I've tried to bring some focus to that vast landscape under the title of The Curious Incident of the Book in the Digital Age - "curious" because while the incredible revolutions we've lived through in the last 20 years may seem to have changed everything, when you really get down to it, nothing has changed at the core of our industry - it's still stories and the people who create those stories - the authors - that underpin everything. It's their imagination that inspires and moves readers and makes publishing much more than just another industry to work in - publishing is not to have a job but a vocation.
Links of the week April 11 2016 (15)
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:
18 April 2016
Books are the DNA of our civilisation, an unbroken line of stories, ideas and knowledge which essentially completes our relationship with all of humanity and with ourselves.
And yet the world is changing - and it is changing fast. In 2007 a colleague phoned from New York to say a new book had just been recommended to him. He had immediately stopped at a coffee shop, downloaded the book and was well into the first chapter by the time he got back to his office. For me it was a profound moment in which I understood the enormity of the cultural revolution ahead. And that was not even 10 years ago. The speed of change has been phenomenal.
Mary Hoffman reports from the 2016 Bologna Children's Book FairThe Bologna Children's Book Fair or La fiera del libro per ragazzi is the leading professional fair for children's books in the world.
Busy, buzzy and boiling hot - it was a classic "Bologna", as the annual children's books rights fair in Italy is affectionately abbreviated.
This was the 53rd Fair and the 50th to hold an annual illustrators' exhibition, which this year was necessarily a big celebration, divided into decades, some featuring well-loved British artists such as David McKee.
Every year a guest country is invited to put on a separate exhibition of its native talent, and this year it was Germany. Germany's effort was among the most striking I have seen in 23 years of attending.
West London has been filled in the past week with publishers offering first hints about new books from literary stars including Ian McEwan, Orhan Pamuk and Karl Ove Knausgaard, but the talk of the London book fair is a former management consultant who has landed a series of deals worth millions of pounds.
Chloé Esposito, who gave up her job last summer to take the Faber Academy writing course, has signed deals with publishers around the world for a trilogy of books, which according to the author are filled with "loads of sex and violence". The three novels, Mad, Bad and Dangerous to Know, tell the story of a twin who assumes her dead sister's life, and have racked up deals in at least eight international territories, including Michael Joseph in the UK, which are understood to total more than £2m. Esposito is also in talks with Hollywood about a film adaptation.
"It's my first novel but I've written hundreds previously, although I've never finished them," said Esposito. "In July last year I stopped work to focus on my daughter, my novel, and to make sure my home wasn't a bombsite ... This is a dream - it's obviously what every writer wants, and I'm overwhelmed by how well it's going. I'm waiting to wake up."
Science fiction is about the gadgets. To be on the cutting edge of science fiction, therefore, you need to know your doohickeys from your gizmos, and be able to determine which will catapult you out past Uranus. Space flight, nanotechnology, virtual reality, and all the things you can do with AI-the serious science-fiction writer has all of those terms on Google alert, so as to know exactly what the future will look like five minutes from right . . . now.
"Great science fiction explores the philosophical possibilities of science's impact on reality," sci-fi writer James Wallace Harris declares at SF Signal. You take real science, you add brilliant philosophy, and you've got sci-fi. Right?
Actually, no. Harris' article has been widely pilloried on social media because, in his tour of "cutting-edge science fiction," - he managed to make a list without citing a single piece of work by a woman or person of color. But what's been less discussed is that his omissions are tied closely to the fact that his definition of cutting-edge science fiction is ludicrously limited.
For Harris, good science fiction focuses on real, possible science, extrapolated. "The trouble is the fans often prefer the beliefs they were raised with, and not those belonging to the cutting edge," he huffs plaintively, bemoaning the fact that sci-fi fans still like time travel and space opera. If only fans, not to mention literary critics, were out there on the cutting edge, they'd know that H.G. Wells' The Time Machine is no longer relevant. It's just science fantasy; pfft. Progress has overtaken it; consign it (via time machine) to the dustbin of history.
The problem is that Harris is in the thrall of that dusty, outdated idea called "progress." Progress has been under assault for some time in the history of science - Harris probably needs to check out the decades-old cutting-edge writing of Paul Feyerabend. But whatever you think of progress in physics or biology, no one thinks progress in literature makes sense. Jonathan Lethem isn't better than Shakespeare just because he's around now.
It's spring, love is in the air - even more so at Random House Germany. The Munich-based publishing group has just launched a new online community called Sinnliche Seiten (which translates as "Luscious Pages"). As the name suggests, it's all about love, romance and everything in between. The website offers news, reviews, videos and columns, a regular newsletter and an online shop. There's also a gamification tool planned that will match readers with romance novels.
A few weeks earlier, Random House also announced a new event called lit.love, a reading festival for lovers of romance novels. During the two-day event, readers will have the chance to meet their favorite authors and take part in readings, workshops, and panel discussions. Laid out as a cooperation between Random House publishing houses Blanvalet, Diana, Goldmann, Heyne and young adult publishers cbj and Heyne fliegt, 20 German and international romance novel authors will take part at the event.
Blanche Knopf built the reputation of the legendary publisher, but her name was left off the masthead.
As a child, Blanche Wolf wanted more than anything to live a life surrounded by books. Born in 1894, and raised in Manhattan by well-to-do parents, her love of reading and culture set her apart from her family and their upwardly-mobile, secular, and socially-constrained Jewish community. When she met Alfred Knopf in 1911, she was attracted most of all to his bookishness - which, one suspects, he might have played up in order to win over the pretty redhead, underestimating how serious she was about it. Her dream life was simple, heartbreakingly so: "We decided we would get married and make books and publish them." How could she have known that the hardest part of that dream was the "we"?
When the house of Knopf launched in 1915, publishing was a gentleman's pursuit - amateur, clubbish, WASP, and above all, male. Blanche and Alfred navigated this casually anti-Semitic world, holding themselves aloof from their alcoholic, philandering competitor, the "pushy Jew" Horace Liveright, founder of the Modern Library and publisher of T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land.
A personal view of this year's London Book Fair from BookBrunch joint editor Neill Denny
Frankly, I thought this was one of the better LBFs of recent years. Inevitably, there are flies in the ointment, and I'll come to those later, but let's start with the pluses.
Money is back. All around, there is the whiff of confidence in trade publishing. The British print market has roared back to life in the last 18 months, its best run for a decade, and the publishers are finally making real money.
Publishing is a world unto its own, and that is its charm. Today is the official launch of the referendum campaign, but I didn't hear a looming Brexit mentioned by a single person unless I asked the question. The impact on author contracts, rights, tax, employment etc etc of leaving: no one seems to have a clue. What you do hear of course are rumours, of deals, of books, of companies up for sale.