News and opinion on the changing world of book publishing
Laura Hazard Owen | April 2009
Despite its sale by the Bertelsmann Group to Najafi Companies last year, Bookspan’s 21 book clubs (including Book-of-the-Month Club, Doubleday Book Club, Quality Paperback Club, and Literary Guild) still exist. Given the company’s tumultuous past few years, how has it held up? (For news on other book clubs, click here.) Numbers don’t mean everything, but [...]
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March 2005
Book Clubs Reinvent the Digital World If the term ‘book club’ evokes a muddled mélange (if not somewhat terrifying dream) of Oprah covering Tolstoy in gold stickers, growing legions of like-minded enthusiasts discussing scrapbooks or maybe even booksellers in Kabul, classes filled with Scholastic catalogs offering Shrek 2 tie-ins, while exclamation-point-laden mailers emblazoned with “6 [...]
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July 2001
The free market’s last great territorial conquest, China remains a daunting and volatile arena for many book publishers in the West. This month Toby Eady, of the eponymous London-based literary agency, looks back on some of his Asian adventures and shares a few words of wisdom for those seeking Chinese fortunes. When I first visited [...]
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December 2000
ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED AT INSIDE.COM (12/6/00) When Stephen King pulled the plug last week on his online serial story The Plant, citing a dwindling base of readers willing to pony up a buck for the latest installment, pundits rushed to declare electronic self-publishing dead on arrival. But many of them failed to notice that King’s supposed [...]
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