In a voyage abundant in metaphors (and blessed with sunshine) publishing veterans John Oakes and Colin Robinson literally launched their new venture OR Books on a old fireboat from a pier eight blocks south of the Javits center on Sunday afternoon. The boat chugged leisurely around the south end of Manhattan, past the Statue of Liberty and right past the giant Queen Mary 2 in Red Hook. From a megaphone on the top deck they hailed their “politically progressive and culturally adventurous” content paired with a “revolutionary approach to business.” In other words, they aim to sell non-returnable only and […]
Don't Let That Fool You, It Really Is BEA
Apologies in advance for the slightly self-serving nature of this Day Two Dispatch from BEA. It did come to a close for me, after all, with the end of the joint interview I conducted with James Ellroy and Colin Harrison at the Uptown Stage. If you want to know how it went, better ask somebody else – live interviews put me in a fugue state that I can’t shake off completely for a few hours after it’s over. But I can say the mental gymnastics of the role of interviewer turned around what was something of a frustrating day, this […]
ABA Annual Meeting
Outgoing ABA president Gayle Shanks of Changing Hands Bookstore convened this year’s annual meeting by saying “I probably don’t have to tell you that this has not been a easy year. It’s been a tough one for everyone in this association and we have done what we can to adjust.” And she underscored that both the organization and its members “have no intention of giving up the good fight, maintaining our market, and our place in the community’s heart.” In reviewing the year’s activity, Shanks discussed the search for a new ceo to replace Avin Domnitz and noted “we interiew […]
It Looks Like BEA
If you didn’t know that it was supposed to be a smaller show, with fewer attendees and fewer giveaways I think you wouldn’t notice any difference (except for the size of what’s left of the Random House booth). It’s always hard to know when to push out the e-mail during the show. The following stories simply appear according to the order in which they were posted. As promised, we’ll have more at PublishersMarketplace during the day and over the weekend, though we may or may not mail again until Monday (true to our motto). Despite some unexpected technical trouble, we […]
World's Richest Children's Prize Launched, for Arabic Books
The new Etisalat Prize for Arabic Children’s Literature, worth approximately $275,000, was announced this morning at BEA. It is backed by the ruler of Sharjah and sponsored by the Emirates Telecommunications Corporation. The announcement sas the prize is “designed to preserve Arab children’s culture in the third millennium. The first winner will be named in November.
The Problem with Statistics: BISG's New Method Still Inflates the Unknown
It’s that time of year again, when we all try to reckon with a wave of imprecise measures of our increasingly complex and nuanced business. The need for true data seems to increase in direct proportion to the supply of inadequate evaluations. In recent weeks, we’ve looked a little bit at the confusingly broad distinctions in the Bowker counts of new titles published last year and tried to reckon with Amazon’s unsubstantiated glimpse into rising Kindle sales. Discerning readers already know that on a standing basis, we very consciously do not report periodic numbers from the AAP, Census Bureau, and […]