Rising paper price ups books prices in China for now and perhaps later the world is the title of Henry Sanderson piece for the Associated Press.He reports that the government "crackdown on small, polluting paper mills have caused a paper crunch in China, pushing up the price of paper by 10 percent this year and forcing printers to delay books and publishers to raise prices.""Paper mills, most of them small, inefficient operations, accounted for 17 percent of all industrial water pollution in 2005, according to the Chinese Paper Association, an industry group."Why is this price increase good news? Because it...
Happy Birthday ‘A Christmas Carol’
Today marks the 164th anniversary of the publication of 'A Christmas Carol' by Charles Dickens.First published in 1843 'A Christmas Carol' went on to sell 6,000 copies in 5 days! I am sure that would translate into bestseller numbers today.Though known as 'A Christmas Carol' the full title of the work is A Christmas Carol. In Prose. Being a Ghost Story of Christmas and was written by Dickens to raise money to settle some debts.The University of South Carolina Libraries has an online exhibit celebrating all the Christmas related books and stuff of Dickens. The exhibit is titled The Man...
Author wins Nestlé Children’s Book Prize. Refuses to accept the check
Author Sean Taylor won the 2007 Nestlé Children's Book Prize for When A Monster is Born.Taylor accepted the award but refused to accept the £2,500 cash prize due to "questions surrounding Nestlé’s marketing of breast-milk substitutes."Taylor consulted with campaign group Baby Milk Action(who urge you to boycott Nestle who they say are "responsible for more violations of the World Health Assembly marketing requirements for baby foods than any other company," Nestlé and "an authoritative third party with experience in the field," before making his decision to turn down the prize money. Taylor goes on to say that while "many of...
Censored in Plame Sight
And the National Book Award for the Altered Book of the Year goes to...Valerie Plame's recently released memoir "Fair Game: My Life as a Spy, My Betrayal by the White House," In fact it just might be the most widely distributed altered book in publishing history.About 15% of the entire book is visibly altered with gray bars eliminating text, sometimes for pages at a time. The CIA originally wanted 35% of the text to be redacted. A court battle ensued between the publisher, Simon & Schuster, and the government. The Bush administration won by about 15%.The title of the book...
The Color of Romance
"Between the kitty litter and the toothpaste, on a lonely aisle of your supermarket, they cry out for love. Highlander Untamed! Unleash the Night! To Pleasure a Prince! The Boss's Wife for a Week! Willingly Bedded, Forcibly Wedded!"So begins Brian Miller's piece in the Seattle Weekly, A Billion Dollar Romance Novel Industry, And its Lonely Black Author. Miller profiles the Seattle romance novelist Edwina Martin-Arnold and in the process gives us a peek into the world of Romance publishing.How big an industry is it:The genre accounts for 26.4 percent of all popular fiction salesIt annually produces around 6,000 titlesHarlequin, the...