Capstone buys Heinemann-Raintree

Personalized Books on Sharedbook.com

Bloggers We Love: Kassia

You don’t have to read Danielle Steel, but you have to accept this fact: people buy her books and people read her books. There was never a Golden Age of Publishing where people bought only high-brow fiction that elevated the mind. It’s a figment of your imagination. When it comes to fiction, readers flock to books and authors for varying reasons, one being the deep satisfaction that comes from a story that touches them.

Don’t insult the readers, man. It’s just bad form, and you really, really need people to buy your books.

David Foster Wallace

I can't keep ignoring this one.

I was a writing student at Mount Holyoke in the mid-1980s. I took every writing course they offered, went to the Bennington Writing Workshops, and ran out of writing courses by my junior year. I was going to come to New York and Be A Writer. Ambitious as I was, I also wanted to Be An Editor and pretty much run my own publishing house - world domination!

My kids' dad went to Amherst...with David Foster Wallace - an English major, he was a year behind DFW. When "The Broom of the System" came out, I read it (at my ex's behest) and loved it. Loved. It.

Reading these obituaries hurts. DFW was 3 years older than I am. He did things - built up English departments, wrote jaw-dropping works of genius, inspired and motivated hundreds if not thousands of students. 

And suffered from debilitating depression. I know a few things about that as well. It runs in my family, and I have had numerous friends who suffer from it also. Depression is not romantic - it is a physical disease. Few who have it actually run out of options, but I found Wallace's father's observations to be most haunting:

He’d been in the hospital a couple of times over the summer and had undergone electro-convulsive therapy. Everything had been tried, and he just couldn’t stand it anymore.

For those of us who are intimate with the ravages of depression, this is terrifying. Because some people do - truly do - run out of options, and find themselves with utterly no relief. And some of these people are extraordinarily gifted and inspirational and shine a beam of light onto life in a way that nobody else possibly could.

Start With XML

The End of the World

Kindle Caution

Friday's BISG meeting

Same old same old

Psst. We have that already. It's called the Internet. With laptops becoming even more portable, cheaper, and wirelessly accessible, isn't tomorrow already here?

 

Ravenous Romance Responds

And now it's time for newspapers

But many newspaper publishers view search engines like Google as threats to their own business. Many of them also see their archives as a potential source of revenue, and it is not clear whether they will willingly hand them over to Google.

“The concern is that Google, in making all of the past newspaper content available, can greatly commoditize that content, just like news portals have commoditized current news content,” said Ken Doctor, an analyst with Outsell, a research company.

Online Catalogs and Users

Constellation

Publishers who use the new service can provide a single digital book file to Constellation and specify how they would like it to be used. As a result consumers may see more obscure, esoteric books available in digital formats, Perseus said.

What I Know So Far (about ebooks)

Sites we love

Ravenous Romance

Romance is the most popular genre in modern literature, generating $1.37 billion in net sales annually and accounting for 26.4% of all books sold. Demographically, 56% of romance readers are under age 44, and 74% have college degrees. Overall, these women are computer-literate and comfortable with new technologies. They are also voracious consumers, having read an average of nine romance novels each in 2006. Digital content offers a way for women to keep their interest in erotic romance discreet, portable, and affordable.

First Chapters on Gardner's Affiliates

USO and CourseSmart

While the motive of reducing costs of textbooks to students is laudable, digital is not necessarily the solution at this time. It is important to offer choice, and convenience. And stores should be offering students digital options. If we do not, someone else will and on terms where we may have little input or control relative to the vendor or margins. At the same time, institutions will need to understand that providing students with lower cost textbook options may result in lower revenues from the college store. That in turn means fewer resources coming in to support student activities or other campus functions to which college store revenue contributes.

Generation We

The purpose of GENERATION WE is to explore the emerging power of the Millennial generation, to describe the positive changes they are ready to drive, and to show how the Millennials (and their supporters from other generations) are poised to change our nation and our world for the better.

The book -- a 256 page full-color presentation illustrated by award-winning infographics artists -- was co-authored with Karl Weber, whom I first met at Wiley about 20 years ago and who has edited and co-authored a lot of books since he left Random House ten years ago. The book they wrote lays out the description of what Greenberg calls Generation We and issues a call for action.

Eric put together a great book with a team of true editorial and design professionals. But he didn't know about ISBNs, ordering paper, reserving press time, or what trim sizes made sense for the presses he'd print on. He sure didn't know that a book needs to be introduced to the supply chain many months before you print it.

So we faced the challenge near the end of July to make months of work happen in a few weeks. With some great help -- particularly from ex-PGW CEO Rich Freese introducing books to accounts, Brian O'Leary of Magellan Media who went back to his roots in print production to arrange the printing, and now from Max Pulsinelli of Maximum Impact PR getting the word out -- we're going to have this book on sale all over the country and all over the Internet by the middle of October. And I think you'll hear a lot about it.

Because of the way we've crashed production, we don't have bound galleys, but we have still gotten a slew of endorsements from a variety of luminaries including Muhammad Yunus, Larry Brilliant, Tom Daschle, Dean Ornish, Norman Lear, and Ron Wyden, with many more to come.

Googling is not vetting

“It was obviously something that anybody Googling Sarah Palin knew was in the news and there was a very thorough vetting done on that and also on the daughter,” the [McCain] aide said.