Now it's beginning to look as if World Book Night may shortly become just that, rather than an aspirational name for the adult version of the UK's World Book Day. The United States is to partner the UK, launching World Book Night in 2012. Read more
In the midst of all the gloom and doom, the Frankfurt Book FairWorld's largest trade fair for books; held annually mid-October at Frankfurt Trade Fair, Germany; First three days exclusively for trade visitors; general public can attend last two. has been pretty much business as usual. Writing on the last day of the Fair, visitor figures are so far up 8.1% on last year, although there has been a slight drop in exhibitor numbers. Read more
No 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. Read more
Amazon 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. Read more
Mergers and further conglomeratisation are shaking the foundations of the international publishing world, as the book trade continues to become more like other businesses, and is similarly affected by globalisation. Read more
A recent heated debate at BookExpo in Washington has highlighted the argument about territorial rights between UK and US publishers. Carolyn Reidy, President and Publisher of Simon and Schuster, accused British publishers of engaging in 'a land grab in continental Europe based on the thinnest of legal and business pretences'. Read more
A recent article in The Australian highlights the problem facing literary fiction writers in Australia. Brian Castro, prize-winning author of six novels, had difficulty in getting his seventh novel, Shanghai Dancing, into print. Read more
This has been the weekend of the Frankfurt Book FairWorld's largest trade fair for books; held annually mid-October at Frankfurt Trade Fair, Germany; First three days exclusively for trade visitors; general public can attend last two., rather later this year than usual and, with 7,223 exhibitors from 101 countries exhibiting 380,655 titles, the biggest ever. Read more
Sad news about redundancies and an Australian bookshop chain going bust show how the way books are sold is changing. This will affect everyone, from writers right down through the book chain to readers. Read more
In a move that is sure to stoke controversy about online sales of second-hand books, Abebooks, the American used book site, has announced an alliance with giant online bookseller Amazon, to be called Amazon Marketplace. This will enable the thousands of booksellers who currently list their used, rare and out-of-print books on Abebooks sites to access Amazon's huge customer base. Read more
'I was trained by poetry where you can just write ambience and atmosphere. But in a novel, if there's not a story that people are interested in, with characters that they care about, they'll close the book.'
In the third in a series on the implications of AI for publishing, Nadim Sadek argues that effective advertising is now feasible for everyone, and for all kinds of titles
A publishing friend of mine recently told me about a sales report they'd received from a major retailer in which some of their books had zero sales. It turned out that there had been plenty of sales, however-they just all went to counterfeiters. In case you think this is an outlier, it's not. Counterfeiting is a serious, nontrivial problem facing the industry.
If you read the recently unsealed materials from the federal antitrust lawsuit against Amazon, you'll see why the company wanted to keep them under wraps. According to the unredacted notes from one meeting, Jeff Bezos directed his team to stuff more ads into search results, even if it meant accepting more ads internally categorized as irrelevant to what users were looking for. Read more
The U.K. Publishers Association (PA) was established in 1896 and is a cornerstone of the British publishing industry, working with a diverse array of companies to promote innovation, collaboration, and commercial success. Read more
With English as a shared language, there is a natural relationship between the American and British publishing industries. Most of the world's top publishing companies, be they conglomerates or independent publishers, have operations in each country, typically in New York City and London. Literary traffic travels both ways across the Atlantic.
The UK is experiencing a boom in book clubs, according to new data from event listing companies.
Book club listings on the ticketing site Eventbrite increased by 350% between 2019 and 2023 - a "much stronger" growth than the overall increase in UK-based listings over the same period. Between 2022 and 2023 alone, book club listings on the site rose by 41%. Read more
"We don't understand the consequences of AI with regards to copyright," Brazil's Karine Gonçalves Pansa, president of the International Publishers Association (IPA), said, when asked to name the most important issues facing publishing right now. "We can say, very easily, that our content is being used, without permission, and without license, by AI."
'I have learned so much from working with other poets, travelling and reading with them, spending days discussing poems in progress. There is the sense that we are all, as writers, part of something which is more powerful than any of us.'