Joanne Kaufman's piece in the Sunday Styles section (why the Style section and not the Book section?) of the New York Times , "Fought Over Any Good Books Lately", gives us a glimpse into the world of book clubs and the challenges they face in keeping everyone on the same page.Many of the issues she touches on are the same reasons why I haven't joined one.That is until now.Starting in January a bunch of us are going to begin reading Roberto Bolaño's highly acclaimed new book 2666. The posthumously published 900 page tome has made most of the Top Ten...
Knock, Knock : The Subscription Book Business
click to enlargeIn nineteenth century America door-to-door bookselling was a big thing. As the country grew westward and new technologies provided cheaper production and transportation opportunities subscription bookselling became a major component of the publishing world. The book became a commodity. By some estimates by the end of the nineteenth century 70% of all books sold were sold by subscription.Agents Wanted : Subscription Publishing in America, an online exhibit at University of Pennsylvania, provides a great introduction to this part of publishing history. It features items from the seminal collection of canvassing books by Michael Zinman.From Lynne Farrington's introduction:Subscription publishers...
Courting the Antiquarians
In spite of all the doom and gloom surrounding the life and future of the book the book business still rakes in around $90 billion a year worldwide.Two of the healthiest and fastest growing areas of the trade are online bookselling in general and the selling of used, out-of-print and antiquarian books in particular.In a recent blog post from the Frankfurt Book Fair Edward Nawotka, book columnist for Bloomberg News and Southern Correspondent for Publishers Weekly, had this to say about the future of books:"One immediate consequence of Obama's victory was the boost in sales for newspapers. So now we...
In Defense of The Kindle
Virginia Heffernan in the NYT Magazine:I can’t seem to put it down. It’s ideal for book reading — lucid, light — but lately it has become something more: a kind of refuge. Unlike the other devices that clatter in my shoulder bag, the Kindle isn’t a big greedy magnet for the world’s signals. It doesn’t pulse with clocks, blaze with video or squall with incoming bulletins and demands. It’s almost dead, actually. Lifeless. Just a lump in my hands or my bag, exiled from the crisscrossing of infinite cybernetworks. It’s almost like a book.
Jacking into the Brain
It might not be video games, the internet, or even the Kindle that finally kills reading. The latest issue of Scientific America suggests that someday we might simply upload texts directly to our brains. Science fiction? Not necessarily.