News and opinion on the changing world of book publishing
May 2010
Take a look at BookScan’s bestselling juvenile titles for the week ending April 25: an astounding 73% were titles from one of several series. But these are not your Baby-Sitters’ Club of yesteryear: “Harry Potter turned the whole paperback series notion on its head,” says Megan Tingley, SVP, Publisher, Little Brown Books for Young Readers. [...]
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Book Social Networking Site for Teens
Laura Hazard Owen | June 2009
Simon & Schuster has launched Pulse It, a book social networking site where 14- to 18-year-olds can read and review new S&S titles online, create profiles, communicate with authors and other members, and earn points redeemable for prizes. The initiative is similar to Penguin UK‘s Spinebreakers, which launched in 2007. The site grew out of [...]
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Laura Hazard Owen | May 2009
Last fall, BookExpo America formed its first-ever Conference Advisory Board and decided to increase the show’s focus on content and programming. “In the past, we had too many sessions that were all over the map and that were trying to be all things to all people,” says Courtney Muller, Group Vice President of BEA. In [...]
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Brooklyn and NYPL librarians recently ran a survey about street lit (what is it? here’s Wikipedia’s entry), and they’ve written up the results in the most recent issue of School Library Journal. Some findings: 49% of the respondents worked in urban libraries, 43% in suburban libraries, and 8% in rural libraries. 92.5% offered street lit [...]
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Laura Hazard Owen | August 2008
Anyone who saw (or was) an adult reading Harry Potter on the subway knows that the line between books for grownups and books for children has become increasingly blurred. And despite time devoted to the discussion (see the recent New York Times Book Review essay “I’m Y.A. and I’m O.K”) and celebrity authors writing the [...]
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