Publishing Industry

As publishers pray for a new children's series to equal Harry Potter and await the next novel by "The Da Vinci Code" author Dan Brown, a report released Friday predicts a tight market for at least the next few years. The Book Industry Study Group, a nonprofit organization supported by the publishing industry, projects a 3% to 4% growth through 2011, when revenue should top $43 billion. The BISG expects little change in the actual number of books sold. "The hits will keep doing well, but other books will have troubles," said BISG senior researcher Albert N. Greco, a professor of marketing at the Fordham University Graduate School of Business.

Marilynne Robinson has never let the pressures of the publishing industry rush her to write her books. In fact, 23 years separate her first novel, "Housekeeping," from her novel "Gilead," which received the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Here's what our reviewer, Merle Rubin, wrote in T he Times in December 2004 about "Gilead," which presents the autobiography of an elderly pastor living in a small Iowa town: At a moment in cultural history dominated by the shallow, the superficial, the quick fix, Marilynne Robinson is a miraculous anomaly: a writer who thoughtfully, carefully and tenaciously explores some of the deepest questions confronting the human species.

Sasha Alyson was chilled when he assimilated the gruesome prediction: Within five years, one-third of his friends might be dead from AIDS. His imagination took a macabre turn. Of his 10 closest friends, which three would succumb? Soon thereafter, one of those three was diagnosed and told his death from AIDS was imminent.

At a 1989 gathering of publishing giants, Jerome Rubin made an unpopular forecast: Technology would render the book obsolete. He argued that the expansion of computerized databases would decrease the need for printed books, a pronouncement based on firsthand experience. In the early 1970s, Rubin helped bring to market both the commercial online research database now known as LexisNexis and the display technology behind the Amazon Kindle and other e-readers. Rubin died Jan. 9 at New York-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center in New York City of a stroke, his children said.

In today's rapidly changing and overwhelming potpourri of health information, where are you going to turn to stay on top of medical news you can use? One place is consumer health magazines. This is a category that, just like the field it covers, has undergone much shakeout and change in recent years. The mix includes about 20 titles ranging from more general old-timer publications to very specialized newcomers such as one targeted to women with cancer.

Like an assembly line stuck in high gear, the U.S. publishing industry is churning out ever more books each year, an embarrassment of riches for publishers, reviewers and readers alike. R.R. Bowker, the company that maintains the authoritative Books in Print database, says the most recent figures show that in 2002, total output of new titles and editions in the United States grew by nearly 6%, to 150,000. General adult fiction exceeded 17,000, the strongest category.

Western writer Louis L'Amour has had seven books published since his death in June, 1988, an output as prolific as that of the popular author when he was alive. Similarly, the name of V. C. Andrews, the best-selling horror writer, has graced four new novels since she died in 1986.

We are all aware of the thousands of self-help books inundating us with advice on just about everything. Many of them are slickly packaged and filled with good old common sense stuff. Others are full of questionable theories about how health, wealth and career success can be achieved with little effort. However, here in Ventura, there is a growing publishing industry being fueled by entrepreneurial writers who are producing fine, basic self-help books that deliver what they promise.

Bonnie Nadel, a veteran Los Angeles literary agent, is weary of the questions she's constantly getting from Hollywood industry types: "They want to option a book for a movie or TV, and they'll ask how many copies the book has sold," Nadel said. "And I'll tell them I really don't know the exact number. I would need inside information, which is very hard to nail down."

For most liberal thinking people racism is easy to identify; it is negative prejudice against groups and individuals, that prejudice being based on appearances--appearances and lies. Racists are just as easily identified from this point of view. They are often unkempt, anti-social, epithet-wielding oafs who--due to poverty, conservatism, or psychosis--hate without reason. They are shaved-skulled, swastika-bearing, red-necked . . . well, you get the picture.

Spam has hit the Kindle, clogging Amazon.com Inc.'s top-selling e-reader with material that is far from being book-worthy and threatening to undermine the company's entry into publishing. Thousands of digital books, called e-books, are being published through Amazon's self-publishing system each month. Many are not written in the traditional sense. Instead, they are built using something known as Private Label Rights, or PLR content, which is information that can be bought very cheaply online then reformatted into a digital book.

When Amazon.com Inc. launched its Kindle digital book business in 2007, little did many people realize that the company was really rewriting the book on the entire publishing industry. Three years later, the online retail juggernaut has sold more than 7 million Kindle devices, according to estimates by Cowen and Co. That means roughly 1 in 10 people who shop on Amazon's Web store have purchased a Kindle. This year, sales of Kindle devices and books are projected to hit nearly $2 billion, up 342% from 2009, according to Cowen.

John Edgar Wideman is the kind of writer who can do whatever he likes. Best known for his 1984 memoir "Brothers and Keepers" and his fiction cycle "The Homewood Trilogy," he's won two PEN/Faulkner awards, been a National Book Award finalist and received a MacArthur "genius" grant. He has a tenured appointment at an Ivy League university. His agent, Andrew Wylie, is one of the most powerful in the business. So why is Wideman self-publishing his latest book, "Briefs: Stories for the Palm of the Mind"?

After months of speculation about their future, entertainment-industry newspaper the Hollywood Reporter, music-industry magazine Billboard and five other publications owned by Nielsen Business Media have been sold. Their new owner is a consortium of investors led by James Finkelstein, whose News Communications Inc. controls the Washington political newspaper the Hill and the Who's Who directories. Finkelstein himself also owns Thompson Publishing Group Inc., which puts out niche publications about government regulations.

Five major publishers -- Conde Nast Publications, Hearst Corp., Meredith Corp., News Corp. and Time Inc. -- announced Tuesday that they would join forces to develop an online storefront to rival Amazon.com Inc. The companies -- which publish such titles as Sports Illustrated, the Wall Street Journal, Better Homes and Gardens, Wired and Vanity Fair -- said their venture would sell newspapers and magazines online but could also be used to sell digital comics and books. As more readers cancel their print subscriptions in favor of browsing stories online, which has led to precipitous drops in advertising revenue, traditional media companies have been frantically experimenting with ways to deliver and make money from digital content.

Google Inc.'s settlement with authors and publishers over the digital scanning of books got a preliminary approval from a federal judge last week, but the controversy may be far from over. In fact, legal experts and industry observers who have been closely following the case believe the fight over Google's ambitious book-scanning efforts is just starting all over again. At issue is the ability of the Mountain View, Calif., search company to make available on the Internet digital copies of millions of out-of-print books and "orphan" books, works whose copyright holders cannot be found.

It was October in Germany, and Frankfurt was aflutter. The literati had gathered for publishing's preeminent international trade show. In one week, across acres of exhibits and at countless lavish parties, the world's booksellers would spend millions on current titles while agents, editors and publishers wheeled and dealed in the background, buying, selling and shaping next year's lists.

* Time Inc. is buying the Institute for Econometric Research, which publishes Mutual Funds magazine and financial newsletters. * Bertelsmann said it will withdraw its application with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission to buy Random House and resubmit it to provide more information on the transaction's impact on the publishing industry.

Will digital books catch fire this holiday? According to an online survey, 1 in 5 shoppers said they planned to buy an electronic book reader such as a Sony Reader or Amazon Kindle this year. When asked what they would like to get as a gift, about 1 in 10 cited a digital book reader. Portable music players, once the hot holiday ticket, got just 3.4% of the vote, while game consoles came in at 6%, according to the survey commissioned by Retrevo, a gadget review website. Likely buyers tend to be men under 35 years old who are living in the Northeast, where more people use public transportation, with an average annual household income of more than $100,000, according to the survey of 771 respondents.

This fall, there will be nothing bigger in bookstores than Hurricane Dan. On Sept. 15, Dan Brown's "The Lost Symbol," the follow-up to "The Da Vinci Code" -- which sold 80 million copies worldwide and is said to be the biggest-selling novel ever -- arrives with high expectations; fans have spent six years waiting for Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon's next adventure. As a consequence, perhaps, some publishers have gotten quieter literary fiction on the shelves in advance. Los Angeles novelist Michelle Huneven's "Blame" is about the lifetime of consequences that result from an alcoholic's mistake.