News

A curated selection of  articles we find interesting, or relevant, for the times and our readers!

The Spread of Book Banning: Explaining the increasing politicization of the book banning debate.

Sunday July 31, 2022

Book-banning attempts have grown in the U.S. over the past few years from relatively isolated battles to a broader effort aimed at works about sexual and racial identity. Alexandra Alter and Elizabeth Harris cover the publishing industry. I spoke to them about what’s behind this trend.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/31/briefing/book-banning-debate.html

Chamblin's, Barnes and Noble respond to influence from a popular app

Saturday May 7, 2022 - Monday May 9, 2022

One of the biggest market-based communities on TikTok is one you might have even seen creeping into the real world recently: BookTok.

BookTok, a sub-community on the video app TikTok, focuses on books and literature through related videos and hashtags.

 

https://www.jacksonville.com/story/business/2022/05/07/booktok-tiktok-community-driving-local-book-sales-new-heights/9585821002/

Book Tok Driving Book Sales

Friday December 31, 2021

"You know at first, I didn't really know what was going on and even my publishers were like, why are we seeing an uptick in sales?" she recalls.

 

https://www.npr.org/2021/12/26/1068063564/booktok-is-a-new-force-driving-book-sales-and-publishing-deals

Supporting Black Owned Businesses

Monday November 1, 2021

Racial and wealth disparities in the United States have been thrown into sharp relief by the COVID-19 pandemic and racial unrest throughout 2020. We see more clearly than ever just how often Black business owners and creatives have been thought of as less than their Caucasian counterparts – and Black...

Look inside the only surviving copy of Joseph Pulitzer’s secret code book.

Friday April 9, 2021

Tomorrow, we celebrate the 174th birthday of Joseph Pulitzer, now most well-known for establishing the Pulitzer Prizes with his endowment to Columbia University. But in his time, he was an elected Democratic congressman from New York fighting corruption, and the publisher of the New York World newspaper—a job so stressful he invented...

Back in 1986, the Castros helped retrieve Hemingway’s stolen Nobel Prize.

Friday March 5, 2021

The period leading up to Ernest Hemingway’s 1954 Nobel Prize win was a pretty nightmarish one for Papa. Debilitating health problems (migraines, high blood pressure, liver disease, diabetes), near-fatal accidents (two plane crashes in as many days while vacationing in Africa in ’54 were severe enough that Hemingway spent the...

Furloughed Waterstones booksellers are petitioning their hedge fund owner for minimum wage.

Thursday February 4, 2021

Waterstones has told staff that furloughed workers will not receive any increase to their wages until shops can reopen, after a petition was launched calling on the book chain to help workers who are being paid below minimum wage on the scheme.

Click here for the full Guardian article.

Here’s some surprising good news: In the US and the UK, book sales are up and indies are growing.

Friday January 8, 2021

Here’s some surprising end-of-2020 good news: books are doing . . . well? According to NPD BookScan, unit sales of print books in the United States rose 8.2% in 2020. Units hit 750.9 million this year—57.2 million up from last year. This is fairly surprising, given the pandemic was expected to...

Nearly a Century Later, We’re Still Reading — and Changing Our Minds About — Gatsby

Wednesday December 30, 2020

I’ve long held to the completely unsupported notion that a protagonist is simpler to write than a truly memorable supporting character. Sometimes just a silhouette — created with a few slashes of the pen, a few charismatic adjectives — seems the more unlikely accomplishment, born out of some surplus wit...

£2.5m Of Books Stolen In ‘Mission Impossible’ Heist Recovered From Underground Romanian Lair

Friday September 18, 2020

Some 200 “culturally significant” books including works by Galileo, Sir Isaac Newton and Goya that were stolen in a west London heist have been found buried underground in Romania.

The books were swiped in January 2017 during a burglary in Feltham, which saw thieves cut holes in the roof of...

Ronan Farrow, Emily Bazelon and Colson Whitehead among L.A. Times Book Prize finalists

Wednesday February 19, 2020

Ronan Farrow, Emily Bazelon, Attica Locke, Michael Connelly and Colson Whitehead are among the finalists for the 40th annual Los Angeles Times Book Prizesannounced Wednesday, with crime novelist Walter Mosley named as the winner of the 2019 Robert Kirsch Award for lifetime achievement.

Click here to read full LA Times article!

...

Kobe Bryant Was Working on a Children's Book When He Died. His Co-Author Just Deleted the Draft

Tuesday January 28, 2020

Kobe Bryant and Brazilian writer Paulo Coelho were working together on a children’s book, but the author of “The Alchemist” said he deleted the draft after Bryant’s death in a helicopter crash.

The 72-year-old novelist told The Associated Press on Monday that the two men started discussing the project in...

Two Authors Just Won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Here's What to Know About Them

Thursday October 10, 2019

"For the first time in the Nobel Prize for Literature’s 118-year history, two authors were announced Thursday as recipients of the award: Austrian novelist and playwright Peter Handke and Polish author Olga Tokarczuk. (Handke received the Prize for 2019. Tokarczuk received the Prize for 2018.)

Last year’s Nobel Prize for Literature...