From Wired: For several decades, textbook publishers followed the same basic model: Pitch a hefty tome of knowledge to faculty for inclusion in lesson plans; charge students an equally hefty sum; revise and update its content as needed every few years. Repeat. But the last several years have seen a shift at colleges and universities—one … Read more
From Bloomberg: Amazon makes no sense. It’s the most befuddling, illogically sprawling, and—to a growing sea of competitors—flat-out terrifying company in the world. It sells soap and produces televised soap operas. It sells complex computing horsepower to the U.S. government and will dispatch a courier to deliver cold medicine on Christmas Eve. It’s the third-most-valuable … Read more
From The Lantern (Ohio State University): With the closing of Student Book Exchange in December, students were left looking for alternatives to purchase textbooks other than those at Barnes and Noble. Why the need for alternatives? Without other options around campus, students are forced to go Ohio State’s official bookstore — arguably the only one within … Read more
A comment to one of the many Amazon posts Passive Guy has made recently included a link to Borderlands Books, a San Francisco fantasy, science fiction and horror bookstore selling new and used books. Of specific interest was an essay written by owner Alan Beatts entitled Amazon is Nobody’s Friend, Part One Excerpts from a much … Read more
From Morse: The path to publication generally requires authors to sign a “publishing contract” that covers such topics as: manuscript delivery and acceptance, copyright ownership and grants; royalty advances, rates and payment; author warranties and indemnities; contract duration and rights reversion (out-of-print); options on new works; and limitations on competing works. But if you’re an … Read more
From The Economist: Imagine living in a rundown apartment building on the Lower East Side in Manhattan. When covid-19 hits in 2020, you do not have the money to escape to a second home in the Hamptons or the Hudson Valley. Instead, in the evening you make your way up to the rooftop of your … Read more
From The NewYorker: In 1989, Gerald Howard had been a book editor for about ten years, and his future filled him with dread. His primary fear, he wrote in a widely read essay for The American Scholar, was “a faster, huger, rougher, dumber publishing world.” He had entered the industry during a time of profound change. … Read more
From The New Publishing Standard: Publishers Weekly carries news of a US census Bureau report showing that US bookstore sales “dropped 17.3% in August, falling to $872 million.” Per PW, “traditionally, August and January are two of biggest sales months for bookstores, since they incorporate the rush period at college campuses.“ Jim Milliot notes, “For instance, Barnes & … Read more
From The Wall Street Journal: A hardworking teenager—let’s call her Amanda—excels at school. She’s a pianist, a varsity athlete, an honor student and the president of the debate club. She gets early acceptance to an elite university, lands the right summer internships, and, after graduation, secures the job of her dreams. Amanda has run the … Read more
From The Wall Street Journal: The title of “How Do We Know Ourselves? Curiosities and Marvels of the Human Mind” suggests that Hope College psychologist David Myers will, in this brief book, focus primarily on the process of self-discovery. But a better title might have been “How Well Do We Know Ourselves?” The answer that emerges, over … Read more
From Women Writers, Women’s Books: It is a truth universally acknowledged by the how-to-write-a-novel industrial complex that a thriller in want of a good plot must be in possession of a ticking time bomb. I learned this the hard way while trying to write a novel after inspiration struck, anvil-on-Wile E. Coyote-style. I was obsessed … Read more
From Electric Lit: p until my early 20s, I had never heard of the Chinese Exclusion Act. I remember taking classes on Mississippi history during my childhood in Oxford, then Texas government, and later the story of the Alamo during my teenage years in Austin. Our history textbooks were heavy and thick, always a pain … Read more
From Research and Markets: The global book publishers market is expected to grow from $87.92 billion in 2020 to $92.68 billion in 2021 at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 5.4%. The growth is mainly due to the companies rearranging their operations and recovering from the COVID-19 impact, which had earlier led to restrictive … Read more
From The Wall Street Journal: Edward Gibbon sits proudly upon my bookshelf. A set of volumes that I own, neatly stacked, comprises his “History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.” What do you make of me because it is there? The set might indicate that I am a classicist, a scholar. It … Read more
From The Atlantic: Early in Rescuing Socrates: How the Great Books Changed My Life and Why They Matter for a New Generation, Roosevelt Montas describes an intellectual origin story that I found strikingly familiar. Montas, a fatherless teenager who had recently immigrated to the Bronx from the sticks of the Dominican Republic and was still … Read more
From Publishers Weekly: When the Association of American Publishers released its final industrywide sales report for 2020 last month, it showed another basically flat year, with sales of $25.71 billion, down 0.2% compared to 2019. The small decline was in keeping with the overall pattern over the past five years. Between 2016 and 2020, overall … Read more
From Forbes: When Allison Trowbridge was writing her book, Twenty Two, she found herself incredibly frustrated by the process. As she started talking to other authors, she found she wasn’t alone in that sentiment. This experience is what sparked the seeds of an idea – why was there no social media platform for authors to … Read more
From The Wall Street Journal: What a pleasure these days to come across a book that unabashedly, cheerfully celebrates the lasting power of literature. Jonathan Bate takes his cue straight from one of the subjects of his dual biography “Bright Star, Green Light.” “A thing of beauty is a joy for ever,” chanted the Romantic … Read more
From Slate: For many families and schools, e-books were a lifeline to keep kids reading during lockdown.Total numbers of digital books borrowed from libraries hit 289 million in 2020—a 33 percent increase over 2019. That makes the feisty public library the main challenger to Amazon, which almost completely monopolizes private sales of e-books and sold … Read more
From The Wall Street Journal: In Voltaire’s “Candide,” the protagonist’s servant asks his master to explain the meaning of optimism. To which his master replies: “It is the mania for insisting that all is well when all is by no means well.” There is perhaps no more perfect description of the human condition, as all … Read more
From BBC News: More than 2,500 UK university staff have called for an investigation into the “scandal” of excessive pricing of academic e-books. “Price rises are common, sudden and appear arbitrary” with some digital books increasing by 200%, they say in a letter to Education Committee MPs. Organiser Johanna Anderson said some e-texts can cost 10 … Read more
From veteran publishing consultant Mike Shatzkin: The global infrastructure for the book business that is not Amazon is owned and operated by the Ingram Content Group. In fact, a lot of the global infrastructure of the book business that is identified as Amazon is actually Ingram. And on top of that, there would probably have been no … Read more
From Marketplace: Charles Robinson, a bookshop owner from Atlanta, asked Marketplace this question: Why are books actually marked with a price on them? Music isn’t. Movies aren’t. Most retail items that I could think of that you would find at resellers aren’t in fact. . . . . You may not be able to judge … Read more
From The Wall Street Journal: When I arrived in Tokyo in the late 1990s for a five-year stint as a correspondent, one of my biggest surprises was the near total absence in Northeast Asia of international organizations that could foster and channel cooperation in the area. I had come to Japan from West Africa, a … Read more
Yesterday, PG had a post about a Publishing Perspectives piece discussing a New York Times article condemning Amazon’s sale of “counterfeit books,” many of which originated overseas. An alert commenter to that post mentioned a U.S. Supreme Court case that may be relevant, Kirtsaeng v. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 568 U.S. 519 (2013) PG … Read more
From Publishing Perspectives: In her statement issued today (August 13), the Association of American Publishers‘ president and CEO Maria A. Pallante has pointed out that the book publishing industry is in no way out of the woods, as Donald Trump’s administration continues its lurching sequence of threats and feints on a proposed US$300 billion in … Read more
From Publishing Perspectives: In one of those quirky coincidences of news coverage, a familiar number has arisen in the top-line reporting from the United States’ Authors Guild about author incomes. . . . . Since 2009, their newly released report says, median incomes for authors from writing have fallen by 42 percent. And when the United Kingdom’s … Read more
From The Washington Post: Print books are back. I think. “People thought physical books were goners,” said Jed Lyons, chief executive of Lanham, Md.-based Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group. He should know. Lyons, 66, ships about 41,000 books a day across the United States and to Europe. He has been in the publishing business since … Read more
From Author Earnings: It has been nearly a year since our last Author Earnings report, which is probably far too long between updates. But while we haven’t said much publicly during that time, behind the scenes we’ve been super busy on the commercial side, and as a result we’ve taken our industry data and analytics … Read more
From The Digital Reader: Some retailers like Amazon try their best to make customers happy, secure in the knowledge that a happy customer is a repeat customer. Then there is Barnes & Noble, a company out to cause suffering, destroy customers’ futures, and (if they have time ) make blood rain from the sky. B&N … Read more
From The Atlantic: As christmas approached in 2015, the price of pumpkin-pie spice went wild. It didn’t soar, as an economics textbook might suggest. Nor did it crash. It just started vibrating between two quantum states. Amazon’s price for a one-ounce jar was either $4.49 or $8.99, depending on when you looked. Nearly a year … Read more
From CNet: Generations of college students have lugged expensive textbooks around campus. But a few years from now, students could shuck that burden as web technology radically changes what exactly a book is. Imagine a chemistry book with a pop-up periodic table of the elements for instant reference, a sucrose molecule that rotates under your … Read more
From Forbes: Barnes & Noble has had a troubled few years. Part of the problem is that it continues to be a tablet business with a chain of bookshops connected to it rather than the other way around – with the tablet and ebook reader business growing at a savage pace, while the bookshop dawdles. … Read more
Another good email on the publishing business from Dave Farland just arrived. I’ve picked up a ton of new readers recently (Welcome!) who may not know about Dave. He’s a long-time prolific author and taught university creative writing courses for Stephanie Meyer and Brandon Sanderson and many other successful authors. Check the David Farland category … Read more