Is the paperback format pulped? Last year, the value of sales in the format dipped below £1 billion for the first time in a decade and Adult Fiction's £263.7m paperback sales represented the lowest ever recorded by BookScan. In the digital era of publishing and bookselling, the future of the paperback format and how and when books are made available for consumption are among the most pertinent questions - as the entire industry adjusts its sales expectations and analyses how readers interact with the formats now available.
Links of the week September 1 2014 (36)
Our new feature links to interesting blogs or articles posted online, which will help keep you up to date with what's going on in the book world:
8 September 2014
There has been plenty of chatter about the paperback's demise. The Bookseller has noted previously that the received wisdom or perhaps logical assumption by some has been that as digital grows,"cheap" paperbacks will fall by the wayside as even cheaper digital editions trample them underfoot. But with the paperback constituting 77% of the physical volume in 2013, its demise is hardly foregone: declining for now, yes, adapting, definitely, but dying? Not yet. In any case the paperback is more intricately linked to the success of digital then those foretelling of its "inevitable" demise might be willing to recognize or concede.
Depending on perspective, it is an author's dream - or nightmare: Margaret Atwood will never know what readers think of the piece of fiction she is currently working on, because the unpublished, unread manuscript from the Man Booker prize-winning novelist will be locked away for the next 100 years.
Atwood has just been named as the first contributor to an astonishing new public artwork. The Future Library project, conceived by the award-winning young Scottish artist Katie Paterson, began, quietly, this summer, with the planting of a forest of 1,000 trees in Nordmarka, just outside Oslo. It will slowly unfold over the next century. Every year until 2114, one writer will be invited to contribute a new text to the collection, and in 2114, the trees will be cut down to provide the paper for the texts to be printed - and, finally, read.
Readers might think nonfiction books are the most reliable media sources there are. But accuracy scandals haven't reformed an industry that faces no big repercussions for errors.
"A lot of readers have the perception that when something arrives as a book, it's gone through a more rigorous fact-checking process than a magazine or a newspaper or a website, and that's simply not that case," Silverman said. He attributes this in part to the physical nature of a book: Its ink and weight imbue it with a sense of significance unlike that of other mediums. Fact-checking dates back to the founding of Time in 1923, and has a strong tradition at places like Mother Jones and The New Yorker. (The Atlantic checks every article in print.) But it's becoming less and less common even in the magazine world. Silverman suggests this is in part due to the Internet and the drive for quick content production. "Fact-checkers don't increase content production," he said. "Arguably, they slow it."
A book I copyedited a handful of years ago included these snippets from Franklin Roosevelt's "Day of Infamy" speech, which was delivered the day after the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941. The author was setting the scene of a young boy listening to the radio as the speech was given, and he used these snippets to add authenticity. A nice touch, right?
The problem is that these brief quotes don't actually appear in Roosevelt's speech. Where the author had thought he was adding authenticity, in fact, he was showcasing poor research habits. If these errors had gone uncorrected, readers would have chucked the book and given it poor reviews.
Situations like this are not unusual. A few of my big catches over the years: a book that stated Babe Ruth was right-handed; an actor's memoir that gave incorrect movie titles and locations; a novel that indicated Native Americans rode horses before the Europeans arrived. I found the correct information in these instances with very simple Internet searches-searches that the authors should have done themselves.
Remember, copyeditors are not fact-checkers. Sure, we do some double-checking of names and verify facts that look suspicious, but it is not the editor's place to ensure a book's accuracy. That is the author's job. Expecting someone else to catch factual errors is an enormous risk that could damage your reputation. So don't be afraid; dive in and investigate your topic! Then, make the most of your researching efforts to craft a more marketable book and save time and money in the process.
Ever since the millennium, the e-revolution, plus the credit crunch, has sponsored all kinds of apocalyptic predictions about books, with regular bad news from the digital frontline. In America, even bestselling authors such as Malcolm Gladwell have taken to YouTube to denounce Big Brother, aka Amazon. In Britain, book-selling is said to be on the rocks, libraries doomed, the ebook all-conquering, with the Visigoths of online selling storming through Waterstone's.
Earnings are down and contracts scarce, putting careers in crisis and livelihoods at risk. In 2013 the median income of the professional writer was about £11,000, well below the £16,850 which the Joseph Rowntree Foundation considers a minimum standard of living.
Amid the gloom, however, there has been one tireless Pollyanna of print, an optimistic literary entrepreneur for whom the glass is not merely half full but positively running over. Kate Mosse, bestselling author of the Languedoc Trilogy (Labyrinth, Sepulchre and Citadel), and champion of the prize formerly known as Orange, has become the smiley face of English writing during the credit crunch and the IT revolution, and an indefatigable advocate for an old-fashioned creativity.
1 September 2014
The global bookselling industry has been experiencing many trials and tribulations over the last decade. Indigo books in Canada has been losing 20 million each quarter for the last year, Borders Books in the US went bankrupt and everyone else is feeling the pinch of Amazon. Are eBooks destroying our bookselling culture?
eBooks have their downsides, aside from disrupting the traditional bookselling industry. A recent study had 28 copies of the same book distributed half in paperback format and the other half on the Amazon Kindle. Anne Mangen of Norway's Stavanger University, a lead researcher on the study said "The Kindle readers performed significantly worse on the plot reconstruction measure." The readers struggled to make sense of the key 14 plot aspects. The researchers suggest that "the haptic and tactile feedback of a Kindle does not provide the same support for mental reconstruction of a story as a print pocket book does".
Children's laureate Malorie Blackman has vowed that "hell will freeze over before I let racists and haters silence me" after facing an outpouring of racist abuse following her call for more diversity in children's books.
The attacks began after the award-winning author spoke to Sky News about diversity in children's literature, saying that although "you want to escape into fiction ... and read about other people, other cultures, other lives, other planets", there is "a very significant message that goes out when you cannot see yourself at all in the books you are reading".
Support for Blackman, the UK's first black children's laureate, was immediate from both her fellow writers and from her readers. Carnegie medal winner Patrick Ness tweeted: "I adore @malorieblackman. I think she's a brilliant Laureate. I'm seething. Why have we agreed we're OK with this? I'm bloody well not." The novelist Matt Haig announced he was "disgusted that the wonderful @malorieblackman, one of the great forces for good, has had to come off Twitter because of racist abuse". Chocolat author Joanne Harris told Blackman: "Don't read below the idiot-line. You are loved and appreciated here ", and Horrid Henry author Francesca Simon added: "I'm proud to be a children's writer with the marvellous @malorieblackman representing us."
As the battle lines harden in the Amazon dispute, Ian Grant argues that no one is in the wrong - that both sides are, in fact, right.
Established authors in the United States and the UK write to Amazon, complaining about Amazon's commercial practices in a dispute with Hachette. Authors in Germany write in similar terms about Amazon's negotiation with Bonniers. In the other direction, an open letter from a number of American authors urges support for Amazon. In France, the same row transmutes into a law protecting independent booksellers. It's all about patronage.
Both sides are right
The two positions that understand the matter best are that of Michael Pietsch, CEO of Hachette, when he says that "This dispute started because Amazon is seeking a lot more profit and even more market share, at the expense of authors, bricks and mortar bookstores, and ourselves", and Sue-Ellen Welfonder, who wrote, in defence of Amazon, "In traditional publishing, a few will always thrive, but a large number of writers, those on the dread midlist, have to learn how to paddle hard to stay afloat. Indie publishing (and Amazon) offers new writers never-before opportunities and gives midlisters a wonderful chance to re-invent themselves, making it possible to have the kind of control and power over our work that was unthinkable just a short while ago." They are both right, but Pietsch should not expect anything else when dealing with a retailer, any retailer. Welfonder clearly understands the market and works hard to make herself heard.
Emily Dickinson said, over a century ago, that "There is no frigate like a book to take us Lands away," and it's true. When we pick up a book, turn on the TV, or watch a movie, we are carried away down the currents of story into a world of imagination. And when we land, once more, on a shore that is both new and familiar, something strange happens. Stepping onto the shore, we're changed. We don't retrace the footsteps of the author or character we've followed here. No, instead we walk a mile in their shoes.
Researchers in psychology and neuroscience, child development and biology are finally starting to gain quantifiable scientific evidence of what writers and readers have always known - that stories have a unique ability to change a person' point of view. Scholars are discovering evidence that stories shape culture and that much of what we belief about life comes, not from fact, but from fiction; that our ideas of class, marriage, and even gender are relatively new, and that many ideologies which held sway for centuries were revised within the eighteenth century and re-drafted in the pages of the early Novel.