Category: publishing

“With Congress joining Microsoft and New York’s sharp-shooting attorney general in the war against spam, e-mail marketers have pulled out the heavy artillery to get their messages across: Poetry. Their cryptic e-teases appear in subject lines and, more frequently, in auto-preview panes that allow a peek at the body of an e-mail without actually opening it.”

A shortage of librarians is looming for American libraries. So first lady Laura Bush, a former librarian, is championing a program to recruit and train new librarians. “The first lady’s stamp is all over a federal grant program to recruit a new generation of librarians, largely through scholarships in library and information science. In late October, the federal Institute of Museum and Library Services, which is implementing the program, announced its first grants, totaling almost $10 million. The White House is asking for $20 million in its fiscal 2004 omnibus spending bill now before Congress.”

It’s been a year since Poetry magazine was told it had received $100 million in a bequest. “Staffers have a lot of general ideas on how to use the grant, including reaching out to the business community, but nothing specific has been decided. The foundation expects soon to hire a president who can organize and implement what board president Deborah Cummins calls a strategic plan. “We can’t do anything until we have a strategic plan,” she says. “We’ve never been in this position before — the ones giving out the money. We’ve always been on the other side of the desk, writing grant applications.”

What were the great books of 2003? Guardian and Observer critics and celebrities make their picks.

“A new generation of writers may have emerged in Germany over the past decade, but this renaissance in story-telling has gone largely unnoticed in the English-speaking world. A growing unwillingness on the part of especially large U.S. publishing houses to wager a bet on translated novels means that many of Germany’s promising young authors remain inaccessible, thus enhancing the impression that this country’s literary masters have kept their postwar focus on history and politics.”

Increasingly, libraries are spending more of their budgets on multimedia and less on books. “The good news for movie fans is that their local library looks more and more like a Blockbuster. The ominous news for book fans is the same: As budget-squeezed public libraries rush to buy DVDs for an insatiable public, branches must act more like multimedia centers and less like temples of the printed page.”

Why is Lord of the Rings so popular? An academic study is underway to find out. “Deploying 13 languages on the internet, researchers from universities in 20 countries are asking a series of questions of fans in an attempt to pin down the attractions of fantasy fiction. The questions are targeted exclusively at admirers of JRR Tolkien’s trilogy, including posers like “Where and when is Middle Earth to you?” which would baffle the uninitiated. The study is being publicised in almost every country, from China to Colombia, to search out national variations in response to the books and films.”

Concord, Massachusetts, is everything a small New England town should be, and the Concord Bookshop, an independent bookseller widely regarded as one of the best in the Northeast, is a large presence in the community. But an in-house dispute between the bookshop’s owners and its employees is tearing the store apart, and the whole town, with its sizable population of well-known writers, seems to be getting involved. Eight employees, including the bookshop’s three top managers, have resigned, with one of them saying that “the fragile alchemy that made it such a great place to work [has] died.” But the owners insist that they love the shop as much as anyone, and are only trying to survive in an increasingly difficult era for indie booksellers.

The experiment that transformed Blaenavon into a town of book shops has been a big success. But now, can the locals afford to live there? “A year ago anyone who suggested that the same thing could happen in Blaenavon, valley of the squinting plywood, would have been laughed all the way back down the mountain to the M4. Property in the town was in terrible condition, but cheap as chips. Now much of it is still in terrible condition, but you get far fewer chips to the pound. Local people stand in front of the estate agents, staring at the photographs, their jaws dropping.”

Christopher Paolini is only 20, and he lives in a remote part of Montana. “This time last year, he was just another geeky teen with too much time on his hands. But now, thanks to Eragon, his 500-page rousing adventure story set in his imaginary world, young Christopher is suddenly rich.” The book “is a huge bestseller in America, where it has surged past the Harry Potter books. Almost half a million copies were sold in only two months, a screenplay is in the works and at least a dozen foreign-language editions are on the way.”