|
Writers' magazine |
|
|
|
|
|
News stories from the book world 2008You can check older stories in our archive. News archive 2007 Archive 06 Archive 05 Archive 04 Archive 03 Archive 02 Archive 01
Groundbreaking new initiative from BloomsburyBloomsbury has dipped into its reputed £50m ($88.32m) Harry Potter war chest to set up an innovative new publishing venture, Bloomsbury Academic. The new business will publish a new list online for free, with the venture sustained by sales to libraries and academic institutions. Print on demand will be used for the actual publishing but the books will be made freely available to students online. The list will consist of academic monographs, rather than reference titles, initially concentrating on humanities and social sciences, building thematic lists on "pressing global issues". The intention is to go for fast growth, with 50 titles in 2009. The publisher of this new venture will be Frances Pinter, a distinguished academic publisher who started her own publishing house at 23 and, after selling this in 1994, took on a role at the Soros Foundation. Pinter is a proselytiser for Creative Commons and has contributed an article on the subject to WritersServices. Bloomsbury Academic will make use of Creative Commons licences to allow non-commercial use of all its titles on publication. Pinter said the new venture would have: ‘a major commitment to spreading knowledge more easily throughout the world with a sustainable business model’. Bloomsbury Academic will be breaking new ground in its plans to make books freely available online. This and other initiatives should provide a new direction for the company too. The publisher recently announced results which showed its revenue and gross profit shrinking by 18% and 11% respectively in the first set of post-Potter results. Bloomsbury’s American company has suffered recent high-level losses of staff and redundancies as it faces up to a difficult market with a relatively small backlist to cushion it. Life after the Potter years is not going to be easy, but if the firm invests carefully it believes it can develop and acquire new businesses which will take it forward. New Executive Director Richard Charkin (who used to write the provocative Charkinblog) rebuts recent talk of closing down Bloomsbury US: ‘People don’t understand: it’s not about America. You publish your authors to the best of your ability wherever people want to buy their books.’ Certainly it is unthinkable that Bloomsbury would back away from the most important English language book market. The company’s expansive new internationalism is based on using the web to publicise books by making them freely available as a way of promoting sales. Although it will not be equally applicable to all areas of publishing, we are probably now in a position to see that this approach will represent a major way forward for the book business. Frances Pinter's article on Creative Commons Inside Publishing on Creative Commons
All change in the travel marketTravel books have rarely been so much in the headlines as they were in the UK last week when Tony Elliott, the pugnacious founder of Time Out, used a speech at the Edinburgh Festival to lambast the BBC. The public broadcaster has recently acquired Lonely Planet’s travel guides and Elliott is not alone in thinking that the BBC is getting out of control and offering unfair competition to commercial businesses. But travel publishing is going through bigger changes than that. It has seen years of boom as people from the richer countries of the world have travelled more and more, and increasingly have opted for long haul destinations. The growing market for guidebooks has brought about intense competition amongst the different travel publishers. Now the twin changes wrought by people’s concern about their carbon footprint and the global economic downturn are bringing that era to an end. Americans, affected by the weak dollar, have been travelling less, but Europeans have been making up for it and there’s been huge growth in the number of tourists touring the world from countries such as China. In the UK 2006 was not a good year for travel publishers, with intense competition. But in 2007 this trend was reversed, with travel book sales up 5.95%, compared to a 2.93% fall in 2006. Discounting took a heavy toll of publishers’ profits and Stephen Mesquita, author of a report on sales for the Travel Publishing Yearbook, estimates that £19m ($35m) was given away in unnecessary discounts. But the biggest change in travel publishing is only now making itself felt. Mark Ellingham, who sold his Rough Guides imprint to Penguin last year, said then: ‘We are on the cusp of major change. In the next five years guidebooks will be almost completely digital.’ Publishers are responding to the changing market by developing exclusive online content and focusing on other ways of delivering the information. Ellingham predicts that by cutting out paper costs and substituting PDF downloads to devices such as the iPhone, information will be delivered directly on a subscription model. He says: ‘The book market is stagnating and beginning to decline and the digital medium becoming properly useful. There will be a thinning out of travel guides – there are too many at the moment. A lot won’t make the transition to digital.’
Are books recession-proof?The book trade is beginning to wonder if books will weather the economic storm. The received wisdom is that they do well in a recession because they are small-ticket items, but is this really true? The recession of the early nineties, the worst downturn in the UK since the war, seems not to have affected the book trade too badly. The sector was still buoyant after three years of slump in consumer spending. John Monk, then of Books Etc, said: ‘Books were in a much better position than big-ticket items such as holidays, electricals and furniture, which really suffered’. Since the problem this time started with the housing market, as the property boom has turned to bust in both the UK and the US, areas usually stimulated by extra spending generated by moving house will be affected much more badly. It’s cheaper of course to stay at home with a book when times are tough, and books can also be sourced more cheaply if necessary, through libraries, friends and families, or from special offers or second-hand. In the UK the big difference from the early nineties is the end of the Net Book Agreement, which has brought vicious discounting to the UK market. And effectively book-buyers around the world are benefiting from lower book costs due to the competition from Amazon, supermarkets and price-cutting stores. So the outlook looks gloomier than it has been, but not disastrous. A downward trend perhaps, but not something that booksellers cannot survive. The independent bookshops which have survived so far are lean and well-adapted to their local environment, with loyal customer bases of book-buyers who do not shop on the basis of price alone. In the US, Barnes and Noble, the nation’s biggest bookseller, has just shown a 2% decline on the same quarter last year, although their internet sales were up and store sales fell by 4.7%. In spite of Stephenie Meyer (see last week’s New Review), things are down a bit and the company is planning to open just 20-25 new stores next year, rather than the 30-35 it will open this year, because of the knock-on effect of the cancellation of new malls by developers. This is not deep recession though. At least books are regarded as essential by many book-buyers. And authors can comfort themselves with the idea of more readers across the world as literacy increases and English spreads ever more widely.
A new supersellerA new star has burst upon the publishing firmament. Stephenie Meyer, whose new book Breaking Dawn already has 1.3 million copies in print in the US, recorded the largest-ever first-day sale when it was published there on August 4th. The book is the 745-page fourth book in her high school vampire series The Twilight Saga. Meyer is not exactly unknown outside the US, as her books sell into 20 languages and she has sold over 10 million copies worldwide, but many fellow-writers will not have heard of her because she writes for a teen audience. Stephenie Meyer is also a most unlikely person to write vampire novels. A 34 year-old Mormon housewife from Arizona, she had never written anything, not even a short story, just made up stories. Then she had a dream about a teenage girl who met a surprisingly courteous vampire who said he really wanted to drink her blood but couldn’t bring himself to kill her. She couldn’t get the story out of her mind, so started writing it down. She says: ‘I wasn’t intending that anyone read it; it was just for me.’ The sexual abstinence of her characters may be what makes her books unusual, but it seems to be the accessible, fast-paced story and the emotional content which makes them sell. Even bestselling authors get rejected. Close to J K Rowling’s 12 rejections, Meyer received nine rejections and five of the publishers the first book was submitted to didn’t even reply (which suggests they didn’t read their slush-pile). The fifteenth offered her $750,000 for a three-book deal. No doubt there’s an editor somewhere feeling pretty pleased with themselves. Meanwhile Stephenie Meyer is writing away, and her life has not changed that much. Her accountant husband now handles her business affairs, but Meyer plans just to keep on writing: ‘Now I’ve found out that people actually like my stories, it’s definitely not a problem coming up with ideas about what to write next.’
The e-book wars - starting soon?It looks as if this autumn will finally see the worldwide availability of e-book readers, and then at last we’ll find out exactly what difference this is going to make to book-buying and the publishing world. The e-book reader story has been running for some time. News Review’s headline on 18 February this year was ‘The e-book arrives – or does it?’ and on 26 November 2007 we asked: ‘Is the Kindle the future of the book?’ There are still three devices available, although others are thought to be in development. The Dutch-originated iRex iLiad has been available in the UK since May 2007, selling exclusively in Borders for £399 ($767), and does not seem, to the wider world, to have made much impact, although it may be of special appeal to academics. Then there’s the Sony Reader, launching with much fanfare in the UK in Waterstone’s stores on 4 September at a price of £199 ($382). It is slightly smaller than a hardback and weighs 260 grams (just over 9 ounces). It can store up to 160 e-books and has been selling in the US since September 2006, currently at $299, although there doesn’t seem to be much information about how successful it has been. Joe Svetlik, news editor of gadget magazine T3, said: ‘It does have the potential to be massive, to have hundreds of books on something the size of a notebook is appealing.’ Finally, there’s the Kindle, which currently costs $359 (£182) in America, and has built-in free wireless Internet connection, allowing users to download titles direct from Amazon’s website. It can store 200 titles and weighs 10.3 ounces (292 grams). Other firms’ readers require ebooks to be downloaded onto a computer and then transferred. Amazon have been selling it in the States since November 2007. On launch the online retailer went instantly out of stock in five and a half hours and did not make the Kindle available again until April 2008. This looks very much like laying down a marker to scare off the opposition, whilst waiting for the market to develop. In June 2008 Jeff Bezos of Amazon said that the e-book version was taking 6% of the sales of books available in both paper and e-book formats. There are now more than 145,000 titles available and many observers think that Amazon will dominate this market when they launch internationally, which is widely expected to be this autumn. It’s a bit of a puzzle why Waterstone’s should go with the Sony Reader, except that Amazon is now just too threatening a competitor for them to go with their Kindle. The big question is going to be whether readers will actually want to read books on a gadget at all, and how many of them adopt it. Richard Charkin, Executive Director of Bloomsbury says: 'There will continue to be a market for printed books for a very long time. I believe the bulk of people will still prefer to hold, feel, treasure, give, receive, display and read a printed book. Unlike CDs, I do not think books will be displaced by downloads.' It could be a very interesting autumn.
The end of an eraThe closure of Publishing News on 25 July marked the end of an era in book trade journalism. MD Jo Henry and editor Liz Thomson thought they had a year to try to turn it round, but time was called after nine months, due to the relentlessly declining advertising revenues. Founded 29 years ago by Fred Newman and Clive Labovitch, the magazine has always provided a challenge to the UK book trade establishment, in the form of The Bookseller, which coincidentally celebrated its 150th anniversary a few weeks ago. But Publishing News always took a different approach. Regarded at first as a bit of a rag, it was more fun to read than its august rival, up-to-the-minute, slightly irreverent and fleeter of foot. It was really directed at publishing rather than booksellers, so always had a more personal, less institutional feeling about it, as well as all the best gossip. There has really been no exact equivalent to PN in any other publishing market, although perhaps Publishers’ Lunch brought something of the same irreverence to an Internet generation, but with nothing like the coverage that PN had as a full print magazine. American publishing has suffered from the lack of anything other than the rather staid Publishers’ Weekly. UK readers will mourn PN’s passing because the two magazines read together gave a fuller view. Fred Newman, writing in the final issue, should have the last word: ‘So whatever else PN may have been, it was never dull or boring. Its journalism reflected what I felt a good trade paper should be doing: writing about the personalities and events that were being talked about, and digging more deeply into the major issues that demanded informed analysis and interpretation…
The closure of Publishing News was a sad and difficult decision to make. The staff who have worked on PN, and not least myself, have a considerable emotional investment and commitment to the publication but, over the past 29 years, there have been enormous changes in the book industry. Its "village" days are long over and gone, and the element of trust that once existed between publishers and booksellers has been greatly eroded. Much of the fun has been dissipated as the book business has been forced to respond to the brutalities of conglomeration and globalisation, which have been the inevitable consequence of the drive for greater efficiency.
The proliferation of literary prizesSalman Rushdie’s win of the Best of the Booker last week with Midnight’s Children was no surprise. He had long been regarded as the quintessential Booker winner and had already won the Booker of Bookers in 1993. He was also a clear favourite with the members of the public who took part in the voting. The past decade has seen the most extraordinary rise in the number and visibility of literary prizes. They come at us from every direction and seem to get bigger and more attention-grabbing all the time. The Booker itself has often been controversial and over the years has made a significant number of literary careers. Anne Enright last year was a case in point, a well-regarded but not well-known author who is now celebrated across the world. The Orange Prize, controversial still because only novels written by women are eligible, has done much to democratise book prizes, as the judges have generally chosen accessible and well-written books which have had wide appeal, and the Prize has always been well-promoted. Ireland’s IMPAC Prize offers a superb 100,000 euros (£79,234 or $158,426) to its lucky winner and has done much to promote this year’s winner, De Niro’s Game, by Lebanese Canadian Rawi Hage, although the sales have not been all that spectacular. The Whitbread, now renamed the Costa Book Awards, has over the years done a fabulous job of promoting different genres, with its unusual two stage process giving prizes to a novel, a first novel, a children’s book, a poetry book and a biography, as well as the overall winner. The Nobel Prize for Literature offers huge international recognition and kudos, without perhaps always conferring the sales that its reputation might lead one to expect. That may be because its international and very literary nature means that the Prize is not really promoted in quite the same way. Some American prizes, such as the National Book Awards, have been accused of focusing too much on very literary books of narrow appeal. Other prizes promote specific forms of literature. The Samuel Johnson Prize, announced last week, does a good job for non-fiction. The Crime Writers’ Association Dagger Awards in the UK and the Edgars in the US promote crime writing. And the T S Eliot, Griffin and Forward Prizes have over the years given much support to poetry. Novelist Zadie Smith launched a stinging attack on literary prizes in February: ‘Most literary prizes are only nominally about literature. They are really about brand consolidation for beer companies, phone companies and even frozen food companies.’ This may be true, but the sponsorship of the beer companies and other backers does a tremendous amount to support literature and to ensure that good writers are more widely read. Robert McCrum wrote recently in the Observer that: ‘The literary prize has become one of the most reliable guides to the literary maze, a map to the perplexing contours of the book landscape.’ At a time when newspaper reviews seem to be losing their impact, prizes give readers a compass to guide them to good reading. Kate Mosse, founder of the Orange Prize says: 'Prizes, far more than star reviews, are what make books succeed now and it's also prizes that give readers the confidence to trust a new writer.' Readers are made to feel that the prize-winning book is something they should read. Winning a big prize can have a spectacular effect on a writer’s career and everyone in the book world should celebrate the boom in this very effective means of promoting books.
Amazon stand-off continuesThe stand-off between the Internet retailing giant, Amazon, and the biggest trade (general) publisher in the UK, Hachette, is continuing. It’s a full seven weeks since News Review looked at Amazon’s massive growth and huge ambitions (News Review 26 May) but in all this time, to the amazement of observers, Hachette titles appearing on Amazon’s pages have continued to have the ‘buy’ buttons removed. This has effectively frozen the publisher’s sales through the online retailer. The details are not public, but the dispute between the two parties relates to a terms negotiation. Amazon has demanded an improvement in its no doubt already generous discounts on books bought from the Hachette group publishers, and the publisher has refused to concede this. It is significant that Hachette is the biggest, as a rather smaller publisher, Bloomsbury, seems to have conceded when the same tactic was tried on them. No one knows what negotiations may be going on behind the scenes with other publishers, but this has now become a test case. Other publishers and agents are supporting Hachette’s stance. Philippa Milnes-Smith, President of the Association of Authors’ Agents, said: ‘We understand the pressure being brought to bear on publishers by retailers, and it’s good to see someone standing up to them’. Authors lose out when big discounts are given to retailers because the high discount clause in their contracts is invoked. This means that they receive a lower royalty on these sales, and thus less income overall. In a market where trade discounts have become higher and higher, a large proportion of a big author’s sales may be at a high discount through Amazon, the supermarkets and the bookshop chains, so the effect on authors can be substantial. Hachette authors, of course, are currently losing out in a very specific way, in that their books are not being sold by Amazon. There is also a question of whether this is any kind of restraint of trade, although presumably the Hachette lawyers will already have dismissed this possibility. No doubt the publisher realises that it is hard to have an ongoing business relationship with your customers if you start taking them to court. With the widespread view in the book trade that Amazon are set to launch the Kindle e-reader in the UK and the rest of the world this autumn, there is growing anxiety about the Internet retailer’s other plans. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos says that their results on selling e-books for the Kindle in the US show that those who buy the downloads continue also to buy as many traditional books as they did before. For many publishers, that is reassuring as regards the future of the traditional book - but not at all confidence-building in relation to Amazon itself. E-book downloads look like another area the Internet giant will dominate, as it continues its plans to become the biggest online retailer. Books were only the beginning of this plan, but they remain an area in which Amazon looks set to continue its dominance.
Cape Town stages successful Book FairThe success of this year’s Cape Town Book Fair reflects a healthy and growing interest in books in South Africa. The Fair doubles as a literary festival, with many authors and events, and this year it attracted just under 50,000 visitors, more than twice as many as in its inaugural year two years ago (see News Review 3 July 2006). In the meantime there’s been a growth in African publishing and in the visibility of African writers, although the Fair’s original aim to attract African publishers has not yet been achieved. Of the 293 exhibitors 34% were European, Asian, Latin American or American and only 3% were from the rest of Africa. The Publishers’ Association of South Africa and the Frankfurt Book Fair, which jointly run the Fair, have further work to do attracting African publishers to what is already replacing the Zimbabwe Book Fair as the biggest pan-African fair. A lively blog on Book Southern Africa gives more details of the events, but the sheer exuberance and enjoyment comes through in the report written for Publishing News by Isobel Dixon, literary agent and poet, who described this year’s Fair as having ‘a triumphant buzz to it’. In the meantime the international publishing world is beginning to pay more attention to African writers and their increasing success on the worldwide stage is promoting the energetic and talented new voices coming from the sub-continent. But there’s still room for plenty of development in the number of books available in Africa. Last year the South African Book Development Council reported that more than half of South African households have no leisure books, and the Fair reflected a particular attempt to attract more families, with a consequent increase in children attending. Elsewhere the picture still shows that there is a long way to go, with many African countries struggling to provide books for school-children and students, let alone being on the way to developing a reading culture. Book Aid International, which works to send books to Africa, is rapidly expanding the reach of its programmes, and reckons that it costs the charity just £1.25 to send a book to Africa. Its Reverse Book Club sends four books a month to Africa for just £5, making it a wonderful charity for everyone in the book trade to support.
Wikipedia's 683 million visitorsWikipedia has long been a rather controversial reference source. The fact that it is open to anyone to edit the entries has always been regarded with suspicion by academics. Last year they launched Citizendium as a counterblast. This is intended to replace Wikipedia as the web’s leading reference work and it is being directed by expert editors. Contributors will use their real names and it is not open for anyone to edit like Wikipedia is. The new reference site is led by Larry Sanger, a co-founder of Wikipedia who left to become a critic. He says: ‘ Wikipedia has accomplished great things but the world can do even better. By engaging expert editors, eliminating anonymous contribution and launching a more mature community under a new charter… The result will be not only enormous and free, but reliable.’ The site describes itself as ‘Wiki with stricter editing rules and obligatory disclosure of editors’ real names’. Can the new reference source catch up with Wikipedia? It looks unlikely, as the giant online encyclopedia now attracts 683 million visitors annually, having been set up just seven years ago. These visitors currently read more than 10 million articles in 253 languages – and this is before the next billion people come online in the next ten years. Its founder Jimmy Wales, argues that the different points of view on Wikipedia are part of the point of the online encyclopedia: ‘This is what I truly want from an encyclopedia; I do not want to be fed one side of the story. I want to know what the legitimate claims are.’ On 12 May News Review asked whether it was the end of the line for print encyclopedias, and concluded that it probably was. The challenge that Wikipedia and other online reference sources provide is terminal. Once you have got used to researching online, it’s hard to go back to any other approach, as it simply starts to feel dreadfully slow and cramped. So Wikipedia and Citizendium will slug it out, but in the meantime anyone researching online will benefit from both sites being available. Online research is brilliant for authors and the Internet has made it possible to do most kinds of research from your own computer. Jimmy Wales should have the last word: ‘The internet has created greater opportunities for access, debate and transparency in the pursuit of knowledge than ever before. It is not a threat to diversity, nor a reason for postmodern retreat from the pursuit of absolute truths. As we will see when the next billion come online, there are many cultures in the world but only one reality.’ On the WritersServices site: Using the web as a research tool and Advanced Searching
Rights tussles dominate the newsIt’s been one shock after another in the publishing world, with lots of changes and some tussles which might yet develop into full-blown war. In the US both Random House US and HarperCollins have new young heads and this has been hailed as the handing-over of the reins to a new generation. The thinking may be that the ‘new boys’ will be better able to cope with the many challenges facing publishers today (see News Review 9 June). Recent figures from the US predicted unit sales falling in 2008 and recessionary fears dominated Book Expo 2008, the biggest annual American book fair, earlier this month. By all accounts BEA has now slipped back into its original identity and is no longer much of a focus for international publishers. Barnes & Noble and Borders were virtually unrepresented, but independent booksellers and librarians came from all over the US. It is still a very significant fair in the American book trade’s calendar, but the London Book Fair has effectively taken over as the dominant spring fair for international rights. nternational rights are high on everyone’s agenda at the moment. American publishers, relatively late to the table in terms of international sales, are making a determined pitch for India, traditionally part of the British publishers’ market (see Inside Publishing on The English language publishing world). They are well behind, as most of the bigger British publishers have already established flourishing companies in India, with Penguin taking the lead, but this huge country with its burgeoning English-speaking middle class is becoming an increasingly important market. A possible shift in international rights is reflected in the fact that in the reshuffle mentioned above, Victoria Barnsley, the CEO of HarperCollins UK, has been put in charge of International, ie all HarperCollins’ outposts outside the US. It seems unlikely that she will want to support the American part of the company grabbing places like India. Perhaps it’s time everyone stopped thinking of India and other countries as territories ‘owned’ by British or American publishers, but instead saw them as vibrant and growing book markets producing a whole skew of wonderful new writers. The other fight relates to e-book rights. American publishers are trying to lay claim to global rights, on the basis that e-books can be downloaded anywhere in the world. That argument completely undercuts the current territorial division of the world, which derives extremely specifically from the original author contracts. Working through their agents or directly with publishers, authors bestow the right to publish in each country, or the right to sub-lease these rights, through their original publishing contracts. American publishers may want to claim that world English language e-book rights should go to them, but this undercuts the entire territorial basis of publishing rights so it will be resisted by agents and also by publishers internationally. Why would a British publisher want to buy UK rights to an American author if they knew that American publishers would retain the e-book rights for the UK? The author, as the creator of the intellectual property, has the ultimate right to decide how their work will be licensed and used.
Children's authors stage mass rebellionChildren’s authors have staged a stunning rebellion against age-ranging on children’s books. More than 50 British authors, led by Philip Pullman and all five children’s laureates (Anne Fine, Quentin Blake, Michael Morpurgo, Jacqueline Wilson and Michael Rosen) have launched an extraordinary campaign. The group of authors have taken ads in the Bookseller and Publishing News, and set up a website to campaign for their point of view. They say:‘We are agreed that the proposal to put an age-guidance figure on books for children is ill-conceived and damaging to the interests of young readers.’ The UK Publishers’ Association Children’s Group, backed by the majority of children’s publishers, announced in April that it would introduce printed age guidance for children’s books. So how did this initiative go ahead without securing the agreement of the authors, and what is going to happen now? On the face of it, there are good arguments for adding age-ranging to children’s books. The proposal passed in April was that a black and white design would be placed on the back of the books, near the barcode, with the categories of 5+, 7+, 9+, 11+ and 13+/teen. Guidance levels were to be the responsibility of the individual publisher and would be an indication of the reading level interest rather than ability. It’s easy to see why publishers and many retailers have been pushing for this. Most books for children are bought by adults, but not necessarily by adults who know which books are appropriate for particular ages. Research conducted in 2006 showed that 86% of book buyers would back the plans for age guidance on books, with 40% saying that they would be more likely to buy more books if they featured guidance. Pullman and his fellow-signatories believe the idea is: ‘ill-conceived… and unlikely to make the slightest difference to sales’. They are backed by some independent booksellers and children’s librarians and their website says: ‘Accurate judgments about age suitability are impossible, and approximate ones are worse than useless’ and states their ‘passionately-held conviction that everything about a book should seek to welcome readers in and not keep them out’. Elaine McQuade of Scholastic, who chairs the Publishers’ Association Children’s Book Group said: ‘I’m very sad that there are some authors, librarians and specialist booksellers who feel so angry… The people who are objecting are people whose lives are all about children’s books. The people we are trying to help – particularly when it comes to fiction – are people who don’t feel confident about buying children’s books, people who perhaps don’t have children.’ And there you have it. The group of authors, booksellers and children’s librarians who make up the children’s book world are coming from a different place, an enlightened milieu where there are skilled booksellers and trained librarians to help adults find the right books for children. But more and more children’s books are being sold in supermarkets, chains such as W H Smith and online, where there is no help, and where the adults buying them don’t know which books to choose. Age-ranging is for them and its implementation might well increase sales of children’s books through these outlets, as the publishers had hoped. In the meantime the row will go on and it looks as if publishers will have to concede that authors who say no to age-ranging will not have it added to their books.
The latest despatch from the Turf WarsNo sooner had the dust settled on Bertlesmann’s surprise appointment of German print supremo Markus Dohle to succeed Peter Olson as CEO of Random House US, than another unexpected change hit the American publishing world. Jane Friedman, the successful and popular head of HarperCollins, also announced her immediate departure. The American publishing scene has been relatively stable in recent years, so two top-level departures at once are a surprise. At Random House the less-than-sparkling financial results seem to provide a likely reason, although Olsen says he had made a personal decision move on. For HarperCollins the change is harder to read, as the company’s recent success would seem to dictate retaining the existing management. In both cases corporate thinking is at work. Bertelsmann’s Random House is the biggest publisher in the US and the second biggest in the UK. The company also owns publishing companies throughout Europe. HarperCollins is owned by News International, which has massive media holdings around the world. The insatiable search for corporate profit must go on. Publishing, like everything else, has become more global. The credit crunch is making corporate life tougher and comes at a time when publishing has many new challenges to face. Not the least of these are what are being called the Turf Wars. American publishers are trying to insist that contracts for American authors should give them global e-book rights, cutting across agreements on terrestrial rights. Their argument is that an e-book can effectively be downloaded – and therefore sold - anywhere in the world. As the Bookseller said: ‘This may seem a mere technical point while e-books represent a fraction of print sales, but it has dramatic implications. As digital content mushrooms, British and international publishers could be reduced to mere distributors of "dead tree" products, while the US hoovers up 100% of online sales.’ British and other international publishers have no choice but to assert the primacy of territorial rights, as otherwise they risk losing control of the books they have contracted and are working to market. Simon Juden, CEO of the UK Publishers’ Association, said that he would expect digital rights to come with print rights, as ‘among other things, the publisher who puts money into marketing the book should reap the rewards’. On the face of it the 25% royalty offered for e-books by American publishers looks a better deal for authors than the 15% that British publishers are trying to establish as a norm. However if the resolution of digital territoriality means sweeping away the existing structure of the world book market, authors have a lot to lose. In their contracts they licence publishers to sell their work in certain formats and territories, and it is not in their interest to split off e-book rights in this way. Above all, it is essential to preserve individual authors’ right to decide who shall sell their work in each territory - and not to let this control be ceded to the corporations. Inside Publishing on The English language publishing world
'New Regulars' join the heavy readers‘Heavy readers’ are changing. Book covers do influence purchase. Three recent reports relating to book consumers paint a striking picture of changes in book purchasing. Book Marketing Limited has just published new research which shows that a third of British adults think the cover is important in influencing purchase. Three out of five of those surveyed say they are more likely to buy a book if it is on offer, but recommendations by friends and family are still very important, as in previous studies. Measuring the response against actual purchases, supermarket buyers are just as keen on browsing for books as those using specialist bookshops. Perhaps surprisingly, online book buyers are more likely than those using other channels to consider the look of the cover to be important. An American survey conducted by Ipsos in 2007 showed that, although 27% of Americans had not read a book in the past year, a further 27%, the ‘heavy buyers’, had read 15 or more books. When Americans who had not read a single book were excluded, the average number of books read was 20, raised by the 8% who read 51 books or more. Although what people read and what they buy is not the same thing, new research by the Bookseller and consumer insight agency Next Big Thing suggests that a new segment of heavy readers is emerging in the UK. Lured by the supermarkets and the Internet, this group is buying as many books as those who frequent bookshops. These ‘New Regulars’ are fans of crime fiction and true life stories, and they look to recommendations on the television and radio, as well as advertising, to guide their purchases. They now make up more than a third of the ‘heavy readers’, who are defined as people who buy one or more books every month. The ‘Highbrow Browsers’ who make up the rest of the heavy readers are the well- educated bookshop visitors familiar to the book trade around the world. The new study shows that this combined group of heavy readers is more responsive than other readers to a book’s price. This makes sense as they are buying a lot more books and price therefore becomes a significant issue. What has changed is that, for the first time in history, readers can go online to check out book prices. Also, since value is a key element of the big supermarket chains’ offer across the globe, they are finding that heavily discounted books make a perfect non-food item to promote. For the shopper, putting a discounted book into the trolley along with the week’s shopping is painless, and may be turning a lot of light buyers into the ‘New Regulars’. We should all be grateful to the heavy readers who keep the book trade afloat. Although it is causing pain to traditional bookstores - chains and independents alike - this restructuring of the book market does offer hope for the future. The emergence of the ‘New Regulars’ and their buying power may be crucial to the future of the book trade.
Amazon goes for brokeAmazon has dominated the headlines in the book trade press over the last few months, as it has taken a more aggressive approach to its plans for growth. Back in 1997 Jeff Bezos said he wanted the internet retailer to be one of only ‘two or three leading players’ Actually it’s done much better than that. Like it or not, Amazon is now the only global online book retailer and it dominates the market. But Bezos’s plan is far more ambitious than that. Books were just a good place to start and his eyes are now set firmly on becoming the international online retailer for a huge range of goods. Amazon’s initiatives have been coming thick and fast. Each one has moved the goalposts around in an innovative way which is often uncomfortable for both publishers and booksellers, but which provides benefit for the consumer. Last year Chris North, Amazon UK VP books, said that: ‘Jeff Bezos’s strategy for Amazon from day one was price, selection, availability and obsessive customer focus. We have the same strategy today… in five years we are still going to be obsessed with the same things.’ So, how has Amazon’s pursuit of these aims contributed to the growing sense of unease amongst publishers? First there was the introduction of second-hand book sales for third parties on the site. Many thought these would cannibalise new book sales but in fact they have contributed to Amazon’s revenues and prevented many book-buyers going elsewhere to sites such as Abebooks. The ‘Search Inside’ programme caused consternation when it was first launched, but now publishers are recognising that the browsability of real books can be successfully replicated on the web, and are developing their own similar programmes. In February Amazon bought the US audiobooks giant Audible, cementing its position on this front and opening up the possibility of extensive cross-marketing which may bring this rather under-recognised format to the attention of many more book-buyers. The Bookseller said: ‘At a stroke Amazon has gone from languishing far behind rivals in digital audiobooks to becoming the clear market leader.’ CreateSpace, launched in the US only last year, is a print on demand service run by Amazon for authors, but margins are so tight it look as if they would find it hard to make any profit from getting involved in this enterprise. The Amazon Kindle, so far launched only in the US, looks set to play a major part in kick-starting the e-book market, with its access currently to 200,000 e-book titles for purchase from Amazon’s site. Two recent spats have been quite serious, and may show a change of approach by the Internet giant. Last month Amazon told American publishers that all print on demand titles would have to be printed at Amazon’s own fulfilment centres by its new programme BookSurge. The alternative is to provide it with five copies of each title via its Advantage service, but this costs publishers $29.95 a year and Amazon demand 55% of the list price, making it at best marginal. Finally, there’s the recent arguments in the UK this spring. In the midst of a terms negotiation Amazon has used its muscle to threaten publishers by removing the buy button from their books on the site. Publishers who have been developing their own online sales have been experimenting with discounting books on their own websites. Amazon tried to stop this by threatening to use the publishers’ online discounted price as the retail price and apply its discounts accordingly. Amazon seems set on being Amazonian, now that it is big and secure enough to flex its muscles. It doesn’t look as if publishers - and possibly therefore also authors - have an easy ride ahead. For book-buyers interested in a great range of books and good prices, it is clearly another story.
A celebration of new wordsSusie Dent is the author of Oxford University Press’s Words of the Year, which will come out in September. In Publishing News she writes about the process of capturing new slang as it enters our vocabulary, and deciding which words will go in the new edition of the book. Collecting information about language is much more efficient than it used to be. The Oxford English Dictionary’s continuous monitoring reading programme collects evidence throughout the year. The two billion words in the Oxford English Corpus make it a database of current language and into it are fed journals, newspapers, novels, blogs and transcriptions of chat-room and street conversations – in short English as it is used everywhere today. It is then possible to observe changes and to track and document trends in the way people write and talk. Naturally OUP work on this endeavour to keep their main database as up to date as possible for new editions of the Oxford English Dictionary. But Words of the Year is intended to be ‘a first charting of current trends’ and provides a fascinating snapshot of changes in the language. This means that many of the words that Dent chooses to include will be ephemeral – and many have already proved to be no more than words of the moment. New words such as bling, blog, hoodies and footprint (of the carbon variety) have established their place in the vocabulary, but others, such as Y2K and the millennium bug proved to be only of their time, and many words such as TMI (text message injury) and memail (an attention-getting email) have not lasted the course. Slang moves fast and in these days of instant communication a new word can race across the globe in no time, often adopted out of English and used by many non-native speakers as well. Many would decry the increasing informality of the way language is used, especially in email and text messages, but Dent reckons that new slang has always been with us and has added many new words to enrich our vocabulary. Although Chinese is spoken by a vast number of people, English has become the language of international communication and is spoken across the globe. New words often come from social or technological developments and these can take place anywhere. American English has major sway in the scientific arena and American culture still dominates the airwaves, but the distinctions between that and English English are being lost in a new international version which draws on both. Writers for whom English is their native language have a huge advantage in reaching a worldwide market, so much so that many non-native speakers are now writing and publishing in English. We should celebrate the rich and changing diversity of the language, and grasp the opportunities it offers to write for an international audience, now easily reached through the Internet.
The end of the line for print encyclopedias?Are print encyclopedias dead? It rather looks as if they might be. The mighty German encyclopedia Brockhaus is about to put all its content online. It's the paper death of a classic, as the company has been printing its encyclopedias for nearly 200 years, and anyone who's had the money has boasted a collection of the handsome volumes on their bookshelves for all the world to admire. Brockhaus will be putting online all 300,000 of its articles, which have been vetted by scholars over 200 years, and hopes to produce revenue by selling ads on its site. In a sense the German encyclopedia company is well behind the curve in reacting to the online developments which have spelled the death of the print version. So will this new initiative work? The omens are not good but the company may feel it has little choice. Encyclopedia Britannica has passed this way before. This venerable encyclopedia dates back even longer, to 1771, when the complete set with its 2,659 pages cost £12 (which is almost impossible to equate to a dollar value at the time). In 1998 the print version was abandoned and a web portal was set up to offer a free version online. At that point the competition was not the web but Microsoft’s Encarta Encyclopedia on CD Rom for home computers. Britannica led the pack in coming to terms with the fact that the public no longer viewed owning a multi-volume encyclopedia as a mark of middle-class status. The company fired its legendary 1,000-strong sales force, already down from 2,000 in the 1970s. But revenues generated from advertising proved disappointing, the approach seemed suicidal in business terms, and the print version was re-established three years later. The printed Britannica set currently retails for £995 (nearly $2,000), a substantial amount even for a library (or perhaps especially for a library, given their funding shortfalls). Mostly they now take the £39.99 ($782) CD and make it available through the libraries’ computers or subscribe to the online version). The company has successfully reinvented itself by using its massive database to produce many different products. The content is sold to overseas distributors, often for use in a local encylopedia or co-branded website. And print is now firmly back in the equation. The current print version comprises 32,000 pages in 32 volumes, but around 50 books are now derived from the database and this number is set to double in the next two years. The publisher’s hybrid site, Britannia Online, has a certain amount of free access and the option to subscribe to get in-depth information. Since it is online, it can all be updated weekly. The current edition has a massive 65,000 articles and 44 million words and it is still a byword for reliable information. Perhaps this success story negates the New York Times pronouncement that ‘the long migration to the Internet has picked up pace, and that ahead of other books, magazines and even newspapers, the classic multivolume encylopedia is well on its way to becoming one of the first casualties in the end of print.’ Reference publishers undoubtedly do have Wikipedia to contend with and next week News Review will look at the web encyclopedia and how it has transformed the world of reference.
Is this 'wholesale theft'?J K Rowling’s argument against the publisher which is intending to publish a Harry Potter Lexicon written by Vander Ark seems a clear one. The case, which was in court in New York last month and is now awaiting a verdict, raises a number of issues relating to copyright. Warner, which owns the Harry Potter trademark through its acquisition of the film rights, is actually fighting the case, but the author clearly feels threatened by it in a very personal way. Although sales of the seven Harry Potter books have now topped 375 million, part of the reason that J K Rowling feels under pressure is that she herself planned to write a Harry Potter encyclopedia, and to give the royalties to charity. Worse still, the Harry Potter Lexicon has come out of a free fan website with the same name, which claims 25 million annual visitors. So, is it just a case of a rich author turning on her fans? Well, not really, as the publishing project comes from publisher RDR Books, a Michigan-based independent. Rowling claims that 2,034 of the book’s 2,437 lines are lifted straight from the Harry Potter titles, saying: ‘I believe this book constitutes wholesale theft of 17 years of my hard work. It adds little if anything by way of commentary; the quality of that commentary is derisory; and it debases what I worked so hard to create. What particularly galls me is the lack of quotation marks. If Mr Vander had put quotation makes around everything he had lifted, most of the book would be in quotation marks.’ The case rests on two distinct alleged offences. The first of these is infringement of copyright, which should not be hard to prove in view of the amount of material taken from the books, as the law requires publishers to seek permission when reproducing substantial amounts of copyrighted material. There’s also the charge of ‘passing off’, in that the book misleadingly implies that it has been officially endorsed, which may be harder to prove. The judge may consider that the author’s support of this and other Harry Potter fan sites in the past implies endorsement of unofficial guides. Rowling takes the whole thing very personally: ‘These characters meant so much to me, and continue to mean so much to me, over such a long period of time. It’s very difficult for someone who is not a writer to understand. The closest I can come is to say to someone, "How do you feel about your children?' On the other side of the equation, there are concerns that the outcome of the case could cramp freedom to publish, particularly reference and scholarly works. The publisher is being represented by lawyers who are working pro bono and their view is that Rowling ‘appears to claim a monopoly on the right to publish literary reference guides and other non-academic research relating to her own fiction. This is a right no court has ever recognised… It would threaten not just reference guides but encyclopedias, glossaries, indexes and other tools that provide useful information about copyrighted works.’ The Internet and the changes it has brought continue to put copyright under threat and to throw up new challenges such as this. We await the verdict with interest. The protection of copyright is essential to authors, if they are to have control over their work and the reassurance that they will receive the income from the fruits of their labour.
'Two upbeat and lively book fairs'April has seen two big book fairs, the Bologna Children’s Book Fair and the London Book Fair. Bologna was buoyant this year, with demand for rights in good projects strong internationally and the East European and Asian publishers proving keen customers. Fiction is still a very strong genre, with increasing interest in horror, described as ‘the new fantasy’. Non-fiction is holding up well however, with solid business on a large number of projects. Publishers had selected only their best picture books to take to the Fair and interest in them was stimulated by the announcement by the UK Children’s Laureate Michael Rosen of the results of The Big Picture, Booktrust’s campaign to find the UK’s 10 best illustrators. British publishers have long been known for their terrific picture books, and this showed that the recent downturn in international demand for picture books may be past, although only the very best projects are selling. Two high-profile launches showed the way the children’s market is going. Scholastic announced its 39 Clues, a ‘ground-breaking’ ten-book series for 8-12 year-olds teamed with an elaborate online game and sets of cards packaged in book form. HarperCollins presented Bella Sara, a horse-fantasy property for girls. The cards and website launched last year, and it already has 2 million registered online users. Digital innovation was also in evidence in the new e-book playbook for Julia Donaldson and Alex Scheffler’s Room on the Broom, which delivers a ‘slightly animated’ story with audio and three games. The London Book Fair also had an upbeat feeling. The British Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, made a surprise visit to the Fair and pointed out that Britain’s creative industries represent 8% of the economy and are growing at twice the rate of the economy as a whole. Margaret Hodge, the UK Culture Minister, took part in a seminar and praised publishing as ‘our most robust creative industry’. There weren’t many signs of the credit crunch hitting the book world, although the pace of company acquisitions seems to have slowed down at present. With the added impetus of a series of seminars organised by Publishing News, digitisation was the theme of the Fair, with a strong feeling that the tipping point for the e-book may be close. The major publishers are investing heavily in digitisation and increasingly promoting their books online, with a blurring of roles between publisher and bookseller. Co-edition sales held up surprisingly well, although traditionally important markets such as the US and Western Europe were weaker, being offset by strongly developing markets in Eastern Europe, Latin America and the Far East. In summary, these were two lively and upbeat book fairs, showing that the global book business is in surprisingly strong shape. Authors can take heart from this, and from the traditional view that books do well in recession, providing a relatively cheap form of entertainment. However there’s no doubt that it remains hard for new authors to find a publisher, unless their work seems destined for the bestseller lists.
Agents and 'an industry blood-lust for new things'In the weekend before the London Book Fair it is agents, not publishers, who are in the news. With the launch of United Agents and a new agents’ forum established in the UK, and an American agent heavily criticised for her author’s fraud, agents are very much under the spotlight. No author who has struggled to find an agent to represent them should be indifferent to what is happening amongst the agents’ ranks. New York agent Faye Bender was taken in just as much as the rest of the world by imposter Margaret B Jones, aka Peggy Seltzer, whose Love and Consequences was a smash hit. Although Bender has been heavily criticised, the author/agent relationship relies heavily on trust and cannot withstand a determined and thorough fraudster. Agents rely on publishers’ contracts with the author to enshrine warranties relating to accuracy. Gail Hochman, President of the US Association of Authors’ Representatives, says: ‘Every contract has a warranty clause and an agency clause. Those are my protections… It’s the author’s job to turn in honest copy.’ In the meantime, times are tough in the agenting world. Peter Cox of Redhammer has criticised the long-established UK Authors’ Agents’ Association and is in the process of setting up Agents Talking Shop, intended to be an informal discussion forum. He says: ‘This year is going to be horrible for most authors… And obviously, if our clients’ income drops, ours does too. As agents, we have to take an increasingly assertive approach towards revenue generation, and there has never been a better time to carefully examine our options in developing multiple income streams.’ The biggest news in the agency world is still emanating from PFD. Last week the book department heads of breakaway agency United Agents gave their first interview in the Bookseller. The new agency is a really big affair, with 35 agents and 75 staff in all, working across books, actors, film, tv and theatre. The book department claims that 99% of their authors have transferred to the new agency. The break with parent group CSS Stellar has been a long time in the making, and the agents have been unhappy for some time. Top literary agent Pat Kavanagh says it is ‘inappropriate’ for a literary agency to be owned by a third party or to be publicly listed ‘because you can’t be thinking about what’s happening to the share price, or whether shareholders are going to be cross with you. All that matters is doing the right job for your writers, even if it means turning something down that’s very lucrative.’ United Agents is based on an unusual model, as the start-up costs have been raised by staff taking a share in the company, although no single individual has contributed more than £100,000 ($197,000). Agenting is not as cash-intensive as publishing, but 75 heads represents a big salary bill in a difficult year, especially since the lucrative backlists of the PFD agency have had to be left behind. Contracts negotiated whilst the individual agents were at PFD will stay there and the agents’ commission will not follow the agents (or authors) to United Agents. Peter Cox’s comments warn of a difficult time to come, and the rumour mill is full of stories of small agencies facing problems. How can such a big new agency survive without the cushion of a backlist? Simon Trewin says: ‘Publishers are still as excited about new authors as they ever were. The challenge is to get them to take a duty of care over the third book if the first or second haven’t taken off. The danger is an industry blood-lust for new things.’
The Friday Project crashes/Borders US for saleThe collapse of The Friday Project with debts of £360,000 ($718,000) has startled the book world, especially since their turnover in the last year was only around half of their costs. Child of the Internet, it commanded the headlines and seemed to have a golden halo of success. Set up to source book projects from the web, the company was based on an idea whose time seemed to have come. Scott Pack, formerly of Waterstone’s, joined the original founders and proved a controversial and highly visible figure, guaranteeing the company a stream of publicity. But this week The Friday Project went into liquidation and many unhappy creditors will see little of the money they are owed, although it looks as if the skeleton of the company will be bought from the liquidators by HarperCollins UK. So where did The Friday Project go wrong? Anthony Cheetham, a major investor, said this week: ‘In retrospect, you can say the company was overvalued, but in my view they never raised enough funds in the first place to be able to invest enough in the bigger projects that would have pulled their profits up.’ Small can be beautiful in publishing, but only if a publisher has small ambitions and is very carefully run. If you are trying to play with the big boys you need the deep pockets of the corporation to buy potential bestsellers and promote them heavily. Meanwhile the world credit crisis is beginning to affect the book world. Borders, the second biggest book chain in the US, has been forced to put itself up for sale and was valued recently in the stock market at only $30m (£15m), 8% of its total annual sales. Group sales in 2007 were $3.8 bilion (£1.9bn), but it made a loss of $157m (£787m) and the total group debts were $554 million (£278m). The company sold its British and Irish arm to the entrepreneur Luke Johnson for £10m ($20m) last year, incurring a charge of $125 million (£62.6m) in dong so. It seems unlikely that Barnes & Noble, Borders’ major competitor, will be able to raise the cash to buy Borders, even if they wished to do so. Perhaps Amazon, which has had a considerable effect on Borders’ sales, will seize this opportunity to marry clicks with bricks. Unfortunately the current instability in the bookselling world does not bode well for authors or for readers, both groups being extremely dependant on the bookselling chains’ continued ability to get books to readers.
Agency launches POD plan as number of books published soarsWon’t anyone stick to what they’re good at? The latest instance of everyone trying out everyone else’s roles is big London literary agency PFD setting up an agreement with print on demand printer Lightning Source to bring their authors’ work back into print. It’s easy to see why this is an attractive idea, as plenty of good books are out of print and PFD have access to the rights, so they can present it as a service for authors. The only problem is that publishers and bookshops do perform a useful function, which can be summarised as getting books to readers, and that’s a job that PFD don’t have much experience of doing. Kate Pool of the UK Society of Authors says: ‘An agency sitting back and saying "you can find this book listed on a website" is very different to trying to find a publisher who’ll take the titles on and bring them back into print.’ You’d have thought that PFD are in enough trouble already. Not only have nearly all of its agents departed to set up another agency, but most of their authors have gone with them. The backlist usually stays, as the rule is that under the terms of any contract negotiated through an agency payments continue to be made to the author through that agency. A new threat has just loomed though, as Evelyn Waugh’s estate has been lost to PFD, after the Waugh family decided they were unhappy with the turmoil at the agency. The notorious American agent Andrew "the Jackal" Wylie made a successful lightning strike and the estate has decided to move all the Waugh titles to his agency. But what of print on demand? It’s flourishing, as many writers realise they can self-publish, and publishers finally get round to using it as a way of keeping their backlist in print. As a result the overall number of titles published in the UK soared last year to 118,602, up a whopping 36% on 2006, with backlist titles (published before 2007) also jumping by 28%. Lightning Source is opening a new plant in Milton Keynes shortly, equipped with the latest new machines to cope with the increasing demand. Very soon they will be able to produce colour books in the UK, as they do already in the US, and that will transform many areas of publishing, especially children’s books and the illustrated book market. WritersPrintShop self-publishing service Inside Publishing on Print on demand Print on demand –
and how it can make more money for you - an article by Morris Rosenthal
in the WritersServices site.
Writers' income under pressureWriters’ income is under increasing pressure. The recent meanness of the British government in cutting the amount paid to authors whose books are borrowed from libraries as part of the Public Lending Right scheme has highlighted this trend. The real situation is obscured by the fact that those authors who strike it rich tend to mop up most of the money. A study by the British Authors’ Licensing and Collecting Society last year showed that although £907.5m ($1,798m) had been earned by the 55,000 authors in Britain the previous year, 50% of that money went to just 10% of the authors. This means that 5,500 bestselling authors got an average annual income of £82,500 ($163,509), while the other 49,500 authors shared the rest, earning an average of just £4,000 (nearly $8,000) each. The moral has to be ‘Don’t give up the day job’ until your earnings are substantial and secure, for it has become harder than ever to get your book taken on by a publisher because their focus is on bestsellers. The fantastic sales generated by the Richard and Judy show in the UK and by Oprah Winfrey’s show in the US show that books, even sometimes quite challenging ones, can have a mass sale if they are well-promoted. Conversely, it has become harder to build a novel from a new author if they are not included in one of these shows or in one of the big chains’ promotions. The pressure that the Internet has placed on copyright is another threat to writers’ income. People feel that everything on the web should be free and attempts to get them to pay for content through micro-payment systems or subscription models have proved hard going in the fiction and popular non-fiction areas, although academic and specialist publishing are having more success with this. Perhaps paid-for e-books will provide the answer. There are three positive things about this rather depressing situation. Firstly, the dynamic growth of creative writing courses in both the US and the UK has offered many established writers the opportunity for paid employment. Many poets, in particular, pay their bills by teaching others how to write, an opportunity which did not exist fifteen years ago. The second thing is that print on demand has now made self-publishing a real possibility at a reasonable cost and given every writer access directly to the market. Even though the hard work involved to make a success of this should not be underestimated, at least writers can now take things into their own hands and for some self-publishing has proved the route to sales success or to a deal with a publisher. Thirdly, the Internet itself offers fabulous opportunities to reach a global market in a way which would not have been possible until recently. This low-cost means of getting to readers has transformed book publishing and will continue to do so, as the publishers themselves are now realising with their website developments and viral marketing campaigns. Few authors will have the deep pockets of publishers and be able to commission videos for online use, which are the current fashion. But individual authors can use their ingenuity and imagination to make their book visible on the web, as Russell Ash has done in this week’s Writer’s Success Story. WritersPrintShop self-publishing service Back to Top
Half of all book sales at a discountThe Friday Project, which was set up to ride the crest of the Internet wave by adapting material from that medium into book form, is shortly to go into liquidation after a pretax loss for the 13 months to 31 December of £705,713 ($1,425,632), and sales for the same period of just £357,000 ($721,186). This dispiriting news doesn’t necessarily mean that their publishing venture was a bad idea, although it may well mean that their costs outran their sales growth. But this was also the week in which Gail Rebuck, CEO of Random House UK, gave a major speech extolling the virtues of the book and saying that it did not matter whether it was delivered via a traditional paperback or a hand-held device: ‘As a publisher I am happy to supply either to customers, and the essence of what I am selling will be the same, whatever the technology transmitting it. I think there is an irreducible quality to reading that means the book will never die.’ Book sales through the Internet continue to grow, as was shown by the UK’s annual Books and the Consumer report this week. In this market they now amount to a fifth of all book sales by value, less than the US but more than most of the rest of the world. Growth in 2006 and 2007 came mainly from supermarkets and the Internet, and the value of purchases through each of these channels has doubled since 2004. Perhaps more notably, the volume of books bought at a discount last year was greater than those bought at full price for the first time. The UK must be one of the most heavily discounted book markets in the world and this shows the fundamental effect that deep discounting is having on book sales. However we should not despair just yet, as the survey showed that consumers aged between 12 and 79 years bought 6% more books in 2007 then the previous year, 342 million books at a value of £2.454bn (nearly $5bn). The discounting, especially three for two offers and deep supermarket discounts, meant that more books were sold. In spite of dour prognostications, a very large number of people in this difficult market are continuing to buy and read an increasing number of books. Scott Pack of the Friday Project on paperback sales in our Comment column Back to Top
Do reading promotions work?World Book DayLast Thursday, March 6th, was World Book Day in the UK and the Republic of Ireland. 23 April has been designated as UNESCO’s World Book Day for the rest of the world. In the UK the 2008 promotion included a competition for Great Books to Talk About (won by Boy A by Jonathan Trigell), a Schools Short Story Competition and a Schools Pack which is mailed to schools with free £1 book tokens for the children. There’s also the money raised for the book charity Book Aid International and 10 new Quick Reads, designed to provide short, exciting books specifically for adults who struggle with reading. National Year of ReadingIn the UK 2008 has been declared National Year of Reading and there are ambitious plans to spread the message across the country. Bedtime reading campaigns, campaigns for teenagers, reading places and much more kick off in April with the first monthly theme: ‘Reading is everywhere and it’s not just about books: you can read anything, anywhere and anytime.’ The campaign will use co-ordinators working for each local authority and bring in ideas and contributions from organisations across the country to create a critical mass of reading initiatives. After all, as Dr Seuss said: ‘The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more you learn, the more places you'll go.’ So, do these big generic campaigns work and can these ideas be picked up for use in other countries? The answer seems to be yes. Although it’s too soon to measure the effect of the UK’s National Year of Reading, there’s a lot of energy and some great ideas going into the campaign, which should make a real impact. As for World Book Day, it does make a real difference in the schools, many of which have supported it for several years. Quick Reads have some solid evidence of the improvement in adult literacy the programme has brought. In a survey they conducted, 90% of adults using Quick Reads said that improving their reading has made them feel better about themselves, 57% of these learners had never read a book since school and 90% of them said that, following Quick Reads, they now enjoyed reading. What’s more, a remarkable 57% said they felt their job prospects had improved and 39% said they felt more confident at work. Reading is a fundamental and essential skill in contemporary society. These initiatives to encourage children to read and to help adults find their way into books deserve everyone’s support. UNESCO World Book Day 23 April Back to Top
C S Lewis tops pollC S Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is the best children’s book of all time, according to a recent poll of 4,000 people aged 16 to 65 conducted by the British charity Booktrust. The second book in the list was The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle, a classic picture book which is said to have sold a copy a minute across the globe since it was first published in 1962, and which has influenced a whole generation of children’s picture book authors. Perhaps it’s no surprise that third place goes to Enid Blyton’s Famous Five Series, the first of which came out in 1942 and which consists of 21 books. (The Bookseller recently pointed out that Blyton earned £3.8m ($7.56m) in 2007, edging out many more recent authors.) Fourth was Winnie the Pooh by A A Milne, written in 1962, and the list also contained six of Roald Dahl’s titles. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince only made it to sixth place, but this is probably because the adults polled were reaching back into their own childhoods, long before the Harry Potter phenomenon, for their favourites. The survey also found that four in five parents read their children bedtime stories every night – a very encouraging statistic, although it does make you wonder how the sample was recruited. Perhaps though recent Children’s Laureate Jacqueline Wilson’s efforts in campaigning to persuade parents to read aloud to their children have borne fruit. In the US the first children’s laureate has recently been announced. Jon Scieszka, author of the much-loved The Stinky Cheese Man, has become the first American Ambassador for Young People’s Literature. No doubt his influence will be all to the good, as it has been in the UK, where a succession of children’s laureates, culminating in the current Laureate, the energetic and opinionated Michael Rosen, have been creating fantastic publicity for children’s books for a number of years. We’ll report on World Book Day on March 6th next week, but it’s sad to see that the site has just been hacked into, as anything which promotes books and reading, especially to children, has to be regarded as a good thing for writers. Back to Top
Amazon grabs AudibleThe recent news of the $300m (£153m) Amazon purchase of Audible, the digital audiobooks site, has made it the market leader. At a stroke this gives the Internet retailer a ready-made subscriber base and access to 80,000 spoken word titles which it can sell through all its channels, including its new Kindle e-book reader. Audible deals exclusively with downloads but it has deals in place with over 250 content providers. Although many publishers will welcome the increased sales opportunities this will bring, they are also nervous about the lack of competition in the spoken word download market. Jo Forshaw, chair of the Audiobook Publishing Association in the UK, said she thought the acquisition would ‘put the welly’ behind the audiobooks sector. But she added: ‘My only concern is that there will now be a massive push towards downloads. I think we shouldn’t kill off the CD yet, there are still a lot of legs in it.’ Her own company, Audiobooksonline, has developed a CD rental model, based on DVD rentals, which should be a good way to reach audiobook consumers. As News Review noted in its audiobooks coverage on 21 and 28 May 2007: ‘Traditionally audiobooks have appealed to bookish people with popular tastes, with a leaning towards older purchasers.’ There’s a huge gap between the predominantly older readers who buy audiobooks now and the new markets can be reached through downloads. It’s a bit like the traditional argument in publishing about whether you should target heavy book-buyers, encouraging them to buy more, or go for light buyers, a potentially huge market, if only they could be persuaded to buy more books. It looks like publishers have to do both, especially when the market is moving so fast. Writers for their part should seize the opportunity that audio offers and start recording their own material, as audio is an important way to market their work, as well as providing sales opportunities in itself. The rise of the cellphone novel, mentioned in last week’s News Review, shows how rapidly new markets can grow. In Japan If You, a cellphone novel by Rin, written during her senior year in high school, was voted number one by cellphone readers. It was turned into a 142 page hardcover book which went on to sell 400,000 copies, and became Japan’s fifth bestselling book of 2007. Rin tapped out passages on her cellphone and uploaded them to a website for would-be authors, suggesting also that the cellphone novel may offer new opportunities to unpublished authors. WritersServices audio section with step-by-step instructions Back to Top
The e-book arrives - or does it?This week has seen two big publishers announcing initiatives to prepare for the e-book world. At the same time, battle has been joined on e-book royalties. HarperCollins is to post entire books online for anyone to read. They believe that this will stimulate demand for e-books, but that no-one will want to read an entire book on screen. CEO Jane Friedmann says: ‘The best way to sell books is to have the consumer be able to read some of the content.’ Joel Rickett, Deputy Editor of the Bookseller, said: ‘HarperCollins is gambling that people aren’t comfortable reading for an extended period of time on screen.’ Random House, for its part, is making a business title by the brothers Chip and Dan Heath available online for $2.99 (£1.50) each chapter. In the meantime a battle is looming on e-book royalties. The US and current UK norm appears to be 25% of published price, but Random House and Little Brown in the UK have just announced to agents that they are going to press for 15% of net receipts. Their argument is that it is expensive to digitise books and make them available as e-books. Random House worldwide claims that it will not break even on its investment in its digital warehouse until 2013, but this obviously depends on the speed of take-up. Once set up, e-books will be very cheap to deliver, especially if they are sold online. No-one knows how they will sell. The very nature of potential e-book sales means that different royalties for different territories is a very dangerous concept for publishers, as there’s nothing to stop book-buyers downloading the book from a website anywhere in the world. Authors will want a decent share of the action and will not want to accept lower royalties from UK publishers. It’s been quiet recently on the Amazon Kindle front (see News Review 26 November), but e-book possibilities depend on the development of a universally marketed e-book reader at a reasonable cost. Readers of HarperCollins’ new e-books will not be able to download them to laptops or to an electronic reading device. In that sense their experiment is more akin to Amazon’s promotional Search Inside programme, which is thought to have increased sales. But whilst big publishers slug it out competitively with their digital developments, readers in Japan have already jumped ahead of them. Last year cellphone novels, composed and read on tiny cellphone screens, took five of the top ten spots in the bestseller list. More on this and on Amazon’s takeover of Audible next week. Back to Top
Striking writers winIn News Review of 5 November we noted the beginning of the Writers’ Guild strike in the US. Since then there have been occasional stories in the media about tv companies being forced to put out a diet of reruns and American audiences deserting their tv screens. The writers have stood firm through what must have been a very difficult time, and they are just about to settle after achieving their objectives. Two deadlines are looming which have forced the tv companies and studios to come to terms. February 15th is seen as the deadline for new material to be produced for the 2008-9 television season. On a longer timescale, the Screen Actors Guild contract expires in the summer of 2008 and studios must have been keen to settle this dispute well before that negotiation, as the actors could really stop the entertainment business in its tracks. So what was the dispute about and what has been gained? The writers were concerned about DVD residuals and, even more importantly, about the huge potential for new media, using such techniques as streaming. The tentative agreement became possible when it was agreed that writers would be paid a fixed residual amounting to about $1,300 (£668) for the right to stream a television program online. In the third year of their contract, they will achieve one of their major goals: payments amounting to 2% of the distributor's revenue from such streams. Writers will be paid a percentage of the distributor’s revenue rather than the flat fee for web-streamed television shows granted to the directors. The writers had insisted on this to ensure that they did not lose out on any new-media windfall the studios and networks may get from web video in the future. So what has been the effect of the strike? Its financial impact on writers, who have been on strike since early November, has been considerable. The strike is generally reckoned to have cost about $1 billion (nearly £514 million), with a particularly devastating effect on Los Angeles, the home of the American entertainment industry. As for the long-term effects, writers will now get a share in the income from dvd and new media. In a Gallup poll conducted six weeks into the strike 60% of Americans sided with the writers. TV viewers may not all return to their screens, as the aftermath of the 1988 strike was that around 10% of tv audiences were permanently lost, and there are more alternatives to tv now. But the writers have fought their corner and established their importance to the entertainment industry, as well as their key role as content-originators who must be paid for their contribution. Back to Top
Boom time for creative writingThis weekend has seen the Association of Writers and Writing Programs annual conference in New York City. It’s a sold-out event with 7,000 attendees. The Association was founded in 1967 with 13 members, at a time when creative writing was in its infancy, to support the growing presence of literary writers in literary education in the US. It now has 400 colleges and universities as members and there are 720 degree-conferring programmes in creative writing in the US. AWP says it has ‘helped to establish the largest system of literary patronage the world has ever seen’. It was founded by 15 writers who represented 12 writing programmes which had been set up in the teeth of fierce opposition from scholars, who felt that the study of literature should focus on the greats, and should not involve actual writing. Expansion has not been quite so fast in the UK, but there are now around a hundred university courses for creative writers, as well as a host of evening classes and privately run courses. In the meantime this is a booming area across the globe, with many new courses being set up to satisfy demand. The huge expansion in creative writing is a response to soaring demand from a wide range of aspiring writers. This is part of the booming world of writing, but it’s also a result of the growing realisation that knowing how to write well is a really useful skill. It would be interesting to know how many of the students on these courses go on to make careers as writers, but perhaps that isn’t really the point. Creative writing courses are very lucrative for the colleges and universities, with full student rolls and plenty of demand, including a large number of mature students. On both sides of the Atlantic many universities have well-known authors teaching their courses and attracting students. In the States Wallace Stegner’s course at Stanford was highly influential and the pioneering University of Iowa course was once taught by Kurt Vonnegut, amongst many literary luminaries. In the UK the Professor of Creative Writing at Royal Holloway is the Poet Laureate, Andrew Motion. The search for celebrity has recently hit the headlines with the news that novelist Martin Amis will be paid £80,000 ($157,258) a year to teach 28 hours at Manchester University, a stupendous £3,000 ($5,897) an hour. Another example is recent T S Eliot Prize winner Sean O’Brien, who is Professor or Creative Writing at Newcastle University. Now that many writers, especially poets, support themselves through teaching creative writing, the courses are making an essential contribution to the creative economy by helping writers to support themselves so they can go on writing. Back to Top
Can fumes make your writing more lowbrow?Joan Brady, the distinguished author of Theory of War, which won the Whitbread Book of the Year in 1993, has made the astonishing claim that the fumes from a factory next door to her home made her writing more downmarket. Brady is an interesting writer. An American who started out as a ballet dancer with the New York City Ballet, she married a writer and moved to the UK in 1979. Her Whitbread win in 1993 was with a novel about a little white boy who was sold into slavery when only four years old, and was based on her grandfather’s life. As the first woman and still the only American to win this coveted award, Brady was assured of a secure place as a literary novelist. But then the local council in Totnes in Devon gave permission for a shoe factory to be installed in a one-time theatre next door to her house. Brady started suffering numbness in her hands and legs, which she claimed were caused by solvents used by the shoe manufacturer, Conker. Doctors later confirmed that she had suffered neuropathy, or nerve damage, which was likely to have been caused by chemicals. She fought the council and the shoe factory through two and a half years and no less than 15 court appearances, and finally received an out-of-court settlement of £115,000 last week. Whilst all this was going on and unable to concentrate on the literary novel she had been writing, Brady started working on a thriller with a friend. And there’s no doubt that Bleedout, her eighth novel, is quite different from her earlier books. But can the quality and type of writing a writer produces be affected by chemicals? Could the fumes have made her ‘go lowbrow’ and write a violent thriller, putting her literary writing on one side? It seems a unusual claim but the evidence certainly suggests that the battle with the council may have contributed to her state of mind. Her website says: ‘Their relentless pursuit of me through the courts took on an almost messianic quality and focused my attention as never before on issues of justice and injustice.’ In an interview with Matt Craig for Shots Ezine, the author said: ‘My reactions seemed way out of proportion, although I’ve found out since that they’re pretty standard in people who are cornered, especially people unjustly accused of crimes. All I thought about was blood and destruction. I kept watching Terminator. I wanted to kill people. I was too agitated to complete the literary novel I was working on, so a friend suggested I try a thriller instead. Bleedout was the result.’ Brady is now working on the second thriller of a two-book contract and Bleedout has been well-received. The Daily Mirror said: ‘Buy it… brilliant… move over John Grisham’ and it looks as if the author might be set for commercial success. At least her battles have given her a good story to tell and an absolutely unique way to publicise her book. It seems only fair that she should get lots of attention from the media and that Bleedout should hit the bestseller lists. Back to Top
Indies in the ascendantThe New Year has brought some welcome news on independent publishing and bookselling, both of which are especially important to writers. The UK figures for 2006 show that 96 stores closed and only 64 opened. This has been turned around in 2007, with 81 new independent bookshops opening and only 72 closing. Meryl Halls, Head of Membership Services at the Booksellers’ Association, said: ‘As one of our members has said, 2007 saw the renaissance of the independent bookselling sector, and this story would seem to be borne out by both new shops opening and sales performance.’ Book Marketing Limited’s figures showed a 2007 increase of 6% in volume sales from independents, compared to a 3% fall at the chains. More people seem to be valuing their local bookshops, and the stores that have survived the cull of recent years have worked out how to retain their customers and are now fighting fit. This doesn’t explain the phenomenal optimism shown by those opening the new stores. Michael Neil of wholesaler Bertrams said that people ‘like the idea of being a bookseller. It’s seen as a noble thing to do. As the chain bookstores have consolidated over the past 18 months, there are opportunities for good local indies to step in’. You can see this in action in a place like the city of Bath, where high-profile bookshop casualties have been succeeded in the past year by high-profile successes, such as Topping & Co. On the publishing front there is the success of the Independent Alliance. This powerful group of mid-sized independents has shown that banding together to support a really good sales operation is a good way to build independent publishers’ sales. The Alliance reckons that it is now the right size, and will not be adding any further publishers. Its success has inspired others to follow and will hopefully lead to further groupings involving other small publishers. Since big publishers concentrate on the chains, smaller ones have a real opportunity to sell more effectively into the independent bookshops. All of this is encouraging news for writers. It is big publishers’ and bookshop chains’ focus on bestsellers which has cramped the opportunities for new writers to get published. But independent publishers and booksellers can focus on individual books and authors, and back their hunches, if they choose, provided that they can survive and run successful businesses. It’s good news that book-buyers have responded to this more bookish approach. It may not be helping independent booksellers directly (although many have developed effective websites) but the web also provides a brilliant way for a huge range of books from publishers of all sizes to find readers. Back to Top
Should publishing be publicly funded?The current controversy surrounding cuts in grants to regularly-funded organisations by Arts Council England has raised the interesting question of whether publishing should be publicly funded. If it is, which is the case in the UK and many other European countries, how do you decide what deserves funding and what doesn’t? The American model presents a stark contrast, providing very little public funding for literature, and that mostly at state rather than federal level. But Americans have a strong tradition of philanthropy to the arts, and individual donors provide most of the funding for literature. The situation is complicated in the UK by the fact that large amounts of public funding have recently been diverted from the arts to support the 2012 London Olympic Games, although there will be a cultural Olympiad, hopefully featuring literature, to accompany them. In the recent spending round it was widely expected that the Arts Council would have its own funding cut, so when in the end it received an uplift, the funding body had already worked out where to cut what it gave to its regularly-funded organisations. It decided to wield the knife in any case on the grounds that a general review was overdue. The problem for literature funding is that, unlike most of the arts, the funded sector sits alongside a large and relatively flourishing commercial sector. So the question arises, what should be funded and what can stand on its own feet? Most publishing of ‘literary’ novels takes place as part of publishers’ commercial activity. The literati may complain, but literary fiction is fairly well-received in the UK and a number of prominent prizes, most notably the Booker, help to focus readers’ attention on the books. Publishing is a relatively cheap operation to fund. It does not need buildings - theatres, concert halls or art galleries - unlike the rest of the arts, and also does not require large salary bills, unlike orchestras for instance, in order to make an impact. Its relationship to the commercial sector means funders assume that literature doesn’t need support in the same way. So what do the UK Arts Councils actually fund? It’s mostly poetry, with some support for literary translations. There certainly is an argument for saying that poetry badly needs the help. With the honourable exceptions of Faber, with its long tradition of poetry, and the small poetry lists at Jonathan Cape and Picador, big publishers do not support poetry. So, if the funding was taken away, there’s little doubt that many fewer poets would get their work into print. But poetry is managing to hold its own. It has been featured on the flagship BBC Today programme every day this week in the shape of the T S Eliot Prize contenders and many people enjoy it. Its practitioners scramble to make any kind of living and mostly fund themselves by teaching creative writing. Poets don’t expect to live off writing poetry, but (like all writers) they certainly want it to be published. The other genre which is state-funded is literary translation and this is mostly what has just been cut, affecting the publishers Dedalus and Arcadia. Dedalus is threatening to sue the Arts Council o the grounds that it has not followed its own procedures for withdrawal of funding, and is also trying to make this into a class action suit. Translation has high costs and a relatively small market in general. But literary translation has never been more popular in the UK and is always going to be a minority interest amongst readers. So does it deserve to be funded, more than science fiction for instance? Is it inherently more worthwhile? This debate will run and run. For now, the answer to these conundrums seems to be that funded publishers owe it to their funders, as the recipients of public investment, to make as good a job of their publishing as they can. In particular they need to reach as many readers as possible, and – for their authors’ sake as well - to make a decent fist of selling the books they publish. Back to Top
A good Christmas for booksIt is good to be able to follow up last week’s story on the continuing strength of reading with a report that Christmas 2007 was not the disaster that had been feared in the book trade. In the UK sales for the four weeks up to 29th December were up 5% on the same period last year. In the US the independents reported solid sales, although the chains continued to consolidate their lead, accounting for 33% of unit book purchases in the January through September period, according to figures compiled by PubTrack Consumer. While the US chains had the highest market share, purchases made through online retailers represented 20% of book purchases and the UK showed the same trend towards increasing internet sales. The Christmas holiday falling on a Tuesday meant that shoppers had an extra three days to visit bookstores, at a time when it was generally thought too late to order from Amazon. The internet giant is nonetheless expected to show record figures. In the UK it was a ‘range’ Christmas, with no one book dominating the bestseller lists. This is actually much better for booksellers, as it’s easier to keep a range of books in stock and also there was more of a feeling that books offered something for everyone. Overall, the year to 29th December showed growth of 6.2% by value in the UK, which even after inflation is 3.2%, a solid achievement. Perhaps these results are not particularly remarkable, but they have to be seen against the background of a year in which the demise of the book was widely discussed, with fears about the dangers implicit in the rapid rate of change and possible fallout from digitisation. January 2008 shows the business pages full of gloomy predictions, and the consensus is that the consumer boom is over in both the US and the UK. The expectation is that the credit crunch is going to affect everything, even if both countries manage to avoid sliding into actual recession. And how would recession affect the book trade? The received wisdom is that books do well in times of economic downturn because they are a relatively cheap form of entertainment and gift purchase. Previous recessions have not always shown this to be the case, and there’s no doubt that the growth and prospering of the chains internationally have been attributed to a consumer boom which relates very directly to people having more discretionary spending power. But at least the book trade is dealing with books, to which many heavy readers are addicted, and have become used to buying rather than borrowing. The international book business will not emerge unscathed from the likely downturn in 2008, but it looks much better placed than most. And this means that new authors will continue to get their books published, even if it is gong to be tough getting through to publishers and agents. Back to Top
'Why we read books'An article in a recent edition of the New York Times was headed: A Good Mystery: Why We Read Books. At a time when the book seems more than ever before to be under pressure from the competition of the Internet, TV, computer games and so on, it is important to remember that millions of people across the globe still read books. In third world countries they thirst for them, seeing them as part of education and a way out of poverty. Some of the best charities working to assuage this hunger, such as Book Aid International, are doing terrific work to shift some of the books we take for granted in the West to countries where they will be better appreciated. Their inspired Reverse Book Club means that a donation of just £5 ($10) a month can provide no less than 48 books a year to readers in the developing world. Reading is a uniquely private matter. Sara Nelson, editor in chief of the US trade journal Publishers Weekly, says: ‘Why people read what they read is a great unknown and personal thing.’ Alan Bennett’s novella The Uncommon Reader imagines the Queen suddenly becoming a voracious reader late in life through reading Nancy Mitford’s The Pursuit of Love. For many children it was Harry Potter which turned them into readers, but whatever it is, the pleasure of reading is that it is something which will stay with you throughout your life. As long as your eyes hold up, books will continue to offer a fantastic range of experience, stimulating your imagination, extending your horizons and taking you to another world of fiction or fact. Dean Koontz, who sells about 17 million copies of his books a year, wrote in the Wall Street Journal that the web is ‘a low-cost way of generating a connection between writers and their audience’. The Internet does indeed provide wonderful ways of linking the very private world of writers, readers and the books they read. The success of sites such as BookCrossing, which enables people from 130 countries to liberate books into the world, show the strength of the urge to share. Bookmooch is a new means of international book exchange facilitated by the web. American bibliophile John Buckman got the idea when on a visit to the English city of Norwich in 2005. A local community centre had a book-sharing corner with a sign that said ‘Leave a book. Take a book.’ He managed to recreate that sense of community online and Bookmooch already has 40,000 members around the world. Participants create an inventory of what they have and a wish list of what they are looking for. So can we move into the New Year with confidence that readers will still clamour for books? In richer countries bookshops are thronged with keen readers and the Internet is offering new ways to find them and share them around. In spite of all the concerns about literacy, the thirst for books remains unabated. We are a long way yet from seeing anything which will replace them. |
