At this morning’s opening press conference, Frankfurt Book Fair director Juergen Boos said, “The book sector follows its own rules, even in the face of the international financial crisis. This has been demonstrated by a survey of the heads of German publishing houses, which the Book Fair recently carried out in cooperation with the magazine buchreport. Although there were almost as many pessimists as optimists among the respondents, the majority opinion was that the business situation for publishers would remain consistent.” The biggest growth at this year’s show comes, not surprisingly, in the Digital Market Place in Hall 4.2, which […]
Archives for October 2008
Booker Tonight; German Book Prize Prize
The naming of the Booker Prize winner tonight in London should spark some activity tomorrow at the Frankfurt Book Fair. This is an unusual year, though, with low sales for all six shortlisted titles. All together, the six books have recorded lifetime sales of 32,342 copies via Nielsen Bookscan. Only Linda Grant’s The Clothes on Their Backs is available in paperback, and that book has sold the most of the six. Bookmakers Ladbrokes has Sebastian Barry’s THE SECRET SCRIPTURE as their 2-to-1 favorite, followed by Steve Toltz’s A FRACTION OF THE WHOLE at 6-to-1, but the bettor’s favorite generally does […]
Young Kundera an Informant?
The Czech Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes says in a report that when novelist Milan Kundera was 21, he told police a guest in his student dorm was a spy. The NYT says: “The police quickly arrested the man, Miroslav Dvoracek, who had defected to Germany in 1948 and was said to have been recruited by United States-backed anti-Communists as a spy against the Czech government. He was sentenced to 22 years in prison.” Kundera said via a statement from French publisher Gallimard, “I object in the strongest manner to these accusations, which are pure lies.” Dvoracek suffered […]
Libraries Join In Big Online Book Collection
The 12 US universities comprising the Committee on Institutional Cooperation have joined with the University of California’s library system to a single repository of their respective collections of digital materials in an entity called HathiTrust. Associate university librarian of the University of Michigan John Wilkin is executive director of the organization. On the one hand it provides a non-profit counterpart to the materials within Google Book Search, but on the other hand it potentially raises a new set of concerns for publishers. Currently they say they repository has almost 2 million volumes (largely the result of Google’s scanning), of which […]
People: Wikert Joins O'Reilly
Blogger and executive publisher of two lines of technical books in Wiley’s professional/trade division Joe Wikert has joined O’Reilly Media as general manager for O’Reilly Technology Exchange. That division publishes O’Reilly’s core manuals for developers and systems managers. Wikert is “spearheading the expansion of the OTX publishing program into a broader offering that spans print, online, and in-person products and services.” In the UK, former chief executive of Virgin Publishing Adrian Sington is leading the start-up of DCD Publishing, a subsidiary of TV production and distribution company DCD Media, according to BookBrunch, a new UK service from Liz Thomson and […]
Newsweek Packages Presidential Kindle Exclusives
Newsweek’s staff has prepared biographies of the four presidential and vice presidential campaigns (titled Mr. Cool, Mr. Hot, The Insider, and The Outsider) and will sell them as Kindle exclusives, available on October 15. The release says that “Newsweek is the first periodical to publish a collection of coverage as an e-book on Kindle.”