com previously announced that it had reached an agreement to acquire AbeBooks on Aug. 1, 2008.

AbeBooks will continue to function as a stand-alone operation based in Victoria, British Columbia. AbeBooks will maintain all its Web sites, including its Canadian Web site. The Web sites will continue to have country-specific content, such as reviews of Canadian-authored books and interviews of Canadian writers.

Which sent me scurrying over there looking for content, as I hadn’t realized they generated any. And it’s there: I found it. But they do an excellent job of keeping it buried.

Not sure what this merger will mean, but it’s nice to hear about growth and acquisitions at a time when a lot of news has been less than good.

In the War on Books, Does the Internet Win?

What has the Internet meant for us as a culture? What havoc has it wreaked on the culture of books? More: in an all out battle -- books vs. the ‘Net -- who wins?

The answer, according to Air America’s Beau Friedlander, writing for The Los Angeles Times, is not as simple as it might at first appear:

Books require a different sort of communion with one’s subject than the Internet. They foster a different sort of memory -- more tactile, more participatory. I know more or less where, folio-wise, Eliot gets nasty about the Jews in his infamous 1933 lecture series “After Strange Gods,” but I always have to read around a bit to find the exact quote, and the time spent softens the bite of his anti-Semitism because the hateful remarks were made amid smart ones. For literary works, books are still, and most likely always will be, indispensable.

But not all nonfiction requires that depth. I asked “Freakonomics” co-author Stephen Dubner how the Internet is changing writing and more generally the way we think.

“The crabbiness,” he says, “that emanates from a certain breed of thinker/writer -- a breed that I generally admire, by the way -- about how the Internet’s cornucopia of information is destroying book culture is based on fear of change more than anything. Most people don't even like to change the part in their hair; asking them to accept a change in the way words are disbursed through culture is a bit much.”

The LA Times piece is lengthy, magnificent and right here.

Bookbrowse Unveils Facelift

Bookbrowse, “your guide to exceptional books,” today unveiled a complete redesign that promises to bring the online publication’s content to readers in a fresher, more effective style.

“Our original site layout was effective,” says Bookbrowse founder and CEO Davina Morgan-Witts, “but over time had begun to look outdated. As we were constantly adding new content and capabilities, the older layout was becoming more difficult and complicated to use. We needed to go back to our core value -- recommending only the best current books and providing all of the information a visitor needs to find the book that’s just right for them -- and rebuild around that user-centric objective.”

Morgan-Witts adds that the 11-year-old site will continue to offer in-depth reviews and the stories behind the books as well as previews of upcoming books, their bank of author bios and interviews as well as advice on starting and running a book club and other book club rich features and the ability to browse and cross reference by more than 70 themes, including by time period and geographical setting.

“Initial feedback has been excellent,” says Morgan-Witts of the redesign. “We set ourselves aggressive targets, and I am proud to say that we have met them.”

The newly redesigned Bookbrowse is here. The current week’s recommendations are here. Information on the enhanced content available to Bookbrowse members is here.

Oprah Goes “Gaga” for E-Book Reader

The book world knows that a nod from Oprah Winfrey can cause sales to rocket and alter careers. But now Amazon boss Jeff Bezos must be wondering if the Oprah-effect will cause a similar sales eruption for electronic readers after the Chicago-based television host waxed enthusiastic about Amazon’s Kindle last Friday. From the Seattle P.I.:

Winfrey went nuts over the device -- stomping her feet, waving her arms and shaking her fists with excitement. She said she received one of Amazon.com’s electronic book readers as a gift over the summer and it changed her life.

Members of the audience each got free Kindles. The women shrieked with joy after unwrapping the devices. The camera cut to one woman who was crying.

Amazon, of course, was delighted. Amazon.com sported an Oprah show preview on its home page Friday. CEO Jeff Bezos was a guest on the show, appearing bewildered at his luck.

He didn’t say much -- but he didn’t have to. Winfrey was sold.

“When I get something this great I have to share it with everybody,” Winfrey said. “For those of you at home, I’m sorry I couldn’t get you all one at home too. ... I’m really not a gadget person at all, but I have fallen in love with this thing.”

The electronic book industry has been collecting itself for success for much of the last decade. A new generation of electronic readers have put slicker, smaller and more easy to use reading devices into the hands of hundreds of thousands of readers over the last year or so. This combined with such a glowing endorsement from the queen of books seems likely to push the electronic book into the stratosphere. It’s possible that Winfrey has opened the floodgates on a brand new day.

A Puddle of Calm for Global Panic

The Frankfurt Book Fair kicked off yesterday with perhaps less than its customary sizzle. As the Guardian’s books blog reports, this year’s Fair is a puddle of “calm amid global panic.”

Hundreds of thousands of people who love books all in the same place - it must be fun, right? Not exactly. Frankfurt Book Fair, which kicked off today, might be buzzy, busy, exhilarating, exhausting – but most people aren't here to muck about. The biggest event of the year for the publishing industry, this is where the deals are made, from foreign rights in an obscure British textbook to the mega-bucks deal for the yet-to-emerge “book of the fair” (which at the London Book Fair in 2007, incidentally, was Aravind Adiga’s Booker-winning The White Tiger).

Part of the reason for the ultra-calm is due the nature of the Frankfurt Fair. Though this is a large and important stop for the international book scene, Frankfurt is known more as a rights fair than anything else: the place where publishers and their agents go to buy and sell international rights to new and already published works. As the Guardian explains:

Although there are lots of authors here (Orhan Pamuk, Karin Slaughter and Gunter Grass, to name a few), this is really a trade event. The German public will descend en masse come the weekend to snaffle new titles from their favourite authors, but for the rest of the week, it's business first.

And of course, the big question on everyone’s mind is this: how will an international financial crisis impact on the book industry? The answer: it already has.

There are fewer exhibitors here than there were last year (7,373 compared to 7,448), and a recent survey of 90 German publishers shows that business was down 3% in Germany over the first nine months of the year.

But publishers here are resolutely optimistic about the fate of books in a recession - one agent said that “books are good in the good times, and great in the bad times”. In the words of Richard Charkin, former Macmillan chief, now Bloomsbury executive director, “banks may crash, derivatives flounder, hedge funds wither, dotcoms rise and fall but somehow or other writers, publishers, booksellers, literary agents, publishing consultants and old bookish friends always manage to congregate for the autumnal bunfight known by the single word, Frankfurt”.

Personally, I’m with Louise Tucker who offers up a thoughtful “Prescription for Thrift” for the Fifth Estate:

I’m not sure that a few sessions with Alain de Botton could do much for our failing banking system but, unlike the economy and the economists, most of us are not beyond bibliotherapy. For a start, compared to a cinema ticket in London, a £7.99 paperback is still a bargain, since, if loved, it provides several hours, or even years in the rereading, of pleasure. Having scoured my shelves at work and at home I came up with three suitable books for this current climate: two practical and one pleasurable.

Tucker hits it perfectly, too, going from necessary generalities to ending on a specific:

My final prescription is for a novel, for my favourite life-affirming, light at the end of a tunnel book: The Shipping News. If Quoyle can survive his various depressions and disasters on the bleak Newfoundland coast then so can we all…

One can almost -- thought not quite -- take that to the bank.

Age-Rating Books for Children: Right or Wrong?

While BBC News today asks if age-rating books books for children is right or wrong, I think a better question might be: useful or not? Do parents really need someone else’s opinion on what reading material is “suitable” for their children? Some publishers in the UK seem to think so because, later this year, a scheme to add an “age band” to books will begin:

Each book will carry a specific marking indicating whether they are suitable for readers aged 5+, 7+, 9+, 11+ and 13+/teen.

Research within the book industry suggests people buying books for children would welcome the guidance.

The mere suggestion of an age writing system for books strikes me as ridiculous and even wrong. I’m not alone in my reaction. Some 750 authors and illustrators have gotten together and formed a group called No to Age Banding. The authors speaking out against age-rating books include Terry Pratchett, Andrew Morton, Anne Fine, JK Rowling, Celia Rees, Neil Gaiman, Roddy Doyle, David Almond, Allan Guthrie, Diana Wynne Jones, Anthony Horowitz and many, many others. The reasons they offer against age banding books are compelling. Here are a few of them:

• Each child is unique, and so is each book. Accurate judgments about age suitability are impossible, and approximate ones are worse than useless.

• Children easily feel stigmatized, and many will put aside books they might love because of the fear of being called babyish. Other children will feel dismayed that books of their “correct” age-group are too challenging, and will be put off reading even more firmly than before.

• Age-banding seeks to help adults choose books for children, and we’re all in favour of that; but it does so by giving them the wrong information. It’s also likely to encourage over-prescriptive or anxious adults to limit a child’s reading in ways that are unnecessary and even damaging.

We agree. If you do to, you can visit the No to Age Banding Web site and add your voice to the growing number already there.

Signing Books Without All the Heavy Lifting

It would be easy to think that top-selling authors are a lot of lazy louts. First, as The Guardian points out, you had JT LeRoy hiring stand-ins for public appearances, then Margaret Atwood cooked up her LongPen so that authors could sign at a distance. Now an anonymous publisher is using Craigslist to hire people to fake signatures. From The Guardian:

One smart publisher seems to have devised a way of easing the pain for the millionaire bestseller writer: they have posted an advert on the listing site, Craigslist, inviting a team of part-time workers to fake the signatures and get paid in cash for the privilege.

The advert says it is looking for 14 people who can do a blitz of false autograph signing on behalf of two unnamed co-authors of a newly released, and equally anonymous, book.

And I love this part, where The Guardian gets down and dirty and does the math:

The advert says the fake signing, to be held in Los Angeles, will run over two days at eight hours a day.

Each signing will take 15 seconds or less, and at that rate the team of 14 could sign up to 53,760 copies.

What’s next? No, never mind. Don’t answer that. The possibilities are endless. And I guess we’ll tell you about it when they come. Meanwhile, here’s The full piece from The Guardian.

“Philistine Blunder” Cry LA Times Editors

Four past book editors of The Los Angeles Times have gotten together to let people know they “are dismayed and troubled at the decision by Sam Zell and his managers to cease publishing the paper’s Sunday Book Review.”

Sonja Bolle, Digby Diehl, Jack Miles and Steve Wasserman only barely contain their venom when they write that “Angelenos in growing number are already choosing to cancel their subscriptions to the Sunday Times. The elimination of the Book Review, a philistine blunder that insults the cultural ambition of the city and the region, will only accelerate this process and further wound the long-term fiscal health of the newspaper.” They call for “readers and writers alike to join with us as we protest this sad and backward step.”

LA Observed runs the letter from the editors in its entirety here and brings news of the “new upscale magazine” being launched in relative editorial secrecy here. While Publishers Weekly offers up a bit of backstory here.

Silence Falls on Publishing News

The two trade publications that represent the book business in the United Kingdom are The Bookseller and Publishing News. I know many of their writers, so it was with alarm that I read this:

PUBLISHING NEWS, THE book trade weekly, is to cease publication. The issue of Friday July 25th will be the last. The news was announced in a statement today (Wednesday, July 15 2008).

The publication, founded in 1979, has been hit by the same problems that have affected all magazines and newspapers, as advertisers have shifted increasing proportions of their spend to online and direct sales. PNL’s founder and Chairman, Fred Newman, commented: “This has been a sad and difficult decision to make, but the nature of the book trade which today offers a multiplicity of ways for publishers to sell books both to booksellers and to consumers has changed dramatically. For the biggest book publishers, the trade press is now only one of many options for the promotion and sale of their titles.”

This is yet another symptom of the global economic downturn and the transfer from print publication to online, with many advertisers joining the migration. It is not all bad news however -- even though this is only keeping a brave face on such terrible news.

Newman stressed that all other activities of PN Ltd are unaffected by the closure of Publishing News. The company will continue to organise the British Book Awards and has recently signed a new two-year contract with its headline sponsor, Galaxy.

Read the full report here, while rival The Bookseller reports here.

Summer Publishing Program Full Steam Ahead

The Summer Publishing Workshops at British Columbia’s Simon Fraser University began on July 2nd and run until August 2nd, offering programs in four areas of publishing: books, magazines, editing and design.

The program began at The Banff Centre in the early 1980s and was shifted and honed in the mid-1990s when it was moved to SFU. The program is well-attended by publishing professionals from around the world who come to learn and to take the pulse of the industry through the carefully monitored and nurtured set of programs. SFU tells us that, this year, “more than 100 faculty, and approximately 450 participants, will come to SFU Vancouver in the downtown core for 38 workshops in books, magazines, editing, and design.”

Participants take part in one and two-week immersion workshops offering hands-on projects, lectures and discussions. Included are Book Publishing Immersion, Book Editing Immersion and the Book Cover Design Intensive. As well, a series of shorter workshops and lectures are offered.

The full slate of programs can be viewed here. As well, the 2008 Symposium on the Book will take place on July 12th. This year’s program features a tight look inside crime and thriller writing:

Six of Canada’s top crime writers join a crime fiction book reviewer, an editor of crime writing, and a mystery bookstore owner to discuss the subgenres of crime writing – thrillers, mysteries, cozies, detectives and true crime – and will also engage the audience with an in-depth look at the position of crime writing in Canada.

Panelists include William Deverell, Anne Emery, Daniel Kalla, Anita Daher, Michael Slade, Margaret Cannon, Dinah Forbes, Walter Sinclair, Mary Jane Maffini (who will moderate the proceedings) and January Magazine editor and co-founder, Linda L. Richards. Registration information can be found here.

BEA Report: Sore Feet and Screaming Shoulders

It may have been guilt from the volley I launched at him earlier but, if so, I’ll take it. January Magazine contributing editor Tony Buchsbaum sends us his first report -- as well as a few more pictures -- from Book Expo America, currently underway at Staple Center in Los Angeles until June 1st.

Buchsbaum is filing his stories from his iPhone, which means he’s getting killer good at texting. Here’s what he had to say:

Dateline -- Los Angeles -- Thousands of book-hungry souls. Tens of thousands of copies of hopeful bestsellers. And thousands who work in an industry created to get you to read. Add a dash of madness -- as well as many a mad dash for the galley-of-the-moment, and that’s BookExpo, three days of heaven for anyone into books. If it’s between two covers, it’s here.

Picture hundreds of titles, mostly due out this fall, each looking for a mind to enter. Picture publishing people working to get people like me interested. With so many people choking the aisles, there’s no stopping to consider whether a book is worth taking. You just take them be hope it’ll be good. You really do have to judge each book by its cover; there’s no time for anything else. By day’s end, you’ve got a few dozen contenders for “a good read,” so there’s work to do.

Feet ready to fall off. Shoulders screaming. Mind reeling. And best of all, there are still two days to go. -- Tony Buchsbaum, reporting from BookExpo America 2008

Book Expo… or Crack?

Tony Buchsbaum, January’s man in is the aisles at BookExpo America, is so overwhelmed with joy at books, books, everywhere he hasn’t been sending many words. Yet. But he’s filed some great photos from his iPhone.

First up, at left, the entrance hall to Staples Center in Los Angeles, where BookExpo America will run until June 1st.

At right is the photo Tony filed as “Heaven, or crack?”

And the last one, at left below: “Definitely crack.”

OK, clearly we’re going to have to get tough with Buchsbaum and tell him to quit partying and quit drooling over books and send us a story.

For instance, he has instructions to file something on the weird-sounding smell-a-vision type books being published by the Big Imagination Group that include “Press-2-Smell technology.” (I’m not making this up.) They’re in booth 5431. (Hurry up, Tony: I hear they’re giving out scratch n’ sniff t-shirts or bookmarks or something.)

Stories are managing to come out of BookExpo… just not from us. And a lot of them are filled with either doom and gloom for the industry (the death of the book thing we’ve been hearing about every few years for the last couple of decades) or triumph against all odds.

First some doom and gloom. This ran in yesterday’s Los Angeles Times under the headline “Troubled book world is going for novel ideas” (Wocka, wocka, wocka):

As Book Expo America, the nation's largest annual book convention, opens today in Los Angeles, innovation -- some would say desperation -- will be the main order of business. More than 2,000 exhibitors from every facet of the publishing world, nearly 1,000 authors and more than 25,000 people will be gathering at the L.A. Convention Center this weekend to discuss the state of an industry that's at a critical crossroads.

Meanwhile, Gayle Feldman, blogging from BEA for The Bookseller wonders if all the empty seats at the panels might mean the convention won’t be back to LA any time soon.

This year, in any event, there is the sense that given the economy, the distance from New York, and the calendar closeness to LIBF, a lot of East coast people and Europeans stayed home. On the other hand, for those from Asia, LA couldn’t be more convenient, and it looks like the Chinese will be here in force.

And nearly a year after the publication of the final Harry Potter book, The New York Times asks if there can be life in the industry after Harry. The answer: not so much. (OK: that doesn’t seem so much like a BEA story, but wait for it: it’s there.)

And another piece from The Los Angeles Times tells us something our man Tony knows for sure: you may think it’s about books, but really? It’s all about the parties.

Go Tony!

Jack London Honored in Geneva

The 22nd annual salon du livre gets underway in Geneva on Wednesday. This year 120,000 visitors are expected during the five day event. Highlights will include celebrations of Egypt, the canton of St. Gallen, Italy’s Aoste Valley and 19th century American author Jack London.

According to 24 Heures: the 2008 fair “has set aside 100 square meters to exhibit documents and photographs of London (1876-1916), reputed to be the most read author in the world, widely translated in multiple languages, including French. Famous for such books as the Call of the Wild, the California native was a self-taught writer who absorbed knowledge equally from the Oakland Public Library and the rough-and-tumble world of miner’s camps in the Klondike and coastal fish boats in the Pacific Ocean.”

24 Heures reports that the Salon international du livre is a culturally important stop on the European tradeshow circuit:

The 22nd Salon international du livre et de la presse bills itself as the biggest cultural gathering of its kind in Switzerland. Targeted primarily at a French- and German-language audience, it features displays by publishers and book stores, as well as magazines and newspapers, such as the Tribune de Genève.

Saving the Book Business from Itself

At Library Journal, librarian and author Barbara Fister asks: “What if you ran your bookstore like a library?” Then seems to startle herself with some of the answers.

Ironically, these days it’s the book business that has an aura of crisis and gloom, while visits to libraries are surging. Over two billion items are checked out annually, and nearly all libraries offer free Internet access along with many of the amenities of a bookstore.

Truth be told, the book business has always had an aura of crisis and gloom. It’s the Eeyore of industries. But lately, it’s become clear that the book industry really does need to be saved: from itself.

Though she has a full understanding of some of the problems currently facing aspects of the publishing industry, she’s the first to admit she’s not sure where all of the answers will come from:

My solutions are a bit fantastical. I’m sure there are things I don’t understand about the large and complex distribution system that underlies bookselling, and we’d have to persuade publishers that libraries are partners rather than semilegitimate piracy schemes. No doubt it’s all more complicated than I imagine, and it wouldn’t happen quickly; the publishing industry adapts to change with all the alacrity of a glacier.

Still, she’s asking the right questions and she sums up the feelings many book lovers have very succinctly:

Still, as a writer I am dismayed when I hear authors scold readers when they do what comes naturally -- share books. As a librarian, I want book publishing to recognize the virtues of our values. As a reader, I want books. Lots of them. Right now.

Fister’s Library Journal piece is here. Earlier this year, I very much enjoyed an essay by this author in Inside Higher Ed on the ethics of social networking. That piece is here. Her newest book, In the Wind (St. Martin’s Minotaur) will be published at the end of this month. Around that time, look for a January Magazine Author Snapshot with Fister right here.

What Reading Crisis?

When confronted with so many books on my review and reading pile I sometimes wonder exactly who is reading these books? Then I see many bookstores closing, supermarket chains pumping out discounted bestsellers, and I worry about literacy. I recently spoke with bestselling author Lee Child, a confirmed bibliophile, about the reading crisis, but he has a much more positive spin on things:

I don’t want to sound like Pollyanna, but I have a vague feeling that reading is going to come back big-time. The thing that took people away from reading is pretty much saturated now--games, the Internet, DVDs, etc. Reading is like a virus that sleeps gently in the soil, undisturbed, and it will come back in a big way, probably with the younger generation using these new reading devices like the Kindle.

This week Business Wire issued a report that seems in part to support Child’s viewpoint based on a Harris Poll they commissioned:

For years, people have been crying about the death of the book. While reading books may be declining, Americans are reading. Just one in ten (9%) say they typically read no books in an average year. About one-quarter (23%) read between 1 and 3 books, while one in five (19%) read between 4 and 6 books and 13 percent typically read between 7 and 10 books. And, over one-third (37%) of Americans say they read more then ten books in an average year.

There are certain groups who are more likely to read more than ten books in an average year. Looking at the generations, almost half (47%) of Matures (those aged 63 and older) say they read more than ten books compared to just one-third (33%) of Baby Boomers (those aged 44-62). Women are also more likely to read more than men – 44 percent of women read more than ten books a year compared to three in ten (29%) men. Candidates may not want to try books to reach their partisans, but they may be a good way to reach out to Independents. Just one-third of Republicans (33%) and Democrats (35%) say they read more than ten books in a year compared to 44 percent of Independents.

However it’s not all good news. The report indicates that readers are buying fewer books, and many cite lack of time in today’s world as the major reason for lack of reading. Even so, the boom and crime and mystery fiction continues:

In looking at the different types of books people read, non-fiction and fiction are almost even (82% and 80% respectively). The largest single genre is mystery, thriller and crime (48% read) followed by history (35%), biographies (31%), religious and spirituality (28%) and literature (27%). Men and women have different tastes in the type of books they read. Women are more likely to read mysteries (57% versus 38%), religious books (32% versus 24%), and, perhaps not a surprise, romance novels (38% versus 3%). Men, on the other hand, are more likely to read history (44% versus 27%), science fiction (34% versus 18%) and political (22% versus 9%).

Miller Aims to End Remainders

The publishing world is atwitter today with news of Robert S. Miller’s defection from Hyperion, the Disney-owned imprint he founded in 1991. He moves to HarperCollin’s new Internet-driven division. According to The Los Angeles Times, Miller will pack his first lunch at the London Book Fair next week and he will work directly underneath HC’s chief executive, Jane Friedman.

The new “publishing studio” division, which has yet to be named, will combine traditional trade book publishing techniques with Internet-based strategies to market and publicize about 25 moderately priced books per year.

But here’s the part that has everyone atwitter:

In a key change, HarperCollins said, authors will be compensated through a “profit-sharing model” rather than a traditional royalty, and the books will be promoted using online publicity, advertising and marketing. The titles will be issued in both physical and digital formats.

The Los Angeles Times piece is here. Galleycat (who is apparently on a first name basis with Miller and thus calls him “Bob”) chimes in here, while The Guardian thinks the sky is falling here.

Authors in the Sky

I recently mentioned SkyArts’ The Book Show hosted by journalist and bibliophile Mariella Frostrup. Thanks to CrimeFicReader I found the best bits of the show now available on a dedicated YouTube page with more than 300 video clips from full-blown interviews as well as authors talking about books that they recommend. There are also insights into publishing as well the editorial side of the business, but beware: this dedicated YouTube page could eat up your entire week.

Particular highlights are Mo Hayder, Jeffery Archer, Nicci French a look at Romance Fiction from Mills & Boon, Patricia Cornwall, Richard Dawkins, Alice Sebold, Ken Follett and Ian McEwan.

The archive is here, but be prepared to lose a day watching these fascinating clips.

Book Obsessed

Barnes & Noble continues its scattershot approach to enriching its retail site with content with a really good new addition, Book Obsessed. These are well-produced and interesting video segments on -- as the name implies -- readers who have heard the call of the book and gone beyond, putting together literary collections that would put the best endowed librarians quite to shame.

B&N calls Book Obsessed “a mini-documentary series that travels the length and breadth of the USA to meet folks whose love for books knows no bounds! From New York to L.A., from Texas to Wisconsin, our intrepid crew tracks down obsessed readers and spends time with them, revealing a fascinating glimpse into their world and the books they love. Each week, you’ll meet a new bibliophile who is truly Book Obsessed.”

Only a few Book Obsessed segments have “aired” thus far, including a very interesting one with friends-of-January Jon and Ruth Jordan of Crimespree magazine. You can see Book Obsessed for yourself here.

Amber for Indies

It still feels like a big, ol’ mostly empty warehouse space where much has been planned but little, thus far has had a chance to happen, but what Amber Square already has in place looks promising.

AmberSquare.com has been created to help indie publishers reach a wider audience and to provide readers with a far greater choice; bringing to their attention books that they miss simply because the dominant industry leaders prefer populating shelf space and column inches with big-name “fast-sellers”. So many wonderful books go unnoticed because the high street book stores and literary media can’t (won’t?) stock or promote them.

Despite the sour sounding grapes, this collective idea -- well done -- could go a long way towards alleviating some of the marketing problems facing independent publishers even if, at a glance, it is currently impossible for the casual visitor to determine if all English-language indies are welcome, or if this is going to be a UK-only affair. Also, though it’s possible that insiders know exactly what’s going on here, it seems to me there are more of us in the world who aren’t part of Amber Square’s inside and we’d like a page that tells us clearly how the site came to be, who is doing it and what their hopes and dreams look like.

More as Amber Square takes shape but, at the moment, what’s in place looks good. You can visit the fledgling Amber Square Web site here.

The Highs and Lows of Publishing

It’s interesting for an author to see the extreme ends of the publishing business. On one hand you have tales of million dollar advances, on the other you have an author who might only sell a handful of copies. But remember always, it is a business, and the publishing business is governed by numbers as well as words.

Firstly in the UK Times, Sathnam Sanghera investigates the business of publishing. In so doing he grounds most author’s aspirations of riches:

Most author advances are small. Newspapers like running stories about mammoth book deals, but the numbers are often exaggerations, designed to make agents look like superheroes and debut authors newsworthy and, besides, such authors are in the minority. The brutal reality is that most first-time novelists rarely get more than £12,000 for a two-book deal. Accounts vary, but it is said that JK Rowling got an advance in the region of £2,000 to £10,000 for her first Harry Potter title. Moreover, according to the Society of Authors, the average author earns less than £7,000 a year.

Even large advances don’t go far. Say you hit the jackpot and get a £100,000 deal, it’s still unlikely you’ll be putting in an order for an Aston Martin V8 Vantage. Typically, the sum is spread over a two-book deal, and given in stages -- a chunk when you sign, another portion as you hand in a manuscript, another when a book is published and so on. This could mean you get the money over several years and £25,000 a year isn’t really comparable to winning the lottery. Especially when 15 per cent will typically go to your agent -- and you’ll be paying tax as well. This is one of the reasons why even very successful authors have other jobs: Philip Larkin was a librarian; Mohsin Hamid, whose brilliant novel, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, is head of consulting at Wolff Olins; and many others are journalists.

It’s getting increasingly difficult to earn out an advance. It’s called “an advance” because it’s a pre-payment of royalties you will earn when the book is sold. But such is the extent of discounting now -- supermarkets can demand up to 65 per cent off the cover price -- that it’s getting harder to earn anything above that sum. If a £20 hardback sells for £8, the author’s royalties will also reduce substantially.

Sanghera goes on to depress us further with some startling numbers proving how tough it is to make a primary living from being an author alone:

Most books disappear without a trace. Last month The Times published statistics from Nielsen Bookscan, which tracks book sales nationwide, showing that, of 200,000 books on sale last year, 190,000 titles sold fewer than 3,500 copies. More devastating still, of 85,933 new books, as many as 58,325 sold an average of just 18 copies. And things aren't much better over the pond: I read recently that, of the 1.2million titles sold in the United States in 2004, only 2 per cent sold more than 5,000 copies.

You can read Sanghera’s Times Online piece here.

However, before you hit the delete button on the masterwork sitting on your hard drive, let’s look at the opposite extreme.

I have been writing recently about the work super bestseller James Patterson, following the announcement that Patterson is now the most borrowed author in the British Library system. Because of this accolade, the British Press have been focusing heavily on the work of Patterson, and The Guardian has produced a lengthy and informative article by Oliver Burkeman called “Inside the Fiction Factory.” This lengthy piece is the prefect antidote to Sanghera’s business section piece on the bottom end of the market. It seems that Patterson’s success is due in part to sheer hard work and determination:

He works on them from around 5:30 am, seven days a week, in longhand. Something about him seems at odds with his surroundings: he is a compulsive worker in a playground of the wealthy, gazing at the sparkling Atlantic Ocean as he concocts sordid storylines about dismembered bodies wrapped in bin-liners. On the wall, there is a photo of Bill Clinton disembarking from Air Force One with a copy of When The Wind Blows, a Patterson novel, tucked under his arm.

Patterson’s books are designed to be addictive in an almost physiological way, cycling rapidly between tension and resolution. Sentences are short. Chapters are rarely more than three pages long, and usually end on cliffhangers. His titles are completely unimaginative, but they dangle the promise that the next fix is imminent. His most famous series, featuring the African-American pathologist Alex Cross, are called Jack and Jill, Cat and Mouse, Roses Are Red, Violets Are Blue, etc; the Women’s Murder Club series, starring the hard-bitten detective Lindsay Boxer, are called 1st To Die, 2nd Chance, 3rd Degree, and so on. (Patterson deals with the challenges of writing in the first person as a black man and a woman mainly by ignoring the matter.) His latest, 7th Heaven, is loaded with crime-fiction cliches: “I stared at the fire-ravaged body of Patty Malone .... Who had committed these brutal murders -- and why?” (But you read all the way to the end, despite yourself.)

Patterson has no pretensions to highbrow literature. “Look, I’m good at parts of this,” he says, in his strong New York accent. “I’m certainly not a world-class stylist. But the storytelling is pretty cool, and the narrative power of the stuff is usually pretty strong.” He writes ceaselessly, he explains, because it doesn’t exhaust him. “These books are entertainments,” he says. “It’s a very different process than if you’re trying to write Moby-Dick, or The Corrections. That’s painful. That’s different from very simple, plot-oriented storytelling. If I was writing serious fiction, I’d want more rest time.”

Patterson is open about using collaborators, though he insists his plot outlines are much more than a rough sketch of an idea. “As one of my agents said: ‘If you gave me this outline, I could write the book.’”

Apart from the sheer hard graft of his craft -- Patterson has an eye on the marketing of his work and holds little pretensions about his writing which has now allowed him to devote his full energies to his authorship:

Patterson finally gave up the day job a decade ago, but the adman’s sensibility remains fundamental to the thriller production system over which he presides. His focus is on building the “James Patterson” brand, and so it makes perfect commercial sense to find a reliable subcontractor for the manufacturing part of the operation -- the writing -- while he concentrates on product design -- the plot outlines -- and on promotion. When his first Alex Cross novel, Along Came A Spider, was published in 1992, Patterson’s publisher declined to fund TV advertisements, so the author produced one himself. (It was one of two Alex Cross books later made into films starring Morgan Freeman.)

Unlike many authors, he relishes the business of marketing. In the UK, Random House has just wooed him away from its rival publisher Headline, and what seems to have impressed Patterson most was that Gail Rebuck, the head of Random House UK, had conducted research showing that only 50 per cent of British thriller readers had heard of him so far: she spoke the language of audience share, in which he is fluent.

You can read The Guardian interview with Patterson here.

Photo credit: James Patterson is given The Thrillermaster Award by Clive Cussler at Thrillerfest 2007 in New York. Photo (c) Ali Karim.

Voting at the Bookstore

Never mind for the moment the battle to be president. The battle to have written the top book by a politician continues. According to The Independent’s John Rentoul, US presidential hopeful Barack Obama is winning:

Both of Obama’s books are surprisingly good. They are not standard-issue American pap of the kind traditionally turned out by politicians seeking high office -- or, more accurately, by their staffs. I’ve read (enough of) John Kerry’s and Hillary’s efforts to be familiar with the genre. To be fair, Al Gore’s contribution from 1992, Earth in the Balance, was a more substantial piece of work -- what was most notable about it was the extent to which it was forgotten by Gore as Vice President.

Rentoul’s engaging Open House piece is here. We previously reported on this matter here.

Guinness World Records Moves to Vancouver

Flamboyant Canadian businessman Jimmy Pattison announced today that he has purchased Guinness World Records from the UK’s HIT Entertainment for “an undisclosed price” according to a story in Report on Business.

Mr. Pattison’s business empire already had a link with Guinness World Records, which first published its annual book of weird and wonderful -- as well as more prosaic achievements in 1955 and has turned it into what it claims is the best-selling copyrighted book ever.

Pattison’s privately held company, The Jim Pattison Group, is the third largest in Canada with sales of over 6.3 billion dollars (CDN) and close to 30,000 employees. In 2006 Pattison himself was listed at # 194 on Forbes’ list of the world’s richest people.

The Report on Business story is here. Forbes chimes in here.

Cuban Book Festival Set to Rock Havana

According to Havana’s Granma International:

“To know how to read is to know how to walk. To know how to write is to know how to climb,” a maxim of the Cuban national hero, José Martí.

This is especially salient as the 17th Grand Book Festival gets set to run February 13th to 24th in Havana.

According to Mirtha González Gutiérrez, president of the Cuban Book Congress, the Havana book fair “offers a space for participation by and interchange between all the entities linked to the world of publishing -- authors, publishers, distributors, booksellers, printers, literary agents, multimedia producers, journalists and other professionals -- making it the best place to meet Cuban readers.”

The annual literary event has become one of the most important cultural draws on the island country’s calendar:

The 2007 fair was visited by more than 5,288,000 people who purchased approximately 5,193,000 copies of books across the island.

Given the preeminence of books and the broad participation, the fair has become the country’s premier cultural event. This year, the Cuban Book Institute has announced that more than 8.5 million copies and more than a thousand new titles will be distributed.

The whole piece is interesting, and it’s here.

Battling Bonds

Former James Bond actors Roger Moore and Sean Connery “will go head to head with rival books this autumn, after Weidenfeld cajoled Connery into telling his story, and Michael O'Mara won the battle for Moore’s memoirs,” according to The Bookseller. Both Weidenfeld and Michael O’Mara are prominent--and competitive--publishers in the United Kingdom.

Michael O’ Mara himself has said his company is “delirious with anticipation,” for Moore’s book. “What I have read so far bubbles with wit and is peopled by a ‘Who’s Who’ of Hollywood.” HarperCollins US echoed their excitement by reportedly plunking down close to $1 million for the US rights to the 80-year-old Moore’s My Word is My Bond, due in stores this October.

For his part, Connery had been playing coy with his autobiography. He was previously signed by HarperCollins but, according to The Bookseller, “pulled out in 2005 after reluctance to discuss certain areas of his private life.” Connery has apparently worked through his shyness and The Bookseller had this to say about his Being a Scot:

Billed as “an intensely personal account”, the book will fuse Connery’s own experiences, including his acting career, with his efforts to track down what Scots have given to the world in art, science and sport. “Sean Connery is not calling it an autobiography but it’s probably the nearest we will get to it,” said Samson. “He’s a legend--one of the absolute, out and out, movie stars.”

Being A Scot will be available August 25th, which means that both books will be out in plenty of time for the holiday gift giving season: the one most booksellers agree is by far their most important.

The Bookseller piece is here.

Obama Wins at the Bookstore

Will the battle for the US presidency be won in a bookstore? Probably not, but in an era when the media likes to make much of the goofiest little things, expect to be hearing more about this: U.S. presidential contender Senator Barack Obama’s books Audacity of Hope and Dreams From My Father have recently been outselling Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton’s Living History by a fair margin.

According to Nielsen BookScan, which tracks about 70 per cent of industry sales, Living History averaged around 1,000 sales a week in December and early January, compared with more than 7,000 a week for Audacity of Hope and more than 2,000 for Dreams From My Father.

The quoted piece is here.

In Defense of Indies

Whether or not the helpful small-town retail clerk is to you a fond memory or a beautiful fiction, an increasing number of people are mad as hell and determined not to take it any more. At least on paper.

And let’s face it: few industries have been as impacted by the growing trend towards mega-retailers as the book business, with many consumers bemoaning the passing of a favorite independent bookstore. Bemoan they may do but, on a certain level, a lot of people aren’t really sure what to do about it.

Larry Portzline has no such hesitations. Portzline is a college instructor and writer from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania and if you’ve ever heard the term “bookstore tourism,” Portzline is probably the reason why.

According to the National Council on Bookstore Tourism -- another one of Portzline’s pet projects -- he launched the movement in 2003 as “a grassroots effort to support locally owned and operated bookshops, many of which have struggled to compete with large bookstore chains and online retailers.”

The movement now has a blog and a Web site but Portzline figured he still had a lot of miles to travel before he reached his destination and cooked up the “Why Indie Bookstores Matter” book tour, an event he himself will undertake starting next April when he launches his 1999 Dodge Caravan -- “the light blue ‘soccer mom mobile’” -- at the open road in search of awareness for long-suffering bookstores everywhere.

The Why Indie Bookstores Matter Tour is a 10-week, cross-country road-trip that will include stops at 200 independent bookstores. “If I can get people to see how important indie bookstores are to their communities,” Portzline said on the tour’s blog a few days ago, “not just as retail establishments but as places of culture and learning and belonging, then maybe those same people will start to see how important other independent businesses are in their hometowns. Maybe they'll remember how great it was to have a locally owned pharmacy, grocery store, hardware store or department store. And maybe they’ll start to see that a community's economic health doesn't come from outside but from within.”

Portzline is currently trying to raise money to finance the trip and promises, while the tour is underway, he’ll update the trip blog while on the road, “post pictures, podcasts and even video. And when the trip is over, I plan to write a book about the experience.”

Looking for a New Publishing Paradigm

I’m imagining a room -- probably a big one -- at Amazon Books HQ occupied by people whose desks have disappeared under envelopes stuffed with hopes and dreams and manuscripts. Motoko Rich of The New York Times explains what’s got me thinking this way:

From today through Nov. 5, contestants from 20 countries can submit unpublished manuscripts of English-language novels to Amazon, which will assign a small group of its top-rated online reviewers to evaluate 5,000-word excerpts and narrow the field to 1,000.

So stop here for a minute and imagine the possible numbers that might be involved here. Thousands. Nay possibly hundreds of thousands. If the volume is anywhere near what I’m imagining, the whole thing might be worth it for the publicity alone. So, OK, again, with the field narrowed down to a manageable thousand:

The full manuscripts of those semi-finalists will be submitted to Publishers Weekly, which will assign reviewers to each. Amazon will post the reviews, along with excerpts, online, where customers can make comments. Using those comments and the magazine’s reviews, Penguin will winnow the field to 100 finalists who will get two readings by Penguin editors. When a final 10 manuscripts are selected, a panel including Elizabeth Gilbert, the author of the current nonfiction paperback best seller “Eat, Pray, Love,” and John Freeman, the president of the National Book Critics Circle, will read and post comments on the novels at Amazon. Readers can then vote on the winner, who will receive a publishing contract and a $25,000 advance from Penguin.

On paper, it all looks pretty good. If you take into account that most publishers seem capable of doing anything to get an inside track on the bestseller list, the potential circus getting ready to erupt here begins to make even more sense. The business of publishing books may be many things, but it’s seldom democratic. If this scheme is successful, that might begin to change. And the apple cart won't just be upset, it will be totally pissed.

With the apple carts neatly stacked to the side, Borders isn’t sitting around letting their arch rivals have all the fun. They’ve put together their own publishing party, though the advance is smaller and there’s a sexy, spacy cyber component via Gather:

Separately, Borders Group, the bookstore chain, is teaming with Gather.com, the social networking site, and Court TV to solicit unpublished manuscripts from mystery or crime writers. A panel of judges that includes the writers Harlan Coben and Sandra Brown will crown the winner from a pool of finalists selected by voters on Gather.com. The winner will receive a $5,000 advance and will be published by Borders itself.

The future of publishing looks democratic. We won’t know for a while if that’s a good thing or not.

The full piece is here.

Reincarnationist Heads for Second Life

Imagine the book tour of the future. Travel has gotten to be expensive and difficult. Security at airports makes flying unpleasant and cutbacks at airlines make food even worse than that. Here in the future, even if an author did want to tour, hardly anyone would show up. Between their jobs, their families and their social networks, no one has time to actually attend author events in person.

Those things being the case, instead of packing a suitcase, that futuristic author might spend some time getting an avatar ready. She might then send the avatar into a virtual performance space where she could read from her book in front of many -- perhaps hundreds -- of other people’s avatars, accomplishing in a single evening what would have taken a great deal of travel and too many airline lunches and all without ever taking off her pyjamas.

For M.J. Rose, hot on the trail of promoting her new novel The Reincarnationist, the future is now and it looks... experimental. On Tuesday at 5 pm EST, a reading event for The Reincarnationist will take place in the ether at Second Life. An avatar of the actor who reads the audio version of the book will do a reading, after which Rose’s avatar will hold court, taking questions from an audience of avatars.

“I’m really looking forward to the event because it’ll be an interesting experiment. There are nine million Second Life members, so just announcing the event will go far in getting more people aware of the book. Plus it’s exciting. People are spending a lot of time online and this gives me an opportunity to reach them in a fun environment.”

With a background in advertising, Rose is no stranger to innovative marketing techniques, something visitors to her book marketing-themed blog, Buzz, Balls and Hype, rediscover every day and that the publishing industry at large has been taking notes on for the last decade.

“A little more than seven years ago everyone thought I was crazy when I did what Salon called the first virtual book party on line. Since then I’ve been committed to trying everything new to see what works and what doesn’t when it comes to book promotion.”

If a recent spate of media mentions are any indication, Rose’s blend of attention to old and new media is working. Rose says that the “SecondLife event is kicking off stage two of the promotion [for The Reincarnationist]. The book has been out for three weeks and the publisher just went back to press for a second printing and stores are reordering. I’ve done about 12 days of the book tour with about five or six more real life events left plus a 40-50 blog tour that kicks off the first week of October.”

Rose says she’s as aware as anyone of how competitive her field has become. “People don't buy a book they haven’t heard of. The marketplace is very crowded these days and I know too much about how hard it is to compete and what it takes.”

Galley Kitty Moves On

Since 2005, Sarah Weinman’s idiosyncratic voice has reverberated through Galley Cat, the self-proclaimed “first word on the book publishing industry.”

Last Wednesday, Weinman announced that she was leaving the galley to editor Ron Hogan in order to pursue other interests:

In other words: after two years, thousands of posts, scores of parties and readership that's more than quadrupled since Ron and I took over GalleyCat in October 2005, it's time to see what's out there beyond the publishing industry's idiosyncratic, mercurial and fascinating borders.

Weinman, who is a January Magazine contributing editor, will continue to helm her own blog, contribute columns to The Los Angeles Times and The Baltimore Sun and plans to “spend more time on neglected matters: fiction-writing, my own crime fiction-centric site, or making some use of that forensic science degree after all.”

Good luck, Sarah! We’ll be watching you.

Turning Over a New Leaf

Unless you’re George W. Bush, it’s pretty much impossible these days to ignore warnings about the progress of global warming, the imminent demise of the polar bears, and the impact of population increases on the earth’s finite resources. But have you ever thought about how much environmental damage you’re doing, simply by reading books?

Eco-Libris has. And as penance, Eco-Libris -- a service of California-based Redwood Visions Consulting LLC (which apparently strives “to bring high-level Internet business expertise to the world of green and sustainable businesses”) -- wants you to help subsidize the restoration of far-off forest lands. As its Web site explains:

Hey, we know you love books. Who doesn’t? But what about all the trees that are used to produce the paper for these books? About 20 million trees are being cut down EVERY YEAR to produce the books sold in the U.S. alone. What can you do about it? Well, here’s a suggestion: stop reading .. NO, NO. just kiddin’.

A better solution would be to start planting trees for all the books you read. To let you do just that, we thought up Eco-Libris, a means to balance out the paper in your books by planting trees. To maximize your impact, the trees will be planted in developing countries, benefiting both the environment and local communities.

For every book you balance out, we will send you an Eco-Libris sticker to put on your book cover, displaying your commitment to sustainability and perhaps even inspiring others to become more responsible about their use of natural resources (in case you were wondering -- the sticker is made of recycled paper with non-toxic ink ... oh, and the thank you note too, and yeah, even the envelope).

That sounds downright admirable, even if it does cause you to sweat a bit as you walk through the aisles of bookstores, imagining all the forests that have been toppled and pulped for your reading entertainment. Such guilt might actually make you pay the $1 per book per tree that Eco-Libris charges for every sapling it sticks in the ground on your behalf.

But isn’t it a bit off, and seemingly counterproductive that, at the same time as Eco-Libris (which, by the way, is said to translate from the Latin as “from the books”) is encouraging you to fund the planting of trees, it is willing to send you a paper thank-you note in an envelope? Couldn’t that recycled stock have been better used in, say, the printing of more books for you to enjoy?

More information about Eco-Libris’ project is available here.

Book Business Booming in the Ukraine

The May 14th edition of BusinessWeek reports that “Bertelsmann is making a bundle off Old Media in former Soviet bloc countries.”

Optimism about the printed word is pretty rare these days. In fast-modernizing Ukraine, though, Bertelsmann is enjoying dot-com-like expansion for its book club, a category that's a slow- or no-growth proposition in the U.S. and Western Europe. Family Leisure moved 12 million books last year -- everything from cookbooks to local potboilers to Stephen King thrillers -- while sales grew 55%, to $50 million. Today, Bertelsmann is Ukraine’s biggest bookseller, with 12% of the market. And the operation enjoys profit margins that are triple the 4% global average for similar Bertelsmann units, which include the Book-of-the-Month Club and Literary Guild in the U.S.

The story is online here.

Swiss Book Fair Opens Today

The International Geneva Book and Press Fair opens to the public today and will run until May 6th at the Palexpo Exhibition Centre. In its 21st year, the 2007 event will host approximately 500 international exhibitors with a spotlight on Russia; an exhibition of the work of Fernand Léger and, for the first time ever at the fair, a Japanese Manga festival.

For those who read French and German, the official Web site is here. Visitor information in English is here and a very interesting English language article on the fair is here.

“Book Empowers”

The International Kuala Lumpur Book Fair is ongoing until May 10th in Malaysia. The theme of the 2007 event -- the 26th year of the fair -- is “Book Empowers.” Entrance to the event, which takes place at the Putra World Trade Centre, is free.

The Virtual Koontz

I got rather excited when I “met” with Dean Koontz at the London Book Fair via Margaret Atwood’s LongPen device. Meeting Koontz via the Internet and getting a book signed by him was a real thrill, coupled with actually talking to him about his work. I wrote about the experience a few days ago at The Rap Sheet.

It turns out that Koontz has a fear of flying. Due to this phobia, and his prolific output, he has really taken Internet communication to a new level. He recently appeared at a reading at SecondLife. Rather, Koontz himself did not appear, but his avatar showed up in his place.

“I wanted to thank all of you who attended,” Koontz said after the event, “in the book shop or at one of the affiliated sites -- and to also thank you for posing some interesting, provocative and some downright funny questions. I hope you continue to enjoy my work, and I look forward to the publication of The Good Guy in late May. Thanks again for helping me enjoy my Second Life.”

There are more details about Koontz’s avatar here and here.

With more than 240 million copies of his work in print, encompassing 73 novels, I wonder if his avatar will start writing at anytime soon ...

You can read more about my adventures at the 2007 London Book Fair here. A London Book Fair slide show is here and video footage is here and here. And GalleyCat’s take on the whole LBF thing can be read here.

It’s All In the Robe

As almost anyone connected in the publishing industry will tell you, a lot of books are produced every year. No one agrees precisely on numbers, but they don’t argue about the fact that it’s scads. Scads and scads of books. It makes it difficult, when starting out, for a writer to get their head above the pack. Ask anyone: it’s a competitive business.

Or, rather, ask almost anyone. For Pope Benedict XVI, the road to bestseller status seems to have come with the robes. His book, Jesus of Nazareth, was a huge seller in Europe before it ever rolled out of Rizolli’s warehouses.

According to the Zenit News Agency, on Jesus of Nazareth’s European publication date -- April 16th, also the Pontiff’s 80th birthday -- the book sold 50,000 copies in Italy. Now, granted, the Pope is bound to have an especially big following in that part of the world, but Rizzoli has brought the first printing to 420,000 copies.

And don’t let the snappy title fool you: Jesus of Nazareth is no Da Vinci Code-style thrillerish romp. According to the AP:

He criticizes lifestyles of the wealthy, citing “victims of drugs, of human trafficking, of sexual tourism, people destroyed on the inside, who are empty despite the abundance of their material goods.”

Rich countries continue to do harm to the Third World by giving aid that is purely technical in nature, he says. “This aid has set apart religious, moral and social structures that existed and introduced their technical mentality in the void,” he writes.

In another chapter, however, Benedict sharply criticizes Marxism, saying it excluded God from life.

English language editions of Jesus of Nazareth will be available from Doubleday in North America and Bloomsbury in the UK, both on May 15th.

Orion Publishing and the LBF

Orion Publishing -- one of Britain’s biggest publishing houses -- seems to be in the press a great deal lately. This is probably due, at least in part, to the London Book Fair which kicks off at Earls Court next week. Firstly, we heard that Orion senior executive and publisher Jane Wood was leaving the company to join the young turks at Quercus Publishing. The Guardian reports today:

This start-up independent [Quercus], backed by publishing colossus Anthony Cheetham, continues to attract some of the most talented editors from the conglomerates. The latest recruit is Jane Wood, Orion's fiction editor-in-chief, who will join former Hutchinson publisher Sue Freestone, and Jon Riley, who made his name editing the likes of Kazuo Ishiguro, Peter Carey and Andrew O'Hagan at Faber.

While over at The Times today, Malcom Edwards, another Orion senior executive and publisher, is attempting to cut down the classics. From the Times piece:

To howls of indignation from literary purists, a leading publishing house is slimming down some of the world’s greatest novels.

Tolstoy, Dickens and Thackeray would not have agreed with the view that 40 per cent of Anna Karenina, David Copperfield and Vanity Fair are mere “padding”, but Orion Books believes that modern readers will welcome the shorter versions.

The first six Compact Editions, billed as great reads “in half the time”, will go on sale next month, with plans for 50 to 100 more to follow.

Malcolm Edwards, publisher of Orion Group, said that the idea had developed from a game of “humiliation”, in which office staff confessed to the most embarrassing gaps in their reading. He admitted that he had never read Middlemarch and had tried but failed to get through Moby Dick several times, while a colleague owned up to skipping Vanity Fair.

What was more, he said: “We realised that life is too short to read all the books you want to and we never were going to read these ones.”

Research confirmed that “many regular readers think of the classics as long, slow and, to be frank, boring. You’re not supposed to say this but I think that one of the reasons Jane Austen always does so well in reader polls is that her books aren’t that long”.

Hmmmmm call me a purist, but this idea is perplexing.

Anyway, anyone who is anyone in publishing will be in London this week, and I’m looking forward to meeting my colleagues at the London Book Fair returning back to Olympia.

I’ll leave the last word to Joel Ricketts of The Guardian and The Bookseller:

Predicting the “big book” of the London Book Fair used to be tricky: would it be a breakthrough piece of science writing, a set of rediscovered war diaries, or a stunning literary debut? These days it's much easier: simply name a celebrity who hasn't yet written an autobiography. In 2006 the jaw-dropping pre-fair publishing deal was for Take That singer Gary Barlow, and in 2007 it is for Dawn French -- at more than double the price. The bolshy comedienne will be paid a sum close to £2m for her life story by Century, the Random House imprint which brought us the record-shattering book by another comedian, Peter Kay. The theory is solid enough: French is a national treasure, who has won generations of admirers with The Comic Strip, French and Saunders and The Vicar of Dibley. She generates the feelgood factor, and her marriage to Lenny Henry adds the requisite personal interest. Yet does she inspire Kay’s kind of fervent fans, men and women of all ages, who helped him sell out a 180-night stadium tour? There's no question that she’ll be in the Christmas 2008 top 10, but will she shift the books needed to recoup that £2m? Of course, none of these questions will trouble the thousands of international publishers descending on London for the book fair this weekend.

The Publisher Hits Back

I rather enjoyed Stephen Page’s recent comments in The Guardian about what role publishers fill in the changing world of books. Page is the publisher and CEO of Faber & Faber, an independent house in the UK, and president of the Publishers Association, so naturally he has some bias. Yet I must admit that most of his comments ring true to me. He begins:

In February 1934, Geoffrey Faber, founder of Faber & Faber, gave a lecture to the Oxford University English Club entitled “Are publishers any use?” It may come as no surprise to hear that he felt they were, despite “the modern view of a publisher as ... less an arbiter of taste than a parasitic middle-man”.

This came to mind when, at last year’s Frankfurt Book Fair, I read an article in the Bookseller by an agent who suggested that, in the digital age, writers would no longer need publishers. They would simply post their work online with various retailers and offer their books as downloads or through print on demand. For this they would receive full value for their work, minus a (rather surprising, I thought) 20 per cent commission to the agent. He didn’t go into what the agent might do to earn 20 per cent, but he was very clear that publishers were unlikely to add value to this process.

So I am prompted to ask again: are publishers any use? What reasons do they have to exist? What will they do in the future? And, crucially, has the book entered the last phase of its physical life?

I want to begin where our industry begins: with writers. The world emerging at the start of the 21st century is full of threat to those who create. The desire to commodify all art as some form of entertainment, and the growth of a monoculture based around mass-market tastes and distribution, make many writers feel precarious. In the United Kingdom, the declining price of books is resulting in lower royalties and less range in bookshops. No wonder this prompts writers to wonder about a different model where they are more their own masters, receive fuller recognition for their work and feel less brutalised by the experience. The digital world is presented in such a utopian fashion by its evangelists that it seems to provide an alternative model. While none of us knows exactly how this future will evolve, I believe writers will be best served by continued partnership with publishers, though publishers will have to adapt, too.

Publishers are a bridge between the market and writers. While providing an expert route to creating economic value in the work (i.e., the author’s work is rewarded), they can also act as a sustaining and supporting partner.

Page concludes his piece by talking about what the future might hold for publishing:

Publishers are not book manufacturers, they are about creating businesses from reading. There will be a revolution in reading around digital technology: there already is in education and academia. But I do not believe that the much-heralded disappearance of the book will happen soon. The history of technology simply doesn’t work like that. We will have roll-up books, books on Palm organisers and iPods, mobile phones and PCs. But that is no reason to think that the parallel technology of books on paper will not continue. Also, new technology often reawakens old technology--think of the new audience for radio that has been created by the Internet.

You can read the full article here.

Another Random Purchase

A 90 per cent chunk of Virgin Books has been acquired by Random House UK. According to Booktrade.Info, the deal “gives the company worldwide use of the Virgin brand in the field of book, audio and digital publishing.”

Not strictly part of the Random/Virgin deal, but announced at the same time, Virgin founder, Sir Richard Branson, will pen five new books for the new Random imprint. According to The Independent, Branson will receive over one million £ for his literary stylings:

The 56-year-old entrepreneur, who published an autobiography called Losing My Virginity in 1999 and a business book, Screw It, Let’s Do It, last year, is to deliver the new books over the next five years. Work is under way on a couple of the books. Sir Richard, who is dyslexic, will receive royalties on top of the seven-figure advance.