Last night was World Book Night. In communities across the U.S. and beyond, people and groups organized efforts to give out free copies of various books in what Anna Quindlen, an honorary chairperson for the event, describes as “an intellectual Halloween, only better.” While World Book…
Call him what you will — and people called him a lot of things — there’s no question that one of the giants of American publishing died yesterday. Barney Rosset, famed avant-garde publisher, and even more famed for publishing book after book at his Grove…
An extraordinary Associated Press obituary of John Sargent Sr., who was the CEO of Doubleday from 1963-78 and published everyone from Dwight D. Eisenhower to Stephen King, and hired Jacqueline Kennedy to be one of his editors, is a revealing look at publishing from a different…
“I predict,” writes novelist Rex Pickett (Sideways), “in less than 10 years time, the traditional publishing industry, now moribund and flailing like a bird on broken wings, will be dead, or will morph into something almost totally unrecognizable from what it was for a century.” Prognostications…
Ten years ago, Melville House founders and publishers Dennis Johnson and Valerie Merians were “Babes in the tangled wood of modern publishing,” writes WWWord.com in its recent profile of the indie publishing company. “They stumbled in and never left.” Now in its 10th year, Melville…
Nancy Pearl, the reigning “Librarian of the Year” and widely acknowledged champion of all things library science, has done the unthinkable: partner with Amazon. BusinessWire reports: Amazon.com Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN) today announced Nancy Pearl’s Book Lust Rediscoveries series, a line of Pearl’s favorite, presently out-of-print…
Yesterday, Edan Lepucki in The Millions wrote a great piece on the perils of self-publishing and the benefits of working with a small publishing house. She also noted that “the conversation about self-publishing too often ignores the role of independent publishing houses in this shifting…
We read in Publishing Perspectives that English is no longer the lingua franca of the publishing industry in India because a large number of local languages are now being translated directly into foreign languages, entirely cutting out the colonial middleman. The same just happened to…
We wrote yesterday about problems with publishing in Latin America. Tragically, those problems were massively exacerbated a few weeks ago when the multinational Spanish-language publisher Norma decided to discontinue four of its lines: adult fiction, non-fiction, self-help and pocket editions. The group is based in Colombia…
Last week, Pablo Dittborn (the Editor-in-Chief of Random House Chile) discussed issues with transcontinental publishing with Andres Hax in Publishing Perspectives. Their conversation was thought provoking and surprising, since we personally didn’t know that there was so much variation in, say, the content of a…
