“Books Need to Be ‘as Urgent as Notifications’”

March 16, 2026 //
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In a keynote address to the London Book Fair on 11 March, Joanna Prior, CEO of Pan Macmillan “tackled the growing literacy crisis, arguing that ‘the decline of reading is a greater challenge to our industry than AI could ever be’.” She also claims that books need to be “as urgent as notifications”.

Come off it Ms Prior, and again, come off it! How come we’ve got booming sales if there’s a literacy crisis? Do you really want books to ping on your iPhone? I suppose there may be the odd book here and there which wants to be urgent — maybe participating in current debate — but by and large books live in an altogether more peaceful and reflective world than do online notifications. If they were that urgent publishers would have evolved slightly more expeditious production processes for their books!

Ms Prior quoted journalist James Marriott, who said the country is “witnessing the birth of the first post-literate generation”. Wow, that’s good enough for me! What more evidence does anyone require? According to Shelf Awareness in a daring intellectual leap, showing us just how well provided she herself is in this vital area, Ms Prior explained the origins of her crisis to us. She “emphasized that this not about a lack of intellect. Rather, it is a sign of a ‘neurological shift’ caused by children being raised on short-form algorithms ‘designed to dismantle the capacity for sustained attention’.” She warns us that a generation has been “‘rewired for the scroll over the page’ and with that loss of literacy and inability to pay attention, Ms Prior asserted, “critical thinking is the first casualty.” Shooting herself in the foot “Prior highlighted a few recent releases, such as Gisèle Pelicot’s A Hymn to Life and Sarah Wynn-Williams’s Careless People, as evidence that books still have the power to be the ‘ultimate driver of conversation’.” Do we have to suspect that Pan Macmillan’s recent lists may not have been particular “conversation drivers”?

Now of course we do want our keynote speakers to rally the folks around the flag and make us all eager to rush off and do the right thing, but talking about crises is not inclined to lead to rational action. Ms Prior presents as her evidence the claim that “in the U.K., only 1 in 3 children enjoy reading in their free time, and half of all adults have stopped reading”. As far as I can tell all the evidence we have for anything like a “literacy crisis” is contained in surveys showing lower percentages of kids, and men answering positively to questions about reading than did in the past. (And by the way, when did we ever live in a world where half of all adults did read books?) Opinion surveys are opinion surveys, and before I build too much on their conclusions I’d like to see a bit more evidence explaining away the record sales of books from traditional publishing houses, as well as the immense increase in reading material represented by the self-publishing business.

I just refuse to take these surveys as meaningful. But even if they did mean that fewer people were reading books, they would not be telling us anything about literacy. What does Ms Prior think people do when they respond to a notification? They read it! Which skill we once upon a time called literacy: something which is probably now at a historically high level throughout the world.

Categories Book publishing, Reading, Self publishing

Smoother, lighter, whiter*

March 13, 2026 //
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Holmen Paper, a Swedish company, have introduced a new whiter, smoother sheet targeted at the magazine market. Printing Impressions brings us what amounts to little more than Holmen’s press release.

The article doesn’t reveal the secret sauce but does include this claim from Lars Åkesson, Product Manager for Graphical Papers at Holmen Board and Paper, “Our mill and development teams continuously strive to maximise the potential of fresh fibre. Since the natural strength of the fibres can be preserved in our production process, our papers achieve a quality and thickness normally associated with higher‑grammage papers.” We are also told that the paper, called Holmen Aspect,”is produced using residual wood from sustainably managed Swedish forests and sawmills”.

The significance, to me, is not so much the arrival of a lighter (in weight not shade) thus cheaper sheet for magazines, but the very fact that a new product is being introduced. The same issue of Printing Impressions carries a piece entitled The Future is Bright for Commercial Printing. Current conditions are described as “troubled waters, with tariffs and rising costs all over the place,” as well as “confusion and economic uncertainty, which are causing clients to delay or defer projects and reduce run size.” It looks like the only way is up!

Book printing has always been a small segment of the printing industry, but I’d assume that a similar optimism was beginning to affect our suppliers.

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* Our dear departed friend Liz Maguire wrote a novel entitled Thinner, Blonder, Whiter, which was published in 2002 by Carol and Graf.

Categories Book printing, Paper

Scam publisher

March 12, 2026 //
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At the blog Writer Beware Victoria Strauss publishes a fascinating correspondence with a publisher who initially wrote to her under the name Simon & Schuster LLC. Here’s their initial email:

Just what would make you respond to such a solicitation is not altogether clear to me, but then I’m not a wanna-be author. Ms Strauss is an activist against this sort of author scam, so she went ahead any replied. Even more of a warning to the innocent would be contained in their response to the fake outline she sent them. Wild enthusiasm may just be acceptable to the vanity of the eager author, but any email referring to an advance of $500,000 clearly has to scream “fake news” at you. Or can the “man in the street” be that naïve about book earnings?!

Of course we have no idea how many people fall for this sort of wheeze — but presumably enough that the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association feels the need to sponsor Writer Beware®. It all ended up with not of course the receipt of any advance against royalties, but with “Simon & Schuster” requesting a bank transfer (to them, or at least to an account in Delaware in the name of a Nigerian person). We don’t discover how much they wanted Ms Strauss to transfer, but the prices they ended up quoting for their publishing of the book “ranged from a fairly standard self-publishing starter package for $1,500 to an ‘elite bestseller package’ padded with ripoff nonsense like ‘full author branding strategy’ and ‘ongoing post-launch performance tracking’ for $15,000.”

Writer Beware® is sponsored by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association with the aim of alerting eager wanna-be authors to scamming risks.

Link via Technology · Innovation · Publishing. 

Categories Book publishing, Self publishing

Book banning envy

March 11, 2026 //
2

In an extract from Banning Books in America: Not a How-To, edited by Samuel Cohen (Bloomsbury Academic, 2026) LitHub brigs us a meditation by Lydia Millet on the disappointment of not having the books you’ve written banned anywhere — even though you thought they were plenty provocative.

She speculates on reasons for our current boom in book banning: “a fear of the creeping normalization of otherness appears to be inspiring banning initiatives, apparently rooted in the premise that sympathetic portrayals of that otherness, as embodied in the voices of marginalized individuals or groups, are seductive and therefore dangerous.” This seems right to me. But then the next question is why are these conservatives so worried about “the normalization of otherness”? Are they so insecure in their identity that they truly think that adoption of life styles different from their own and that of all their neighbors is just a matter of having the idea put into your head? And that such a choice would jeopardize their own prized lifestyle. We remain, and not because of their rhetoric, an extremely conservative society, and despite their insistent rhetoric, America is a million miles from anything remotely resembling socialism, heck even liberalism. And that’s not because of the vigilance of Moms for Liberty et al. nor because of the absence from the library of Heather has Two Mommies.

Striving for balance Ms Millet points out that we’ve been through periods of left-wing book banning:

“It should be mentioned that several book erasures have occurred in US publishing in recent years when a particular volume was deemed censorship-worthy not by the vigilantly value-defensive right but the vigilantly value-defensive left. I remember cases in which books were either summarily withdrawn from planned publication at the eleventh hour or lustily vilified afterward via media furors that erupted on the subject of their authorship — self-righteous squabbles over whether a given author had the ‘right’ to generate the fictional content in question. Such cancellations are a blot on the escutcheon of the left as certainly as cancellations from the right, and the deference of any publisher to them a mark of rank cowardice.”

I’m not so sure about this. Maybe my memory’s even worse than I thought, but I don’t remember right-wing books being banned — shunned maybe — but I don’t remember a movement to exclude conservatism from public libraries. (I will be happy to have pointed out to me evidence for my memory failure here.) I believe liberal thinking would tend to believe that free debate was the best way to handle ideas you don’t like, and that banning books should not be a weapon in the liberal arsenal. But maybe the cases Ms Millet remembers, without giving us chapter and verse — at least in this extract — really do exist.

Withdrawing a book at the last minute does not seem to me to be an exclusively wicked thing to do. If a publisher decides that they don’t want to publish this or that book, they have an absolute right not to do so, even if their decision is just based on avoidance of bad PR. They may, probably will, face financial consequences based upon their contract with the author as well as whatever they’ve already invested in readying the book — but at the end of the day if a publisher doesn’t like a book for any reason, there’s no force, legal or moral, compelling them to be its publisher. Publishing is a business not a public service.

In the end I still believe that banning books pays an unintended compliment to book publishing. That someone thinks our product is that powerful is surely just an enticement to look into the evidence to anyone with a mind not tightly closed.

Categories Book publishing, Libraries

Narrator Hall of Fame

March 10, 2026 //
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From here we can look across the Broadway valley towards the Hall of Fame in The Bronx. Not the Baseball Hall of Fame, or the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame; just the plain old Hall of Fame.

Now, via Book Riot, we are alerted to the existence of a Narrator Hall of Fame. This is not a commemoration of ancient mariners, each of whom as we know stoppeth one of three to force a narrative on them; we are talking about people who voice audiobooks. This Hall of Fame was set up in 2018 by Audible to celebrate the people who read their books for them. OK, OK. I suppose if I was running Audible I might think a Hall of Fame would be an option. (I might immediately think it was possibly too soon for “fame” and perhaps a bit transparent to restrict that fame to my own team.)

In order to be eligible for induction to The Narrator Hall of Fame, narrators must:

  • Have at least fifty titles on Audible
  • Be highly rated by listeners
  • Demonstrate versatility across genres and styles
  • Be actively involved in the narrator community
  • Have contributed to the evolution of the art form.

I dare say the first of these is the most important. Audiobooks are published by others than this subsidiary of Amazon,* but I guess they won’t be featured here no matter how much they may have “contributed to the evolution of the art form”.

Moved by concern for the welfare of those whose words these famous narrators are using, I checked for writers’ halls of fame. Wikipedia reassures us that “at least five” states have established such things, New York being one of them. Trip to Albany? — It’s quite close to Cooperstown for a Hall of Fame double-header.

Meanwhile, back at the farm, Audible have announced the arrival of Read & Listen, a feature which displays the words, enabling you to read along while you hear the book being narrated. No idea what the rights position is on this, but no doubt money cures all.

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* I realize this might read as yet another of those knee-jerk anti-Amazon rants — but I once again insist on my general support for super-efficient Amazon. Publishers only resent them, I believe, because they are our largest customer and as such can pressure us on terms of supply. ‘Twas ever thus. Pre-Amazon we’d bitch about the bookstore chains, Borders, Barnes & Noble etc.

Categories Book publishing, Reading

Book Bunk & Nairobi’s libraries

March 9, 2026 //
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Book Bunk is the group coordinating efforts to improve the libraries of Kenya. The organization was founded in 2017 by writer Wanjiru Koinange and publisher Angela Wachuka, and is funded by the British Council, The Sigrid Rausing Foundation, Open Society Foundations, The Ford Foundation, and The Carnegie Corporation of New York. According to the Kenya National Library Service there are sixty-four libraries in Kenya. Book Bunk claims to have increased library patronage by over 240%.

If you don’t see a video here, please click the title of this post in order to view it in your browser.

The reaction to colonialism may take time. The Guardian writes about the renovation of Nairobi’s libraries. Book Bunk is at work, as you can see in this video, on the McMillan Memorial Library built in central Nairobi by Lucie McMillan in memory of her husband, Sir William Northrup McMillan, an American-born colonialist. It was opened in 1931 as a “whites-only” space, the racial segregation continuing until 1958, when the city council took over its management. It is the only building in the country protected by an act of parliament, so no doubt modernization has to be carefully done.

Hand-wringing about people’s perceived unwillingness to read collapses into ludicrous navel-gazing when we consider the power of exploding literacy around the developing world.

Thanks to Jeremy Mynott for the link.

Categories Libraries, Reading

Get on the bus!

March 6, 2026 //
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Publishers Lunch of 25 February brings us the incredible news that “Coach has partnered with Penguin Random House in the US for the fashion brand’s Spring 2026 campaign, Explore Your Story, which ‘brings books into the center of fashion through a collection of readable book charms and two campaign films.’ Coach licensed rights to six PRH books for readable book charms, as chosen by ‘Gen Z-led communities’—I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Sense and Sensibility, Untamed, Friday I’m in Love, I’ll Give You the Sun, and Little Fires Everywhere.“*

If you don’t see a video. here please click on the title of this post in order to view it in your browser.

Well, Coach has to know a bit about what ladies like, but to me those “readable book charms” look a bit too big. Still, I look forward to seeing my first one in the subway.

Of course, because the “charms” are real books, they need to be largish. Not a good look to be caught reading a book using a magnifying glass. Yes, the text is there, though all their publicity shots show models reading “real” books while little ones dangle from their purses.

I suppose the very fact that each of these book charms will set you back $95 is probably in itself an attraction — “Look at me, I can afford this sort of thing!” How long before those pages get all dog-eared though, and not just by being read, by being bashed by passers-by?

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* For the curious, the authors selected by “Gen Z-led communities” are Maya Angelou, Jane Austen, Glennon Doyle, Camryn Garrett, Jandy Nelson, and Celeste Ng.

Categories Book publishing

Things fall apart

March 5, 2026 //
5

Werd’ ich zum Augenblicke sagen:
Verweile doch! du bist so schön!
Dann magst du mich in Fesseln schlagen,
Dann will ich gern zugrunde gehn!*

This is beautiful. “Wer liebt nicht Wein, Weib und Gesang, der bleibt ein Narr sein Leben lang” as Martin Luther is alleged to have claimed, is a silly jog-trot platitude expressing the same sort of desire. Faust, who somehow manages to sum up all German romantic longing in his “Verweile doch! du bist so schön!” — allegedly the most quoted bit of German verse — was on the fun track; he wanted nothing to do with nostalgia, Goethe shows him sufficiently eager to be off on a round of new experiences to sell his soul for the thrill.

Was he right? Should we, to come crashing down to earth, be concerned that people are alleged to have better things to do than to read books any more? Should we instead be raring to take wing in a social media whirl, reveling in new experiences? Or is spending sixteen hours a day on Instagram tantamount to selling your soul to the devil?

It is true, at least in the Anglophone world, that we’re not reading Goethe’s Faust any more. It’s also true that we no longer really know our Greek mythology. This used to be a staple of school education. Robert Graves in his introduction to The Greek Myths mourns that “the Classics have lately lost so much ground in schools and universities that an educated person is now no longer expected to know (for instance) who Deucalion, Pelops, Daedalus, Oenone, Laocoön, or Antigone may have been.” Graves wrote these words in 1955, the year I was packed off to public school, and I have to confess that a couple of these names are indeed not altogether familiar to me. Although the number one subject at my school was rugby football, we were naturally exposed to the classics: indeed had to have Latin in order to get in in the first place. (It was only in 1960 that Latin ceased to be an entrance requirement to Cambridge and Oxford.) But apart from losing your ability to show off, what does it matter that you don’t know who it was who Odysseus’ first arrow got?

Since we seem to be content to accept the evidence of surveys answered by teenagers as the scientific data underpinning our study of book culture (and despite the fact that record numbers of books are being created and sold these days†), let us go along with the idea that kids won’t read anymore. Does this matter? Well if it were true, it would obviously be bad for the book publishing business. But even if it’s not true, publishers might be in danger anyway. Come back in hundred years and will anyone still own these bulky paper objects we currently seem to invest so much concern in? Of course publishers could adapt. Or will books by then have graduated to the same sort of status as a Louis XIV ormolu clock?‡

There’s books and then there’s books. There’s the container, and then there’s the content. In so far as the content is useful (or entertaining) this material will continue to be available. What physical shape it arrives in is a lot less important (and much more uncertain): and in any case the transmission path may bypass any physical format altogether. For the time being we cannot see past the codex, but it wasn’t the codex that Moses brought down from Mount Sinai. The day of the scroll ended five hundred years ago. Need the codex last longer than a couple of millennia? We use the tools we find best for the job we need doing. I really can’t imagine that in a couple of centuries we’ll still be finding out facts by looking them up in whatever passes for a book by then. (Pace Wikipedia.) Imagining what’ll take the place of our cumbersome database systems is harder — and I’m not going to try: but it’ll surely be way slicker than anything we’ve seen yet. In any case by then it may all be over with profligate humankind and the insects may have established their sway. The facts they need, they carry with them.

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* In the translation by Louis MacNeice of Goethe’s Faust this, Faust’s bargain for his soul, reads:

If ever I say to the passing moment
'Linger a while! Thou art so fair!'
Then you may cast me into fetters,
I will gladly perish then and there!

Perhaps a shade less effective than Goethe’s original.

Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus presents a much more business-like, down-to-earth, legalistic Faustus:

Loe Mephostophilis, for love of thee
Faustus hath cut his arme, and with his proper bloud
Assures his soul to be great Lucifers,
Chiefe Lord and Regent of perpetuall night.
View here this bloud that trickles from mine arme,
And let it be propitious for my wish.

† “Books remain one of the discretionary spending bright spots,” said Brenna Connor, U.S. books industry analyst at Circana, during a talk last week at Winter Institute 2026 in Pittsburgh, Pa. “People are cutting back overall, but many of them are not cutting back on books.”

‡ France turns out to be book-buying central. According to The Guardian (thanks to Annabel Hollick for the link) “350m books were sold in France in 2025; adjusted for population that’s almost three times as many as in the US (762m), and just under twice as many as in the UK (191m).”

Categories Book publishing, Reading

Woke joke

March 4, 2026 //
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Taking action to protect yourself by indulging in actions which everyone can see are ridiculous is perhaps not the most diplomatic way to control the narrative. Conservative thought may well be at least not-irrational in believing that our society may have gone too far in making allowances over diversity, equity and inclusion — we’ve made obvious (and to me, highly beneficial) progress since my childhood. I can, of course, see how not everyone might welcome a liberalization of society, but counteraction is difficult to control. And after all, if you’re right, wouldn’t the self-evident correctness of your beliefs lead to long-term automatic correction anyway?

A case in point: at Texas A&M, a university, mark you, instructor Martin Peterson was told he had to remove Plato’s Symposium from his introductory philosophy course. The Economist brings us the story. Reading Plato the university has maintained exposes students to gender and race ideology. And these topics are strengstens verboten in Texas. Just what revolting suggestions Plato was making are not specified by The Economist, but I’m pretty sure the university authorities weren’t objecting to the absence of women from the dinner party discussion. Of course we don’t really have to have signposted for us what it is about The Symposium which is upsetting Texans.

Copied from The Siren, via Hyperallergic.

Apparently at the University of Texas in Austin forty percent of faculty report that they had to change their curricula last autumn, no doubt for a variety of reasons. The chancellor of Texas Tech University “says the reforms are designed to rein in wokeness and push universities to deliver degrees that help graduates get high-paying jobs”. And dumb old us thought that the purpose of a university education was to expose minds to as many ideas as possible and lead students to the discrimination necessary to choose between them.

The situation becomes a bit less farcical, veering into the self-destructive, when we hear of our government’s vigorous defunding of science, especially climate research and vaccine development. Willfully covering your eyes and hoping that by not looking you’ll make the thing you don’t like just disappear is behavior we expect from five-year-olds.

Mr Peterson worries about his job security at Texas A&M, and in March, instead of Plato, he plans two sessions on the value of free speech.

Categories Reading

The classic long tail

March 3, 2026 //
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In its “Reading the World” column The Financial Times Weekend section of 28 February/1 March includes an article by Boyd Tonkin headed “The literary long tail of classics keeps growing”. He attributes the growth in sales of older books to film and TV adaptations, TikTok influencers, reduced cost of acquisition as against new books, and a certain emphasis on translations. All these factors do count towards the “classics” success story, but I insist on a technologically deterministic explanation underlying them all.

For the last quarter century publishers have indeed gradually been waking up to the idea that you can actually make money reissuing old books. It all started with Penguin Books in 1935, but the classics bit in that revolution was submerged by the paperback bit. The counterintuitive idea that, if they sold enough copies, cheap editions of books could make more money than the more expensive hardbacks which hitherto (and for long thereafter, even unto our own days) were the staple of the business, was only slowly accepted by publishers other than Allen Lane. Just before and just after World War II the publishing of paperbacks was indeed the supernova of book publishing innovation. The glare of that fact hid from us the really important feature that lots of these paperbacks were in fact not new books, so a second bite at the cherry was being achieved.

It wasn’t till the sixties and seventies that some publishers began to think that they might themselves reissue as cheap paperbacks older books that they had once done well with in hardback form. The normal practice in those days was to lease paperback rights to a paperback publisher, and giggle behind your hand that you had just pulled off the coup of the century by getting a heap of money as an advance for some old goods which were many-times amortized in your accounts. Old ideas die hard, but even our ancient university presses bestirred themselves in those decades and reissued as paperbacks some of their old classic texts. And lo and behold they did OK.

As Mr Tonkin reminds us “potential audiences exist for many kinds of vintage volume”. This we have long known: the problem being that the audiences were not quite large enough to make the gamble of reprinting a sure fire thing. The fly in the ointment back then was always the problem that in order to get a decent unit cost of manufacture you had to print a lot of copies.

Paradoxically perhaps this problem was felt in less extreme form in academic publishing. If your books are expensive anyway because of restricted demand resulting from their specialized subject matter, then you can probably get a (relatively) cheap-looking paperback at a reasonably low print run. The cost of putting ink on paper and binding the result up as a paperback is pretty much the same whether the subject matter in The Uptake and Storage of Noradrenaline, or John Galsworthy’s Forsyte Saga novels. — Maybe this second TV series about to hit our shores will reignite demand for news of the Forsyte family. After all, Mr Tonkin reports that Wuthering Heights has already sold over 100,000 copies in 2026 as a result of the release of Emerald Fennell’s hyped-up movie version.

At the recent Winter Institute Shelf Awareness of 27 February took this picture of HarperCollins staff welcoming their American Classics series, due to publish in May.

The arrival of HarperCollins’s “American Classics” is, to me, an ironic development. As an academic publishing house we used to do very nicely thank you taking over from Harpers the sorts of books that will be in this new Classics series; well the more serious non-fiction part of it. They’d put these books out of print when their sales dropped below 4,000 a year — an academic publisher was overjoyed to get a book that could sell 4,000 copies lifetime! Synergy at work. So what’s changed?

What has changed is the huge development this century of short-run book manufacturing. In the old days Harper would need to print in the 10,000 range to push their unit cost (and hence retail price) down to where their customers could live with it. But tens of thousands of copies of books of this sort, books which may actually sell one or two thousand a year with the odd break-out big seller, can’t be printed ahead of time without tying up too much capital in slow selling lines. Now when they themselves can economically reprint that 4,000 quality which they used to be forced to subcontract to academic specialists, a whole range of publishing has opened up to trade publishing houses, and even small “potential audiences” can be catered to by the big houses, no longer just by the small-scale specialists.

So bless digital printing. It has opened up a whole new world of older books which used only intermittently to see the light of day. Ebooks, while relevant in this context, are perhaps less significant because of the existence of so much of this sort of digital material free of charge now that it’s in the public domain. Nevertheless, one of the things that constantly amazes me is publishers’ ability to sell for good money texts which are available online free of charge — take Wuthering Heights for instance. Look only for more publishers to do more old books.

Categories Book manufacturing, Book printing, Book publishing
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