Category: publishing

So Oprah thought retreating to the classics would rid her book club of controversy? “John Steinbeck’s selection by Oprah is likely to confirm the suspicions of those critics who look down their noses at him as a simplistic writer not worthy of inclusion in the American pantheon. For starters, if East of Eden is a classic, it’s a disputed one. A handful of Steinbeck partisans defend it as one of Steinbeck’s great books, to be placed alongside works like Of Mice and Men and The Grapes of Wrath. Others argue that it’s flawed but still worthwhile, even a masterpiece. But an equally large—if not larger—group thinks that hardly anything good can be said about it.”

A wealthy California woman “paid £1.25 million for a crumbling English country house and spent a further £10 million converting it into a library and study centre, equipped with all her beautiful, arcane books. Chawton House, Hampshire, once owned by Jane Austen’s brother and set in 275 acres, is about to open to the public after 11 years of toil, sweat and village politics.”

Penguin is flexing its muscles to get itself more prominence in bookstores. “If a store commits to stocking a ‘good amount’ of Penguin titles and agrees to ten displays per year ‘in prime selling space,’ it receives an extra 1% discount on all titles published within the last year. Stores have to make a three-year commitment and must agree to promote both adult and children’s titles. To some small publishers, the move, coming from the country’s second-largest publisher, seems like yet another sales obstacle on a road already scattered with them. ‘The net effect is going to be less exposure for small houses’.”

“In the 53 years since his death George Orwell has become a secular saint, acclaimed by the political left and right and many in between, revered as a seer and truth-teller, honored for his moral courage, his razor-sharp intellect and his diamond-hard prose. Somewhere along the way, however, amid all of the hero worship, the real man – the idiosyncratic, squeaky-voiced, tubercular Englishman who dressed like a pauper, rolled his own cigarettes, chased after women and practiced a wobbly but sincere brand of socialism – seems to have gotten lost, and perhaps the real writer has as well. Orwell has suffered the famous author’s ultimate fate: He is revered and invoked more than he is read.”

Many libraries say they’ll give up federal funding rather than install content filters on their computers, as the US Supreme Court ruled earlier this week. “We just don’t feel we as librarians need to be in the position of telling people what they should read, see or hear. When you put filters on computers, that’s what you’re doing.”

The US Supreme Court has ruled that Congress can force public libraries to install and use porn filters on library computers. “Congress passed the law, the Children’s Internet Protection Act, in 2000, but it did not take effect pending the legal challenge by public libraries and civil liberties groups, which argued that any filter also inadvertently blocks access to other, noncontroversial sites, as some studies have shown. But in a 6-3 ruling, the court said the law did not violate the First Amendment guaranteeing free speech because libraries will have the capability to disable the filters for any adult patron who may ask.”

Oprah’s back with a book club – this time with classic literature…a little Steinbeck to start. “So what could be wrong with this? Thousands of readers will come to know a good book they might otherwise not have read. And, of course, ‘East of Eden,’ a best seller in its day, will come out of the experience no worse for wear. Maybe nothing is wrong with this. Maybe taking shots at Oprah for “inviting” Steinbeck to her talk show will, in the end, be exposed as just grumpy elitism. Or maybe something about ‘East of Eden,’ repackaged in an eye-catching Oprah Edition for the occasion, is in danger of being quietly lost in what could transpire in coming shows.”

J.K. Rowling’s books have changed the world. And how many books can you say that about? They’re “altering our literary landscape. With more than 200 million copies in print worldwide, the books have been translated into 55 languages and are available in 200 countries. The literary influence is global.”

Harry Potter sells 5 million copies on its first day. “That is nearly twice as many as the estimated sales in 12 months of last year’s best-selling novel in hardcover, “The Summons,” by John Grisham.” The book even outsold the weekend’s blockbuster movie. “The five million copies sold, at retail prices from $17 to $30, surpassed the first weekend’s box office for the latest blockbuster movie, ‘Hulk,’ which sold $62.6 million in tickets in its three-day opening weekend.”

The Harry Potter books are deserving of attention. But the assault of marketing we’ve seen is way over the top. “When this level of marketing is applied to books or to sport, then it soon becomes impossible to distinguish between artistic considerations and financial ones. Rowling may say that she is secretive out of concern for her readers, but it is hard to separate this question of ‘intellectual property’ from concern for the ‘marketing campaign’. Then there is the squeeze effect on other books, other authors, other types of story, some of whom might merit a fraction of the Potter treatment, but who cannot get any place in that over-Pottered shop window. Small bookshops already look set to lose out because of the huge discounts being offered by major stores. Worse, hype like this sows the seeds of its own creative destruction.”