Category: publishing

An experiment in bookselling is a stunning success in Blaenavon as nine new bookstores open and crowds throng to this formerly blighted industrial town. “The new shopkeepers, many standing behind counters for the first time in their lives, struggled to cope. Visitors were rattling the doors of the new bookshops while they were still closed for the official opening. Once the doors opened change ran out within half an hour, paper bags within an hour, the piles of maps showing the new bookshops by mid-afternoon. By evening yawning gaps were opening up on the brand new shelves.”

“Today, Blaenavon relaunches itself as Booktown Blaenavon. Nine new bookshops will open simultaneously, specialising in subjects from cookery to psychic healing, six more shops are in the pipeline, and the Castle Inn has put up a shelf of 50p books. The small town in South Wales launches its greatest experiment since 1787, when three businessmen leased seven square miles of rough, heathery land to build an ironworks equipped with dazzlingly modern steam technology.”

The launch of the new Harry Potter last week broke all publishing records. “To help keep stores supplied, Scholastic announced last Tuesday that it was going back for a third printing of 800,000 copies, which will bring the in-print figure up to 9.3 million copies.”

Amy Tan’s 1989 novel, The Joy Luck Club, “presented a heartwarming picture of Chinese American life that enjoyed wide mainstream acclaim, but that many younger Asians felt was overly romanticized, even ‘whitewashed.’ Now, whether a result of that legacy or the nuisance of persisting stereotypes that insist Asians are quiet, studious and obedient, the bulwark of “immigrant fiction” has burst. A flood of vital, angry, sometimes violent and even sardonic new fiction from young Asian American novelists is being released this year.”

Britain’s poet laureate Andrew Motion last weeke wrote some rap for Prince William’s birthday. What a mistake. “The poet laureate going hip-hop is like Mel C going punk – except without quite so many flying bottles. Even so, within hours of the rap being published, an online petition was launched demanding, with a rather sinister turn of phrase, that Motion ‘be removed’. The factor which will prevent MC Motion being sprayed in 20ft letters across the Buck House gates is not that he attempted the rap, but that it is so toe-curlingly off-the-mark, that instead of putting William – and the royal family – in some sort of modern context, it’s more like a trap door beneath William on the gallows of cool, with Motion being forced to yank the lever.”

“Of all the elements of Canadian culture, literature may be the most definitive. Canadians are voracious readers of their own writers – from the founding ‘CanLit’ boom featuring Margaret Atwood and Mordecai Richler to, more recently, Barbara Gowdy, Rohinton Mistry and Yann Martel – and Canadian writing tops bestseller lists and wins awards internationally. How is the next generation carrying on this legacy and how is their work affected by such factors as Canada’s racial diversity, media saturation and changing values?”

The American Library Association has become embroiled in a controversy over small independent libraries in Cuba. “Small lending libraries run out of people’s homes, they circulate materials that the librarians say are banned by the government. To some members, the [American Library] association has been ignoring the repression of their colleagues and the cause of intellectual freedom; to others, a small group has been trying to hijack the organization to pursue an anti-Castro agenda.”

Last year two 20-somethings decided to sell books on the streets of New Orleans. But the city said they needed a permit. But it wasn’t possible to get a permit. “It turned out New Orleans had permits for street vendors selling food, flowers, razor blades, shoelaces, candles, and pencils—but not books. And anything that wasn’t explicitly permitted was forbidden.” So the pair fought the ban and ended up in the state Supreme Court – where they won…

A new comprehensive study on the state of Canadian publishing reports that there are more Canadian books being published and demand for them is increasing…

Hillary Clinton and JK Rowling are suing publications for breaking embargoes on their books. But should a publisher be able to sue a newspaper for reporting what’s in a book? “Clinton and Rowling may honestly believe the press violated their copyrights by quoting from and discussing the contents of their books prior to the official pub date. But neither author has much of a legal case, and I’m sure their lawyers would confess over drinks that the noise and litigation is mostly theater.”