NewsTrust - Books - Most Recent Stories: News (Mainstream)

Publishing: The Revolutionary Future

Mon, 01 Mar 2010 00:00:00 -0800

The New York Review of Books - By Jason Epstein - Mar. 01 (Special Report) - The transition within the book publishing industry from physical inventory stored in a warehouse and trucked to retailers to digital files stored in cyberspace and delivered almost anywhere on earth as quickly and cheaply as e-mail is now underway and irreversible. This historic shift will radically transform worldwide book publishing, the cultures it affects and on which it depends. Meanwhile, for quite different reasons, the genteel book business that I joined more than a half-century ago is already on edge, suffering from a gambler's unbreakable addiction to risky, seasonal best sellers, many of which don't recoup their costs, and the simultaneous deterioration of backlist, the vital annuity on which book publishers had in better days relied for year-to-year stability through bad times and good. The crisis of confidence reflects these intersecting shocks, an overspecialized marketplace dominated by high-risk ephemera and a technological shift orders of magnitude greater than the momentous evolution from monkish scriptoria to movable type launched in Gutenberg's German city of Mainz six centuries ago.

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Math of Publishing Meets the E-Book

Mon, 01 Mar 2010 00:00:00 -0800

New York Times - By Motoko Rich - Mar. 01 (News Report) - E-books are cheaper to produce than print volumes, but consumers may not realize that expenses like overhead and royalties are still in effect, publishers say.

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Decade that didn't leave its name

Sat, 26 Dec 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Washington Post - By Michael S. Rosenwald - Dec. 26 (Special Report) - Jesse Sheidlower, editor at large of the Oxford English Dictionary, cannot escape the question: What should we call this decade? We have the '80s, the '90s, and . . . the "twenty hundreds"? Sheidlower has faced the query, often posed in panicky tones, at cocktail parties, in letters to the editor, and in phone calls to his word-saturated office. The anxiety began in the mid-'90s, then stretched into the early whatchamacallits -- Aughts? -- and has now reached fever pitch as the decade winds to a close.

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Sarah Palin's Going Rogue going great guns at the tills

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0800

The Guardian - By Alison Flood - Nov. 23 (Other) - Former vice-presidential candidate?s memoir racks up 300,000 sales on its first day in shops Sarah Palin's memoir, Going Rogue, has become one of the bestselling non-fiction books in history after it sold 300,000 copies in its first day on sale. Palin's publisher HarperCollins told American press that Going Rogue has proved so popular it has been forced to print an extra 300,000 books after an initial print run of 1.5m, with about 300,000 sold on 17 November – its day of publication – alone. Going Rogue is currently sitting at the top of Amazon.com?s bestseller list, ahead of Stephenie Meyer, Dan Brown and Stephen King. Palin's first-day sales are behind Bill Clinton?s, whose 2004 memoir My Life sold 400,000 in its first 24 hours, but ahead of Hillary Clinton's, whose autobiography Living History broke records when it was published in 2003, selling 200,000 copies on publication day. The figures are nonetheless a long way behind fiction sales

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CongressDaily - Atonement

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

National Journal - By George C. Wilson - Oct. 26 (News Report) - A conscience-stricken member of the House Armed Services Committee is writing a book called "My Daddy's Not Dead Yet" in hopes it will atone for what he now considers his sinful vote to empower former President George W. Bush to invade Iraq in 2003

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Is the Google Books Settlement Evil?

Sat, 29 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Vanity Fair - By Jennifer Massoni - Aug. 29 (Special Report) - “I think very few authors have any real idea what to do,” says novelist (and former lawyer) Meg Waite Clayton. “I’m resentful that I have to wade through forms to protect my rights. Unless I get a written notice from Random House, I think I’m contractually bound to opt out,” she says. Not so, says Paul Aiken, executive director of the Authors Guild: “Publishers were not cutting a deal that would put their in-print authors in violation of their contracts.” So which is it? For a third opinion, you can ask the settlement administrator, a Minneapolis-based consulting group, at www.googlebooksettlement.com.

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Earliest Wodehouse satires found

Sun, 26 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700

The Guardian - By Vanessa Thorpe - Jul. 26 (News Report) - The discovery of four satirical "playlets" by PG Wodehouse, seen by the public for the first time in 100 years this weekend, prove that the humorist - who is often viewed as apolitical - had a strong interest in public affairs from his youth. Wodehouse is best known as the creator of the all-knowing Jeeves and his egregious boss, Bertie Wooster. However, the four sketches, written between 1904 and 1907 - and complete with lampooning songs - show he was closely engaged with British politics and happy to function somewhat as the Have I Got News For You of his day.

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'Big Brother' move for Kindle users

Sat, 18 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700

The Guardian - By Bobbie Johnson - Jul. 18 (News Report) - Owners of Amazon?s Kindle electronic book reader have received a nasty surprise, after discovering that copies of books by George Orwell had been deleted from their gadgets without their knowledge. The books - downloaded from Amazon.com by American Kindle users - were remotely deleted after what the US company says was a request by the publisher, MobileReference.com. Amazon refunded the cost of the books, but told affected customers they could no longer read the books and that the titles were "no longer available for purchase". "Although a rarity, publishers can decide to pull their content from the Kindle store," a customer service representative said. In an ironic twist, one of the titles in question was Orwell?s classic dystopian ...

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Some E-Books Are More Equal Than Others

Fri, 17 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New York Times - By David Pogure - Jul. 17 (News Report) - This morning, hundreds of Amazon Kindle owners awoke to discover that books by a certain famous author had mysteriously disappeared from their e-book readers. These were books that they had bought and paid for—thought they owned. But no, apparently the publisher changed its mind about offering an electronic edition, and apparently Amazon, whose business lives and dies by publisher happiness, caved. It electronically deleted all books by this author from people’s Kindles and credited their accounts for the price. This is ugly for all kinds of reasons. Amazon says that this sort of thing is “rare,” but that it can happen at all is unsettling; we’ve been taught to believe that e-books are, you know, just like books, only better. Already, we’ve learned that they’re not really like books, in that once we’re finished reading them, we can’t resell or even donate them. But now we learn that all sales may not even be final. As one of my readers noted, it’s like Barnes & Noble sneaking into our homes in the middle of the night, taking some books that we’ve been reading off our nightstands, and leaving us a check on the coffee table. You want to know the best part? The juicy, plump, dripping irony? The author who was the victim of this Big Brotherish plot was none other than George Orwell. And the books were “1984” and “Animal Farm.

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Business Brisk at Area Libraries

Mon, 02 Feb 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Washington Post - By Annie Gowen - Feb. 02 (Special Report) - Cultural soothsayers once thought libraries would become obsolete in the Internet age. Not so. They have modernized, digitized, virtualized.

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Google & the Future of Books

Wed, 28 Jan 2009 00:00:00 -0800

The New York Review of Books - By Robert Darnton - Jan. 28 (Special Report) - How can we navigate through the information landscape that is only beginning to come into view? The question is more urgent than ever following the recent settlement between Google and the authors and publishers who were suing it for alleged breach of copyright. For the last four years, Google has been digitizing millions of books, including many covered by copyright, from the collections of major research libraries, and making the texts searchable online. The authors and publishers objected that digitizing constituted a violation of their copyrights. After lengthy negotiations, the plaintiffs and Google agreed on a settlement, which will have a profound effect on the way books reach readers for the foreseeable future. What will that future be?

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Library use jumps in Seattle area; economy likely reason

Thu, 15 Jan 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Seattle Times - By Mary Ann Gwinn - Jan. 15 (Special Report) - A library card has become a hot property in the Seattle region — area public libraries are experiencing a surge in circulation. While busy libraries in one of the nation's most literate cities are nothing new, some librarians credit (or blame) the recession for a dramatic upswing in business. The Seattle area's two library systems, the King County Library System (KCLS) and Seattle Public Library (SPL), each loaned more than a million more items in 2008 than in 2007.

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1 in 7 U.S. adults are unable to read this story

Fri, 09 Jan 2009 00:00:00 -0800

USA Today - By Greg Toppo - Jan. 09 (News Report) - A long-awaited federal study finds that an estimated 32 million adults in the USA — about one in seven — are saddled with such low literacy skills that it would be tough for them to read anything more challenging than a children's picture book or to understand a medication's side effects listed on a pill bottle.

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Young Muslims Build a Subculture on an Underground Book

Tue, 23 Dec 2008 00:00:00 -0800

New York Times - By Christopher Maag - Dec. 23 (Special Report) - For many young American Muslims, stigmatized by their peers after the Sept. 11 attacks but repelled by both the Bush administration’s reaction to the attacks and the rigid conservatism of many Muslim leaders, the novel became a blueprint for their lives.

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Michael Crichton, Author of Thrillers, Dies at 66

Wed, 05 Nov 2008 00:00:00 -0800

New York Times - By William Grimes - Nov. 05 (Breaking News) - Michael Crichton, whose technological thrillers like “The Andromeda Strain” and “Jurassic Park” dominated best-seller lists for decades and were translated into Hollywood megahits, died on Tuesday in Los Angeles. He was 66 and lived in Santa Monica, Calif. A statement released by his family gave the cause as cancer, but provided no other details.

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China wields a little red pen

Thu, 31 Jul 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Sydney Morning Herald - By Susan Wyndham - Jul. 31 (News Report) - THE Chinese Government is stopping local production of Australian books that refer to the China-Tibet border, the Dalai Lama and other subjects that "infringe its sovereignty".

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From literacy to digiracy

Fri, 16 May 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Economist - May. 16 (Special Report) - The printed word has fought a rear-guard action against not only computers and television, but also a whole horde of digital upstarts from DVDs and video games to mobile phones, iPods, YouTube and now the mobile internet. Meanwhile, newspapers, magazines and books have faded to shadows of their former selves, as a post-literate generation finds its facts and fun elsewhere.

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Are Americans Hostile to Knowledge?

Thu, 14 Feb 2008 00:00:00 -0800

New York Times - By Patricia Cohen - Feb. 14 (News Report) - Ms. Jacoby, whose book came out on Tuesday, doesn't zero in on a particular technology or emotion, but rather on what she feels is a generalized hostility to knowledge. ... But now, Ms. Jacoby said, something different is happening: anti-intellectualism (the attitude that "too much learning can be a dangerous thing") and anti-rationalism ("the idea that there is no such things as evidence or fact, just opinion") have fused in a particularly insidious way. Not only are citizens ignorant about essential scientific, civic and cultural knowledge, she said, but they also don't think it matters.

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Twilight of the Books

Wed, 19 Dec 2007 00:00:00 -0800

New Yorker - By Caleb Crain - Dec. 19 (Special Report) - More alarming are indications that Americans are losing not just the will to read but even the ability. According to the Department of Education, between 1992 and 2003 the average adult's skill in reading prose slipped one point on a five-hundred-point scale, and the proportion who were proficient--capable of such tasks as "comparing viewpoints in two editorials"--declined from fifteen per cent to thirteen.

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Google and Its Enemies

Tue, 04 Dec 2007 09:13:47 -0800

Weekly Standard - By Jonathan V. Last - Dec. 04 (Special Report) - Initially Google planned to scan the 15 million books in six years. That projection was revised upwards to more than 20 million books, and the New Yorker recently reported that Google is now aiming to scan at least 32 million books, besting the number of titles in the largest bibliographic database, WorldCat. It hopes to finish within ten years. As one Googlehead told the New Yorker's Jeffrey Toobin, "I think of Google Books as our moon shot."

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Amazon: Reinventing the Book

Mon, 19 Nov 2007 08:48:45 -0800

Newsweek - By Steven Levy - Nov. 19 (Special Report) - Books have been very good to Jeff Bezos. When he sought to make his mark in the nascent days of the Web, he chose to open an online store for books, a decision that led to billionaire status for him, dotcom glory for his company and countless hours wasted by authors checking their Amazon sales ratings. But as much as Bezos loves books professionally and personally--he's a big reader, and his wife is a novelist--he also understands that the surge of technology will engulf all media. "Books are the last bastion of analog," he says, in a conference room overlooking the Seattle skyline.

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Two Environmentalists Anger Their Brethren

Tue, 25 Sep 2007 00:00:00 -0700

Wired - By Mark Horowitz - Sep. 25 (Special Report) - Break Through is a fascinating hybrid: part call to arms, part policy paper, part philosophical treatise. (Name another book that gives equal time to Nietzsche, cognitive therapy, and fuel-economy legislation.) It takes aim at some of the environmental movement's biggest lions, including Kennedy and Al Gore. It belittles the Kyoto Protocol; it rips into best- selling social critics like Thomas Frank and Jared Diamond. But it also dismisses free marketeers who believe that unfettered markets alone can solve our carbon-emission woes. "If this book doesn't piss off a whole lot of conservatives and a whole lot of liberals, we've failed," Nordhaus says.

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Move over Tolstoy: detective tales of Tsarist era take Russia by storm

Tue, 18 Sep 2007 06:13:59 -0700

The Guardian - By Luke Harding - Sep. 18 (Special Report) - He has amazing deductive powers, an array of hidden weapons and the lethal reactions of a samurai. What's more Erast Fandorin - special agent, gentleman, polymath and all round lucky bloke - is capable of solving any mystery.

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One in four read no books last year

Wed, 22 Aug 2007 04:45:00 -0700

Associated Press - By Alan Fram - Aug. 22 (News Report) - One in four adults read no books at all in the past year, according to an Associated Press-Ipsos poll released Tuesday. Of those who did read, women and older people were most avid, and religious works and popular fiction were the top choices.

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Nixon Lives!

Thu, 03 May 2007 11:13:16 -0700

Forbes - By James Brady - May. 03 (Special Report) - What do you mean, the media "won't have Nixon to kick around anymore?" The former president died 13 years ago, and here he is, larger than life, portrayed on Broadway in a play hailed by The New York Times, USA Today and Clive Barnes; in a new soon-to-be best seller; in the glossy pages of Vanity Fair; and as the subject of an entire Charlie Rose show in which Charlie didn't do most of the talking. I got my own Nixon fix in the May Vanity Fair, where they excerpted a big chunk of a new book about Nixon and Kissinger that suggests the president wasn't always in control. Instead, Dr. K. and Alexander Haig were dealing with the Russkies, setting policy and fending off late-night phone calls from our ally, Brit PM Ted Heath, during an Arab invasion of Israel, because, in their words, "the President was loaded." The book is Robert Dallek's Nixon and Kissinger: Partners in Power, published by HarperCollins.

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