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In the ongoing remaking of BEA to try and keep the show vital for a changing business, conference organizers confirmed today that the show will convene in New York City on an annual basis at least through 2011. So previously plans for returning to Washington DC in 2010 and Las Vegas in 2011 have been dropped. The show will get shorter as well, with the convention floor open for two days only instead of three starting next year. They will maintain a day of conferences, special events and show preview the day before the show floor opens. The new dates […]

The Boston-based Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood is agitating against Scholastic again, claiming that through its school book clubs the company “has exploited its unique access to schools by marketing an array of non-book products in its monthly book club fliers…. The campaign said about one-third of the items for sale in Scholastic’s elementary and middle school book clubs were either not books or were books packaged with other items such as jewelry, toys and makeup.” Campaign director Susan Linn says, “The opportunity to sell directly to children in schools is a privilege, not a right. But Scholastic is abusing […]

David Wilk at Booktrix once again provides us his lens on last weekend’s Comic Con, said by Lance Fensterman to have drawn nearly 77,000 fans–well up from 67,000 attendees a year ago: Larger than ever, and more smoothly run by Reed at the Javits Center, New York Comicon has grown to become a major pop culture event.  While it lacks the huge displays put on by the movie companies, and does not attract the complete range of small and independent publishers that flock to San Diego every July, the show has clearly succeeded in serving its core audience of comics […]

The NYT has a “trend” piece on self-publishing that only got published because it’s pitched–speciously–as a contrast-to-the-death-of-regular-publishing story. Which leads to such unprovable stretches as “during an economic downturn, books tailored to such narrow audiences may fare better than titles from traditional publishers that depend on a more general appeal.” POD-driven self-publishing has indeed been a steady growth story for about eight years now that has little or nothing to do with the rest of the business. As they note, “self-publishing is still a fraction of the wider publishing industry. Author Solutions, for example, sold a total of 2.5 million […]

Lev Grossman thinks he has big ideas about the evolution of publishing, and the novel in particular: “A lot of headlines and blogs to the contrary, publishing isn’t dying. But it is evolving, and so radically that we may hardly recognize it when it’s done. Literature interprets the world, but it’s also shaped by that world, and we’re living through one of the greatest economic and technological transformations since–well, since the early 18th century. The novel won’t stay the same: it has always been exquisitely sensitive to newness, hence the name. It’s about to renew itself again, into something cheaper, […]