The Observer offers a look at the potential new reality of daily business in the wake of the economic crisis. “The stifling timidity many editors and agents are predicting appears not to have taken hold” yet but, “soon, though, people may find themselves compelled to be more wary. Only the most established agents will be able to convince publishers to take a chance on an unknown novelist or a historian whose chosen topic does not have the backing of a news peg. The swollen advances that have come to represent all that is reckless and sinful about the way the […]
Archives for October 2008
International News: Sony Goes to Germany; Bloomsbury Goes to Qatar; Amazon Supports Translation; and More
Sony has confirmed that they will release their ebook Reader in Germany next Spring, working in partnership with bookseller Thalia for selling the devices and wholesaler Libri for selling and serving the ebook files. Libri is hoping to have “thousands” of titles available for the launch. Bloomsbury is partnering with the Qatar Foundation to create a new publisher house for English and Arabic books in the Middle East. Called Bloomsbury Qatar Foundation Publishing and based in Doha, it will publishing general fiction and non-fiction for both adults and for children, but also educational books for schools, academic books for universities […]
People
Co-founder of Weldon Owen John Owen has been named group publisher of Bonnier Publishing, comprising nine companies in the US, UK, Australia, New Zealand and France, said to have combined revenue of over $120 million a year. CEO Des Higgins says: “Bonnier Publishing is growing rapidly. With a presence in every major continent we see tremendous opportunity for our companies to cooperate more to realize our full potential as a group. I’m delighted to appoint John Owen as group publisher. John’s role is not to replace the outstanding and talented people who run our companies but to help identify global […]
Business Winner: When Markets Collide
Mohamed El-Erian won the FT/Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year award for WHEN MARKETS COLLIDE: Investment Strategies for the Age of Global Economic Change, “a timely alert to the fundamental changes taking place in today’s global economic and financial systems – and a call to action for investors who may fall victim to misinterpreting important signals.” CEO of Goldman Sachs Lloyd Blankfein says the book “provides invaluable context for the global financial crisis and does so in an extremely accessible and compelling way.” FT editor Lionel Barber says the fourth winner of their award “is lucid and prescient in […]
National Book Award Finalists
Fiction nominees range from the 81-year-old Peter Matthiessen for a book the AP calls “an 890-page revision of a trilogy of novels he released in the 1990s” to debut novels from Rachel Kushner and Salvatore Scibona. The winners will be named November 19: FictionAleksandar Hemon, The Lazarus Project (Riverhead)Rachel Kushner, Telex from Cuba (Scribner)Peter Matthiessen, Shadow Country (Modern Library)Marilynne Robinson, Home (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)Salvatore Scibona, The End (Graywolf Press) NonfictionDrew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (Alfred A. Knopf)Annette Gordon-Reed, The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (W.W. Norton & Company)Jane Mayer, The […]
Booker Bulletin: Adiga's White Tiger Wins
Per the traditional pattern, the favorite never wins. Debut novelist Aravind Adiga’s THE WHITE TIGER (William Morris’s big book at the London Book Fair in 2007 if you’ll recall) won the Booker Prize, just announced in London. Published by Atlantic Books in the UK (their first Booker victory) and just released in trade paperback by Free Press in the US, Adiga prevailed over bettor’s favorite, Sebastian Barry’s THE SECRET SCRIPTURE. It’s the third debut novel to win the prize. Chair of the judges Michael Portillo remarked, “The novel undertakes the extraordinarily difficult task of gaining and holding the reader’s sympathy […]