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That’s what Sramana Mitra, writing at Forbes magazine (last month), thinks. Mitra believes that publishers must be treating their authors very badly, because most authors make little money on most books.
Well, guess what: hardly anyone makes money from book publishing — except for UPS. (So, yeah, the industry needs to be reworked. But is Amazon [...]

Alberto Manguel, author of The Library at Night, among other books, writes lovingly in the New York Times about his current library south of the Loire Valley in France and his other libraries that grew into this one.
But Manguel is a hoarder — a habit I’ve been trying to rid myself of. As books overflow [...]

This photo of books simply left behind after a St. Louis Public Library move comes from nathansnider’s photostream.
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Conceivably Related PostsPhoto Wednesday: woodtype figures

This image of woodtype figures sorts at the Hamilton Wood Type & Printing Museum in Two Riv…Photo Wednesday: Bringing it all back home

I studied comparative literature at the University of Wisconsin [...]

Print publishers are currently caught between the Scylla and Charybdis of a weakening economy and higher prices for essential costs such as paper, freight, and postage.
The soft economy pressures publishers to lower prices on books, but this is difficult to do with the cost of paper at an all-time high. Gas prices have caused [...]

Recently I had occasion to research rates charged by designers for text-based book work. I was trying to determine a reasonable price for a 320-page hardcover collected poems, interior and cover/jacket design. Since I have mainly worked with heavily illustrated books over the past decade I had lost touch with going rates for text-based projects.
According [...]

Nice conceptual book cover, via Book Design Review. Literary aspirations can be a heavy burden indeed.
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Conceivably Related PostsYoung and Hip

According to an article in the NYT, cities are now competing for hipness in an attempt to lure y…We’re in Trouble
Eric and Kristen are in unfamiliar territory. They have only known one another a few weeks, [...]

The Association of American Publishers reported on Monday that book sales rose 7.2 percent in January, with adult paperback sales showing the largest increase, an astonishing 37.6 percent.
At a time when overall consumer confidence is turning down, what could cause such a jump in book sales? I offer two possibilities:

People are cocooning — staying home [...]

An early printed bilingual dictionary, the Vocabularium Rerum provided German readers with the meanings of common Latin words and phrases. This edition (photo from Helga’s Lobster Stew’s photostream) was printed in Venice in 1495. According to HLS, the book can be seen”open to the public in the library at the Supreme Council of the [...]

Fake memoirs are in the news again, with the usual hand wringing. No need to go into the details, which have been thoroughly reported. Instead, let’s think about what might make book editors so gullible.
Book editors are a peculiar mixture of optimism and cynicism. They begin as idealistic literature enthusiasts — they probably start with [...]

That’s just one of the titles shortlisted for The Bookseller’s Diagram Prize for Oddest Book Title of the Year. The full list of candidates:

I Was Tortured By the Pygmy Love Queen
How to Write a How to Write Book
Are Women Human? And Other International Dialogues
Cheese Problems Solved
If You Want Closure in Your Relationship, Start With Your [...]

So the digital age brings us full circle, back to the serial publishing of the Victorian era. Random House has announced that it will test selling books by the chapter online.
I’m old school enough to prefer a physical book, but certainly there are plenty of indications that readers will commit to an online series if [...]

Ellen M. Kozak has written a nice summary at Wisconsin Lawyer about “Spotting the Publishing Scam.” You can read the full post there, but I think it’s worth summarizing the main points:

Real publishers don’t make offers overnight. A publisher who offers an agreement a couple days after the ms. arrives is pulling a scam.
A scam [...]

On Fishing is a good example of a mostly typographic cover that is distinctive, noticeable, and instantly conveys a sense of the book. The graceful loops of the swashes express something of the freedom and exhilaration of a good fly cast, while the title is forceful and remains readable from a distance.
Perhaps the upright modernist [...]

I’ve been surveying the state of independent book publishing. We looked at the changeover from the old system that was characterized by a diverse group of robust independent houses to a system that tends to aggregate imprints under global corporate management. We saw that the international corporations have a wide range of holdings that go [...]

It’s time to get back to the discussion of the dilemma of independent book publishing, following holidays that were more disruptive than I anticipated.
This project began when I discovered that the large changes in the publishing industry over recent decades were not necessarily known even by some who were generally knowledgeable about books.
A caveat before [...]

It’s easy to get so immersed in a subject that you lose track of how much of it is generally known. I’ve been talking about the difficulties of independent publishing for so long that it began to seem to me that the subject was common knowledge. Then a comment on this blog made me realize [...]

Recently there has been an increase in calls for the inclusion of ads in printed books (this “On the Media” report, for example, touches on the idea). There’s a degree of desperation in this — supposedly it would help to address the difficulties of making publishing profitable. Alongside these calls has been the inevitable hand [...]

Yourshelves.com is a project of kimbooktu, who explains:
I collect pictures of libraries of ordinary people. People who love to read - and collect - books from all over the world. Every time I get a new ‘library’ I am amazed at how book lover’s keep their possessions. The fun part is; all the libraries have [...]

I missed the discussion about this book cover during the accompanying exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, last summer. Clearly the provocative cover image of the catalogue is intended to cause the viewer to consider the nature of feminism and feminist art.
According to the museum website, “the artists in WACK! made [...]

Jeff Barry has completed an interesting project of culling his blog archives to produce a free e-book, called Buenos Aires, City of Faded Elegance. He explains:
Whenever I come across a new blog I read the latest postings and, if I like those, I add the site to my news reader. I always intend to go [...]