Happy 80th Birthday Mickey Mouse

The comic and cartoon hero is looking good for eighty, and he's partying with celebrities, dancing Bollywood and travelling worldwide. To read more about the Disney charachter who started out in 1928, see my post over at The View From Here.

Friday photo: Eats, Shoots and Leaves....

Please, read Lynne Truss's book, Eats, Shoots and Leaves if you haven't already done so. And check out her punctuation quiz - it's fun!

Here is an example of why I love punctuation, but it's so easy to get wrong. Oh, and the typo...how many can you spot?

The Stockpile - 19 books on current order

I'm stockpiling. I've ordered my Book Club list for the next nine months (6), Christmas gifts (3) and my current 'like-to-haves' (10). I've bought some online and some from my local store. The only problem is now, where will I store them?

I've another five already on the to-be-read-stack. Since I currently do less than one a month, looks like I have my own supply and demand issue to take care of at home. Now that I can deal with. The market may need to take care of itself.

The Alchemist: A Fable About Following Your Dream [Paperback] Paulo Coelho
Arthur and George [Paperback] Julian Barnes
The Book Thief [Paperback] Markus Zusak
Fault Lines [Paperback] Nancy Huston
First Book of the Recorder (Usborne First Music) [Paperback] Philip Hawthorn, Caroline Hooper
French by Heart: An American Family's Adventures in La Belle France [Paperback] Rebecca S. Ramsey
Granny Was a Buffer Girl [Paperback] Berlie Doherty
If Nobody Speaks Of Remarkable Things [Paperback] Jon McGregor
The Joshua Files - Invisible City (Joshua Files) (Joshua Files) (The Joshua Files) [Paperback] M G Harris
The Lovely Bones [Paperback] Alice Sebold
Manga for Dummies (For Dummies) [Paperback] Kensuke Okabayashi
McCarthy's Bar: A Journey of Discovery in Ireland (A Lir book) [Paperback] Pete McCarthy
Night Train to Lisbon [Paperback] Pascal Mercier
Peeling the Onion (Beim Häuten der Zwiebel) [Paperback] Günter Grass.
The Secret Life of Bees [Paperback] Sue Monk Kidd
The Sleepwalker (CHERUB) [Paperback] Robert Muchamore
The Tower (Der Turm). [Paperback] Uwe Tellkamp
What You Don't Know about Retirement: A Funny Retirement Quiz [Paperback] Bill Dodds
Wicked (Wicked Years 1) [Paperback] Gregory Maguire

Existing Shelf Stack:
Half of a Yellow Sun [Paperback] Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Inglorious [Hardback] Joanna Kavenna
The Irresistable Inheritance of Wilberforce [Hardback]Paul Torday
Moral Disorder [Paperback] Margaret Atwood
The Road Home [Paperback] Rose Tremain
Strawberry Fields [Paperback] Marina Lewycka

Demand and Supply in the Publishing World?

The press is full of the challenging market times we face, whether buying milk, manufacturing cars or publishing books. Nathan Bransford of Curtis Brown says encouragingly today, times have been tougher in publishing.

"First, we must remember the advice of the late Douglas Adams and Don't Panic. The book industry has been through worse times than this, people will always read books, books will still be published, and until that changes most of us will still be here."

The American Association of Publishers reported significant year to date increase and decreases in many sales in August. But the range of change was broad.

Winners:
E-books sales jumped up by a whopping 52 percent for the year.

Adult Paperback sales increased by 9.5 percent for the year.

The Children’s/YA Paperback saw an increase of 14.1 percent for the year.

Losers:

The Children’s/YA Hardcover sales for year-to-date dropped by 35.5 percent.

Audio Book sales were down by 26.8 percent.

Religious Books saw a decrease of 7.7 percent for the year.

More recently HarperCollins UK has put a hold on all recruitment until the start of next year "in response to the current economic climate". The decision by HarperCollins UK follows a tough quarter for the worldwide business, with profits down some $33m.


Without wanting to be too pessimistic, we're not out of the woods yet. In fact, we've hardly entered them yet at all. The reality is that the consumer economic climate has only just started to cool and has not yet filtered through its full impact to publishing. Publishers at Frankfurt confirmed to me, that "prices have gone up. Fact." And in an economic climate in which people have less cash in their pockets, any price increase can have a negative affect on sales.

I believe next year will see further increases in book costs as printing costs rise. Q4 has seen an increase in Russian wood export tax and 2008 has seen a succession of printing house closures across China as legislation (both environmental and anti-piracy) has put many companies with lower standards out of business. Penguin UK sourced 60% of their production from China in 2007. At the end of 2007, prices were already increasing and causing consternation at the Beijing Book Fair.

Further, the Chinese printers are looking to western publishers who run on large economies of scale. Matthew S. Chan summed up his feeling from Book Expo America earlier this year, "Chinese printers, are out of touch of the undercurrents going on in the publishing industry... they were happy to cater to American companies that wanted to commit to print runs of 3,000 and more. Many of the Chinese companies wanted print runs of 5,000 or more. However, what they do not yet understand is that “long tail” and the boom of small, independent publishers will continue to erode at the core business of the “big best-seller” that large publishing houses love so much."

China is the largest global importer of Russian wood. Higher import prices will inevitably be passed onto the customers, the publishers. If demand is also met by fewer suppliers, it can only exacerbate the pressure on price. And this will coincide with a publishing market with less buying power looking for small print runs, which will be offered at higher costs. Typically, this reduced demand would result in more closures, and a cyclical process will continue until supply, price and demand get back in balance. This may take some time. Of course there are many printing industries around the world, in Europe and the US too, but if you follow the Paper Index Times, similar issues concern printing companies from Canada to Cambodia.

Quoting Edward Nawotka at Beyond Hall 8 Barnes & Noble CEO Len Riggio wrote an email to his booksellers telling them to brace “for a terrible holiday season, and expect the trend to continue well into 2009, and perhaps beyond.” This is the same Barnes & Noble who has recently told distributors it will not be paying for two months due to anticipated excessive returns.

This expectation seems to be true for all sectors, Children's and adult alike.

So I'm stockpiling. I've ordered my Book Club list for the next nine months, Christmas gifts and my current 'like-to-haves'. I've bought some online and some from my local store. The only problem is now, where will I store them? I'll share the list tomorrow. 19, I just counted, yikes.

It's a cracking read, Gromit - The Lost World

The cities of Edinburgh, Glasgow and Bristol have announced that they will be joining together in a collaborative reading campaign in February next year. The Lost World Read 2009 will celebrate the 150th anniversary of the birth of Arthur Conan Doyle, and the bicentenary of the birth of Charles Darwin. Thousands of free copies of Edinburgh-born Conan Doyle’s story The Lost World will be distributed through libraries, schools and supporting partner organisations together with a ‘quick read’ edition and a paperback comic biography on the Life of Charles Darwin. The three cities will be joined by the county of Hampshire, and the 15 Library authorities of South West England.

In The Lost World a group of explorers set out on an expedition to South America to prove that deep in the jungle there is a forgotten world where dinosaurs and other prehistoric animals still survive.

An exclusive cover has been designed for the free edition of the book by Bristol’s Aardman Animations, featuring their most famous creations, Wallace & Gromit. A spokesman from Aardman commented, “Wallace and Gromit are big fans of reading and are so excited about being part of this project. They think it's great that so many people, up and down the country, are going to be joining in."

image copyright Aardman Animations Ltd, 2008 (www.aardman.com)