Perfect strangers in 2007: Harry Potter and the Kindle
The News Review:
- Perfect strangers in 2007: Harry Potter and the Kindle
- Scholastic hopes ‘39 Clues’ will be Harry Potter successor
- China’s paper industry seeks fix for pollution as prices rise…
- You can’t keep a good schoolboy down
Perfect strangers in 2007: Harry Potter and the Kindle
Gainesville Sun - Dec 23, 2007
com | The Gainesville Sun | Gainesville, FL. com unveiled its Kindle e-book reader, the latest, and surely not the last, hand-held device meant to bring the centuries-old experience of the printed page to the digital age.
Scholastic hopes ‘39 Clues’ will be Harry Potter successor
Gainesville Sun - Dec 23, 2007
com | The Gainesville Sun | Gainesville, FL. publisher of those wildly successful books by J. Rowling, is moving forward with what it hopes will be its follow-up blockbuster series.
China’s paper industry seeks fix for pollution as prices rise…
Press-Enterprise - Press-Enterprise (subscription) - Dec 23, 2007
Neither are the latest Dan Brown novels and classic Chinese fiction. Voracious demand for books and a crackdown on small, polluting paper mills have caused a paper crunch in China, pushing up the price of paper by 10 percent this year and forcing printers to delay books and publishers to raise prices. The problems have been largely confined to China, but analysts say that if the trend is unchecked, publishers worldwide could find themselves paying higher costs — and consumers facing higher book prices. Story continues below…
It is the United States’ biggest offshore supplier of print products, chiefly books. Exports of paper products from China rose by 76 percent between 2005 and 2006. The Chinese paperback translation of the "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows," the seventh in the series, sells for $9, more than twice the price of its predecessors and a slice out of disposable income that in cities still averages less than $165 a month. "This one is too expensive if you want to buy the whole series," sniffed 21-year-old university student Li Jie as she browsed at a central Beijing bookstore, "especially for a student. " China is deeply embedded in the international book market. It is the United States’ biggest offshore supplier of print products, chiefly books. Exports of paper products from China rose by 76 percent between 2005 and 2006, according to government statistics, and are projected to rise a similar amount by the end of the decade.
You can’t keep a good schoolboy down
The Observer - Dec 23, 2007
It was hardly a vintage year for books, but 2007 was certainly the year of one book. From the moment in the new year that JK Rowling announced the title of HP7 (as it was known to the trade), Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows shot to the top of Amazon’s listings and sucked the oxygen out of the literary ecosystem. In a Darwinian struggle for shelf space, only rough, tough Conn Iggulden could compete, with another boys’ book. In January, Iggulden became the first person to achieve the fiction and non-fiction double with a simultaneous No 1 bestseller: the publication of Wolf of the Plains alongside The Dangerous Book for BoysBook headlines often have little to do with books. Rowling’s reported wealth would rise this year to £545m, but the reality of literary life was rubbed in when, last March, a survey of some 25,000 authors revealed that the typical British writer earned only about £4,000 a year (significantly less than the £6,300 reported in 2001). Blogging and the internet might have liberated the writer from the garret, but it seems that you still cannot take the garret out of the writer.