Category: publishing

When the fifth Harry Potter book is released in June, it will, of course, be the biggest literary event of the year in the English-speaking world. But how big, exactly, have Harry and his Hogwarts buddies become? “Worldwide, Amazon.com has received more than 875,000 orders for the book… The U.S. publisher of the Potter books, Scholastic, is planning a press run of 8.5 million.” The cross-promotion is rampant, as well. The two big-budget movies “are both now out on video. Harry Potter clothing, backpacks, lunchboxes and video games crowd store shelves. There’s a line of Harry Potter Lego that lets kids build their own Hogwarts Castle. Harry Potter is never out of the public eye.”

That $100 million that Ruth Lilly left to Poetry Magazine has turned out to be about a third less than promised. And the magazine is suing the bank that was managing the money. “Court documents show that when the fund was created, Lilly stock was selling for about $75 a share. By the time the bank unloaded most of it, it was about $48 a share. According to papers filed in Probate Court in Indianapolis, attorneys for the Poetry Foundation said the $102 million ‘is a significant financial loss to Poetry and the other beneficiaries . . . and is a direct and proximate result of the bank’s wrongful conduct’.”

Conservatives may be fond of compaining about the ‘liberal media,’ but increasingly, right-wingers are becoming the most audible media voices. Books written by right-wing pundits to repudiate the liberal worldview are flying off shelves, and the Book-of-the-Month Club recently announced plans to launch a conservative-themed series. Pundits like Ann Coulter and Michael Savage are nothing new to American politics, of course, but their embrace by a traditionally wary New York publishing industry is a very recent development.

What’s happened to the physical quality of books? “Setting aside magnificent art books and the sometimes quite extraordinary over-production of commercial ‘jackets’, the heft, boards, paper and design of a typical new novel or biography are decent and serviceable, certainly, but beautiful – no. Why should this be? Is it merely economics? A lack of aesthetic excellence is often blamed upon this quite nebulous excuse and on the declining standards of the book-buying public, which leave publishers under no obligation to make their books any better than they are.”

Languages are disappearing at an alarming rate. “According to new measurements, human languages face a greater threat of extinction than birds or mammals. Previously, the life of a language was measured rather arbitrarily by counting the people speaking it. But William Sutherland, a British ecologist, applied the standards of species classification to the 6,809 living tongues in the world to demonstrate what probably comes as little surprise to linguists: There are more extinct languages than species and more languages on the brink of vanishing.”

Newspapers are devoting less space to book reviews. “But one review venue is going strong and getting more attention of late: Amazon.com. Its customer-written reviews – some signed, some anonymous – are linked to book titles on Amazon’s website. Anyone can write one (sorry, you don’t get paid) and get it posted, and the opportunity has created a small cadre of people who have written hundreds – in some cases, even thousands – of reviews.” Amazon reviews are getting more and more attention from publishers and authors because they influence sales.

Japan has a proud literary tradition – it has one of the highest literacy rates in the world. But reading seems to be in a sharp decline. “Once upon a time, one could look into a Japanese train and expect to see people doing one of two things: either sleeping or reading. But today one sees commuters who are preoccupied with portable electronic games, digital assistants and cell phones which enable them to send e-mail and surf the Net.”

Is reading an activity adults grow out of? Really? Alex Good wonders “how did a habit of mind (not to mention a form of artistic expression) traditionally associated with maturity and intellectual depth get turned into an essentially juvenile activity? I never would have thought, as a young man, that a love of literature would be something I would grow out of. Was I wrong?”

You might think, the way we lionize the latest young writer that only the young can write a compelling book. “Older people aren’t newcomers to literature. But older characters have tended to spend their time recalling their youths or coming to terms with their mortality. Now we are seeing the rise of books about sexto-, septo- and octogenarians who are seizing the here and now.”