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Oh that mine enemy were to write a book. It’s a line, paraphrased from the Book of Job, that was uttered last Friday morning at BookExpo America by Christopher Hitchens—author of the recently published book God Is Not Great—as the motto from his earlier book reviewing days. It was an odd sentiment to be heard at a panel called “Ethics in Book Reviewing: The More Things Change…?” but it certainly made the crowd, which was packed in and spilling out of the conference room, laugh out loud. And it set the tone for the rest of the panelists’ comments.
It’s not what most people expect from a book conference. There are no scholars huddled together discussing the latest piece of literary fiction that is keeping them up late at night; no gangs of poets arguing about who will make up the future canon of Western literature. Instead, what people found at this year’s BookExpo America, held last weekend at the Jacob Javits Convention Center in New York City, was actress Julianne Moore (really her), America’s Test Kitchen host Christopher Kimball (really him, but not quite as exciting as Moore), the cast of Pirates of the Caribbean (look-alikes, pretty good), Borat (another look-alike, not so good), and the Knight Bus from the Harry Potter series.
It was Saturday morning and Matthew Sharpe was late, but for a good reason. The author of Jamestown was supposed to be signing copies of his book in the autographing room of BookExpo America (BEA), but he’d just been named a finalist for a Quill Book Award, part of a program organized by NBC Universal and Reed Business Information that honors books in nineteen different categories at an awards show televised on NBC. Sharpe was busy being interviewed for MSNBC.
Last year's book sales rose slightly over 2005, the New York Times reports today. According to a study by the Book Industry Study Group, publishers sold 3.1 billion books in 2006, up just 0.5 percent from 2005, when 3.09 billion were published.
Brad Vice’s short story collection, The Bear Bryant Funeral Train, was recently published—again.
A used bookstore owner in Kansas City, Missouri, began burning his collection of books yesterday, the Associated Press reported.
George Burke and Shamoon Siddiqui recently launched Bookswim, an online operation that allows readers to rent books much the same way Netflix allows people to rent movies. The two graduates of the New Jersey Institute of Technology posted a beta version of the Web site at www.bookswim.com.
German media conglomerate Bertelsmann AG recently initiated major changes to Bookspan, the company responsible for Book-of-the-Month Club, that it acquired from Time, Inc., last month.
The Small Press Center, the nonprofit organization in New York City that has sponsored Small Press Month in March for the past eleven years, recently announced that it will change its name to the New York Center for Independent Publishing (NYCIP).
