John Baker’s Blog

The New York Times Sunday Book Review has an interesting piece on the book trade:
In 2007, a whopping 400,000 books were published or distributed in the United States, up from 300,000 in 2006, according to the industry tracker Bowker, which attributed the sharp rise to the number of print-on-demand books and reprints of out-of-print titles. [...]

Amazon’s reply to criticism of its recent POD announcement, insisting that POD publishers use its own BookSurge publishing service.
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Joan Didion’s memoir about trying to come to terms with her husband’s death became ‘the indispensable handbook to bereavement’. Then her 39-year-old daughter also died. As The Year of Magical Thinking arrives in London, David Hare describes [...]

An interesting article in The Guardian from Stephen Page, publisher and chief executive of Faber and Faber:
Technology, often feared by the bookish world, is a growing friend. As the mass market has risen so has the reality of a technologically connected society. This doesn’t just mean Facebook. Global communities are gathering around common interests online, [...]

The Dear Author site has Sandra Schwab’s positive review of a new Cybook e-book reader.
So far I’ve read 1½ books on the Cybook and I have to say it makes for very comfortable reading indeed, I haven’t experienced any sort of eyestrain whatsoever: the screen isn’t really white, but more grayish in colour (like a [...]