Category: publishing

Minneapolis civic leaders are considering postponing construction of the new downtown central library. “Though voters approved the $122.5 million project, the library system faces a major problem: A $25 million shortfall in its operating budget over the next 10 years, even before likely cuts in state aid are taken into account. The shortfall is roughly equal to the entire cost of running the system this year.”

Planning out a plot isn’t always a good thing. “I look to find my book as I go along. Plot comes last. I want a conception of my characters that’s deep enough so that they will get me to places where I, as the author, have to live by my wits. That means my characters must keep developing. So long as they stay alive, the plot will take care of itself. Working on a book where the plot is already fully developed is like spending the rest of your life filling holes in rotten teeth when you have no skill as a dentist.”

Joe Queenan’s excited at the prospect of Madonna writing children’s books. “The English Roses will be based on the adventures of a red fox and a young prince. Presumably, at least one will be androgynous; though probably not the fox, as the species already has enough image problems. It sounds quite fascinating. But better still are the brief outlines industry sources have leaked of the other four books in the series…” One working title: “Ricco Has Six Mothers and at Least as Many Fathers”

Newly-hired Random House chief Daniel Menaker is “charged with preserving the glow of literary prestige around the imprint, which published William Faulkner, Robert Penn Warren, Truman Capote and a long shelf of 20th-century American classics. But to do it he also needs to revive its editors’ flagging morale while proving that he can work well reporting to Ms. Centrello and that he can keep important authors.” Is he really up for the job?

The ancient library at Alexandria claimed to own copies of all the books in the world. Now “the directors of the new Alexandria Library, which christened a steel and glass structure with 250,000 books in October, have joined forces with an American artist and software engineers in an ambitious effort to make virtually all of the world’s books available at a mouse click. Much as the ancient library nurtured Archimedes and Euclid, the new Web venture also hopes to connect scholars and students around the world.”

Fire broke out in the new Alexandria Library on Sunday. “No books or Bibliotheca Alexandrina resources were damaged, according to a library spokesman. Bibliotheca Alexandrina was inaugurated in October amid great fanfare. The £150m project aspires to reflect the spirit of the ancient Alexandria library, which was founded around 295BC by Ptolemy.”

Last year was a pretty good one for British publishers. “There are two universal anxieties for British publishers, one shared with their American counterparts, one not: the shared problem is that of an essentially flat book market, with sales that are simply not keeping pace with a growing population. The anguish that is special to British publishers is the extraordinary pressure on margins created by the ever-increasing push for higher discounts, especially by supermarkets that sell books.”

Register a book, leave it someplace, and tell where it is on the internet. Someone else will pick it up, read it and pass it on in the same way. It’s called bookcrossing. “There are close to 100,000 people who have signed up as bookcrossers on the Web site, with nearly 270,000 books registered and more than 20 million hits a month. Once you have registered a title on the site, you print out a BookCrossing label, paste it into the book along with your identity number and release it into the wild. Anybody picking up the book is supposed to register the find on the Web site, post a journal entry commenting on the book and describing the release date and location. All of that information is available on-line for anybody curious enough to browse the site. There are more than 13,000 books sprinkled around Canada waiting to be claimed, read and recycled.”

In Quebec, from 1993 until last summer it was illegal to publish biographies of “persons living or dead without permission from the subject or his or her heirs.” So for seven years there were virtually no biographies published in Quebec. Just before the law’s reapeal, though, a writer got stuck on the horns of the law, and the matter is now in court…