Remember when e-books were supposed to kill publishing? That’s not happening, according to The New York Times. E-books were the wave of the future in the late 2000s, with sales surging 1,260% as booksellers and book lovers fretted that the printed book was doomed. A failure to keep up with e-book customers helped shutter mega-bookstore Borders, while success with them helped keep competitor Barnes and Noble alive. In fact, analysts in the late 2000s pegged 2015 as the year that e-books sales would overtake print ones. As it turned out, however, they were wrong: 2015 is here, but the print …
Publisher HarperCollins has released an image that illustrated the whole history of E.B. White’s children’s classic Charlotte’s Web. It’s a wonderful little document that traces the entire history of the iconic novel. HarperCollins created the image to mark the release of the e-book version of the class. The image was original posted on their official tumblr page. It tracks all the biggest milestones in the history of the great book, from the original writing up to the e-book release. There are a lot of interesting little facts here – did you know that it took 15 years for the book to get …
It’s been a pretty wild year for Ted Dawe and his book Into the River. First, Dawe’s home country of New Zealand made international headlines by banning the young adult novel. Now, publisher Polis Books is bringing the book to a North American Audience. Dawe’s novel is about a native Maori boy from rural New Zealand who struggles to fit in at an elite boarding school. Into the River won the hearts of critics and readers when it was released in 2013, but it also caught the eye of family-focused advocates like Family First, a New Zealand group that lobbied to …
There will be no Folio Prize in 2016, the organizers have announced. After two years of supporting the prize, the Folio Society will not be renewing its contract. As a result, the prize will be suspended for at least one year. The Folio Prize was established in 2011, in response to what organizers felt was a “dumbing down” of the famous Book Prize. The Folio Prize was to be an antidote, and considered writers from outside of the British Commonwealth. But the Booker Prize now does the same – American writers have been eligible for the prize since 2014. That …
National Poetry Day in the United Kingdom is October 8, and the celebration is getting a jump-start thanks to the contributions of celebrities. Organizers have released videos of famous people reading poetry, including a recording of scientist Stephen Hawking reading a poem called “Relativity.” Check it out below! Sarah Howe is the poet behind the work, which really gets a boost from Hawking’s distinctive synthesized voice. Other celebrities recruited for the project include actor Sean Bean, who read “Notes on the Art of Poetry by Dylan Thomas: Actress Samantha Morton also contributed. She read “My Brilliant Image” by Hafez: Organizers are hoping the …
