If you like the idea of super compact books that will fit into your pocket but aren’t keen on reading books on a small digital device such as an iPhone, there is still hope! U.K. company TankBooks has come up with a very clever and visually appealing way of packaging miniature books—inside specially designed boxes that look like flip-top cigarette packs.

The company currently offers six titles, all classics, by Joseph Conrad, Ernest Hemingway, Franz Kafka, Rudyard Kipling, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Leo Tolstoy. The books can be purchased individually or as a set (the set comes in a nice tin), and yes, they will ship to the United States. And while the cigarette box-packaged books may be addictive, they won’t be harmful to your health. Seems like a win-win!

This weekend (June 18-20) in Paris, the much-venerated Shakespeare and Company bookstore is holding its fourth literary festival. Inaugurated in 2003, the festival has since settled into a biannual schedule, running in 2006, 2008, and now 2010. Each festival has centered on a different theme, including “Lost, Beat & New: Three Generations of Writers in Paris”; “Travel in Words: Celebrating Travel Literature”; and “Real Lives: Exploring Memoir and Biography.”

This year’s theme is “Storytelling & Politics”—appropriate, given that Shakespeare and Company founder George Whitman (now in his nineties) has always seen his bookstore as a political vehicle, even describing it as “a socialist utopia masquerading as a bookstore.” Check out this video to get a sense of the unique literary atmosphere he created.

The 2010 festival’s diverse, international roster of participating writers and artists will include Martin Amis (England), Fatima Bhutto (Pakistan), Breyten Breytenbach (South Africa), Tjawangwa Dema (Botswana), Mathias Énard (France), Janine di Giovanni (United States), Petina Gappah (Zimbabwe), David Hare (England), Jack Hirschman (United States), Ian Jack (Scotland), Yusef Komunyakaa (United States), Hanif Kureishi (England), Nam Le (Vietnam), Philip Pullman (England), Carole Seymour-Jones (Wales), Raja Shehadeh (Palestine), and Gao Xingjian (China).

According to Publishers Weekly, this year’s festival will also mark the launch of a new literary magazine and literary prize. Beginning in 1967, Whitman published three issues of his Paris Magazine over the course of more than a decade. Keeping his title, the new publication will be edited by Fatema Ahmed, formerly the managing editor of Granta. Shakespeare will also announce its sponsorship of a biannual 10,000-euro prize for a novella of 20,000-30,000 words. It’s exciting to see the continued vitality of this iconic Left Bank establishment.

Do you attend bookstore readings? I am fortunate to live in Portland, Oregon, home to many bookstores, including the venerable Powell’s Books. I could probably go to a bookstore reading on a daily basis, and I often read through the listings in the local paper with great interest. The truth, though, is that I rarely go to bookstore readings. I never gave it much thought other than to attribute it to laziness, but then I saw this article, “The Dreaded Question: What is a ‘Reading’?” in the Huffington Post. The piece is by bookstore owner Alex Green, who talks about how the label “reading” is not quite accurate. He writes that “many of us are reluctant to attend a reading because we don’t know what one is, and we become afraid that something egregiously uncomfortable, or boring, is going to happen.” Green then goes on to explain that readings, at least at his bookstore, are engaging and lively discussions.

Green’s article made me question why I don’t attend more bookstore readings, and I think he is right—I think they are going to be kind of boring. I fully expect the author to read a chapter or two from a book, and thanks, but I can do that on my own at home. I would rather know about the author’s writing process or reasons for writing a particular book, or maybe I want to know the author’s favorite flavor of ice cream. If Green is correct that “readings” are actually conversations between authors and readers, then I could get on board, but really, it’s hard to know what to really expect. So, what do you think of bookstore readings? Do you attend? Look forward to them? What do you like about readings?

*The photo is from the last “reading” I attended. It was at Powell’s Books for my friend Amy Karol, author of Bend the Rules Sewing and Bend the Rules with Fabric. At the “reading” she displayed and discussed some of projects in the book, took questions, signed books, and hosted a cakewalk, so no, it wasn’t a typical reading.

The Audio Publishers Association (APA) has solicited a number of authors and narrators to help celebrate Audiobook Month. The participants will blog, tweet, and otherwise promote their way through June to generate interest in audiobooks. Among the authors lending a hand is David Sedaris. Sedaris has a distinct and, to many, instantly recognizable voice. He recorded some promos for National Audiobook Month. Other author advocates include Jennifer Egan, Deepak Chopra, James Patterson, Chelsea Cain, and Cory Doctorow.

First there was the Oscar Meyer Weinermobile and then the Peeps Fun Bus, and now there’s the Penguin Anniversary-mobile. The automobile, which commemorates the 75th anniversary of Penguin Books, will be touring the United States and making stops for anniversary parties at bookstores. The Penguin Car, a flaming orange Mini Cooper emblazoned with the Penguin logo, will also be transporting authors to book signings and celebrations.

Penguin will donate a set of 75 of its most prominent titles to a library or literacy organization in each scheduled stop along the anniversary tour. In June the Penguin Car will visit Minnesota, New York, South Carolina, Kentucky, and California. Though Penguin’s official anniversary date is July 30, the anniversary tour will continue through the summer. At the end of the anniversary celebration, the Penguin Car will be auctioned off, and proceeds will be donated to a literacy group.

Another fun part of Penguin’s celebration is Penguin Ink, which pairs six tattoo artists with six Penguin titles. The tattoo artists designed new covers for the titles, which include Waiting for the Barbarians by J. M. Coetzee, From Russia with Love (yes, it’s a James Bond title) by Ian Fleming, and The Broom of the System by David Foster Wallace.

Visit Penguin’s special anniversary website here to follow the Penguin Car and read about the history of Penguin Books.

Anyone who ever looked at picture books as a child knows that books aren’t just about text. Visual images can be just as powerful as the written word. I find myself drawn to books that celebrate visual images, whether they are photographs, graphic designs, or hand-drawn artwork, so I was excited to discover viction:ary, a Hong Kong-based publisher that specializes in collaborative image books.

viction:ary’s books cover a range of topics, including tattoos, architecture, fonts, and logos. The firm’s latest offering is Nice to Meet You Too: Visual Greetings from Business Cards to Identity Packages. It’s a sequel to, you guessed it, Nice to Meet You, which was published in 2006. I learned about this book via Yuko Uemura, a graphic and textile designer whose screenprinted towels I have purchased. Her business card is featured in this edition.

Here are a few more covers to tantalize you:

Musikraphics, a book that shares designs related to music, such as album covers and music posters.

Tattoo Icons, complete with trial tattoo stickers!

People seem to have very strong feelings about digital media. It seems every day I read articles embracing digital media and articles dismissing it. And even within the differing camps there is discord—Kindle vs. iPad vs. whatever the e-readers from Sony and Barnes & Noble are called. Putting aside the nuts and bolts of publishing costs, I just don’t understand what the big deal is. If you want to read books on paper, then read books on paper. If you want to read ebooks, go right ahead. Can’t we all just get along?

One thing on which we can probably all agree is that the traditional publishing model is outdated and needs to be modernized. So, whichever tribe you belong to, you might find some humor in this tongue-in-cheek article from The Atlantic.

Tim Parks, who blogs for the New York Review of Books, had an interesting post recently about the pressure that writers (particularly non-American writers) feel to reach an international audience and the way this is affecting what and how they write:

There is a growing sense that for an author to be considered “great,” he or she must be an international rather than a national phenomenon . . . [M]ore and more European, African, Asian and South American authors see themselves as having “failed” if they do not reach an international audience.

Parks goes on to describe how this pressure has increased with the advent of electronic submissions, which enable an author to send a new work simultaneously to publishers all over the world, such that international rights may even be purchased before the writer has found a publisher in his or her own country:

An astute agent can then orchestrate the simultaneous launch of a work in many different countries using promotional strategies that we normally associate with multinational corporations. Thus a reader picking up a copy of Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol, or the latest Harry Potter, or indeed a work by Umberto Eco, or Haruki Murakami, or Ian McEwan, does so in the knowledge that this same work is being read now, all over the world . . . This perception adds to the book’s attraction.

The disturbing side effect of this global market consciousness, Parks suggests, is that authors may be inclined to tailor their work for ease of translation and “remove obstacles to international comprehension,” particularly by keeping the language simple:

Kazuo Ishiguro has spoken of the importance of avoiding word play and allusion to make things easy for the translator. Scandinavian writers I know tell me they avoid character names that would be difficult for an English reader . . . What seems doomed to disappear, or at least to risk neglect, is the kind of work that revels in the subtle nuances of its own language and literary culture, the sort of writing that can savage or celebrate the way this or that linguistic group really lives.

It will be unfortunate if the proliferation of literature in translation can only happen through its homogenization.

Written in the aftermath of the 2005 riots in the Paris suburbs and published by La Fabrique in 2007, L’insurrection qui vient was denounced by the French government as a terrorist manual. The text first gained significant attention in 2008, following the arrest of its alleged authors, a group of youths now known as the Tarnac 9, on charges of sabotaging French train lines.

The English translation was published last year in the United States by Semiotext(e), a leftist California press known for publishing such household names in French cultural theory as Michel Foucault, Julia Kristeva, and Jean Beaudrillard. The Semiotext(e) edition had an initial print run of only 3,000 copies. Incidentally, too, the text is available for free online in both French and English. And yet the book is now in its sixth printing, and M.I.T. Press, its distributor, reports that it can barely keep enough copies in stock.

How has this fringe book become such a hot item? Some initial U.S. publicity for the book was generated by a guerrilla-style reading event in New York last June. But the real force behind sales appears to be the conservative commentator Glenn Beck, who launched a seven-minute diatribe against the book last July, which concluded with the inadvertent plug: “I am not calling for a ban on this book,” Beck explained. “It’s important that you read this book, [so] you know [what is coming,] and be ready when it does.” Recently Beck devoted an entire segment to the book, calling it “quite possibly the most evil thing I’ve ever read.” A Publishers Weekly article cites MIT Press associate publicist Diane Denner as saying that the book experiences a spike in sales every time Beck mentions it.

Ironically, while Michael Moore mentioned the book as his most recent read in an August 2009 interview with the Hollywood Reporter, his own “endorsement” had no such effect.

Classroom Publishing is a revised second edition and focuses on introducing publishing in the classroom and using it as an educational tool. Ooligan has set up a dedicated website and blog for Classroom Publishing, a twitter feed, and an e-mail newsletter. The website is much more than a mere advertisement—it serves as a guide, offering educator resources, news, and links to helpful information and sites. It continues the dialogue introduced in the book.

Ooligan will be hosting a launch party for Classroom Publishing on Friday, February 19, at p:ear gallery in Portland, Oregon, from 7 to 9 pm. See you there!

Steve Almond, author of Candyfreak and My Life in Heavy Metal, among others, has taken publishing matters into his own hands. Though Almond is still a hot commodity (his Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life will be availble April 13, 2010), he found that one of his book ideas was not generating much interest with publishers. His idea was a book that could be flipped over and read in two directions. One side would offer short stories, and the other side would contain essays about writing. The title? This Won’t Take But a Minute, Honey.

Unable to secure a large publisher, Almond decided to self-publish the book on demand using the Espresso Book Machine. His first reading was at Harvard Bookstore, which has an Espresso Book Machine that pumped out copies of the book as Almond read.

Almond isn’t ready to overthrow the corporate publishing model, but he does delight in the innovations that make such self-publishing possible. This Won’t Take But a Minute, Honey is available only at Almond’s readings. Read more about Almond’s experience here (it’s entertaining!).

French President Nicolas Sarkozy; image by guillaumepaumier via Flickr

Imagine the plight of the French. They want to protect their language and culture. They have what many consider to be one of the most beautiful languages, and their literary history is rich. From Molière to Flaubert to Sartre, the French have given much to the world.

Unfortunately for those who think literature is more than mere Internet “content” to attract advertising dollars, the times are changing quickly. Google is in the process of digitizing every book it can (admittedly to the great benefit of people who don’t have the resources otherwise to obtain certain texts), and soon Google and other American companies, such as Amazon and Apple, might dictate the publishing terms of books both old and new worldwide.

Faced with the possibility of losing control of its literary heritage, the French are mulling over possibilities. Even the conservative French president Nicolas Sarkozy—who has been called “Sarko l’Américain” for his pro-American sentiments—is concerned. He recently said of Google, “We won’t let ourselves be stripped of our heritage to the benefit of a big company, no matter how friendly, big or American it is.” He said France would finance its own book digitization program.

Amazon is also causing concern in France. Amazon has already battled France over the country’s prix unique du livre, which allows publishers, not booksellers, to set the price of a book. Because of this law, Amazon sells books for the same price as a small bookstore in Paris. Now five of France’s largest booksellers, including Fnac and Virgin, have proposed a nationalized ebook “hub.” There French publishers and booksellers would work together to sell ebooks online at a price determined by the publishers, preventing Amazon and other sites from competing with lower prices.

Guillaume Decitre, CEO of the French bookseller Decitre, said, “If we don’t manage to do this, what’s going to happen? We will find ourselves in front of a platform, or hub, already made by a private company . . . whether Amazon, Google or Apple.” In order to establish a nationalized ebook platform, the booksellers would have to persuade not only the French government but also French publishers, who don’t necessarily have the same interests. In fact, French publishers are thinking about creating their own single ebook platform without the booksellers.

Americans are often mystified by the French approach to politics, and many love to mock it. But if we are entering what comes to be called the Chinese century, it will be interesting to see how Americans react to their own declining empire, their own experience of being a small part of an economic world, this time dominated by Asia.

Let’s say you’re a small, independent bookseller that unfortunately happens to be down the street from some giant megastore chain that offers deep discounts on the same books you’re trying to sell at full retail price. You’re probably out of luck and better off opening a hot dog stand, right? Well, maybe not. I just read an article about such a case in England.

Linghams is an independent bookstore in Wirral, England, located across the road from mega supermarket and retail chain Tesco. Tesco sells new releases at steeply discounted prices, and Linghams’ sales were negatively impacted by the competition. After reading an article about Tesco CEO Sir Terry Leahy in which Leahy indicated he felt bad about wiping out small businesses, Linghams manager Eleanor Davies contacted Leahy. Davies explained how the discounted books were affecting sales at Linghams but also noted that Linghams was a specialty bookseller and thus offered a different service than Tesco. Leahy suggested that Tesco could send customers over to Linghams if they were unable to find the desired books at Tesco. Guess what? It worked! The Tesco near Linghams began displaying signs pointing customers to visit Linghams if they needed a broader or more specialized book selection.

It’s nice that the voice of the independent bookseller was heard, but this will probably not become a trend. Still, it can’t hurt to ask, since if you don’t ask, the answer is always “no.”

Quick, name some Japanese authors. I bet you couldn’t come up with many names, could you? Plenty of English-language books get translated for the Japanese market, but not many
Japanese-language books get translated into English. Japanese book editor Hiroki Sakai decided to do something about this inequity and in 2001 founded Vertical Inc., a small publishing house that specializes in translated works of contemporary Japanese fiction and nonfiction.

Vertical publishes books in a number of genres, including graphic novels, comic books (manga), games, cookbooks, craft books, mysteries, and historical fiction. The company has a small but capable staff well versed in translation, marketing, and book design. Vertical is responsible for introducing American readers to the works of such authors as Kenzo Kitakata, a popular mystery writer who had published more than 100 novels in Japan yet was virtually unknown in the United States.

For a somewhat dated yet detailed article about Sakai and Vertical, go here.

In conjunction with the Books = Gifts campaign, Random House compiled a Personal Shopper Kit for bookstores. More than 200 kits have been sent to booksellers across the country. The kits contain store displays, “Personal Shopper” buttons for employees to wear, and book recommendation materials. The Random House logo doesn’t appear on any of the materials, and the products are designed so they can be used in conjunction with individual store campaigns.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to go work on my book wish list . . .

So let’s conduct a little experiment here. Following are four covers for the same book, Chinua Achebe’s seminal Things Fall Apart.

Pretty different, aren’t they? Now let’s assume you had never heard of this book. If you saw these lined up on a shelf, would you stop to investigate any of them? Personally I am attracted to the anniversary edition cover. I would buy that book for the cover! The red and orange one? Not so much, but then, that is the cover sported by the school-copy edition I read.

A captivating cover leads me to anticipate what kind of magic is on the pages within and inspires me to take a chance on that book. Call it superficial if you want, but if you’re the publisher who produced that book, you win.

After months of keeping a low profile, OR Books finally announced its first work: Going Rouge: An American Nightmare. Sound familiar? Its title, Going Rouge, has the same letters, with just two switched around, as Going Rogue, Sarah Palin’s upcoming memoir. It also has a nearly identical cover design and the same release date as Palin’s book. The covers are so similar that with a casual glance it would be easy to confuse one for the other. It makes me wonder if OR Books was merely trying to take advantage of Palin’s best-selling memoir or if it was trying to confuse customers wishing to buy Palin’s book into buying its own book instead.

If OR Books chose the work to gain publicity for its new press, it succeeded brilliantly. The book, compiled by two editors at The Nation, has already received a lot of press, much of it for the nearly identical cover. People who don’t like Palin and who would otherwise never have heard of OR Books might go to its website and purchase a copy. As a result, OR Books accomplished something extremely important for a new publisher in the highly competitive and glutted American market, where about 300,000 books are published each year.

But despite my admiration for its marketing success, I feel somewhat disappointed by what seems to be a gimmicky strategy. Oakes and Robinson are serious publishers who have the potential to identify, edit, and publish significant literary works. So bravo, OR Books, for your marketing coup, but I look forward to your subsequent books—something more innovative, I hope, something we could call art.

In the meantime, here is a video OR Books made for Going Rouge.

Small, independent, or university presses get little glory. These publishers are generally not in the business in order to make heaps of money or attain celebrity status. Books are selected with much thought and care but probably with little hope they will ever make it onto a bestseller list.

Literary prizes, however, can sometimes boost a publisher’s reputation and affect sales. Take, for instance, the Nobel Prize for literature. The Nobel committee tends to bestow its awards upon relatively unknown authors, at least to readers in the United States. This, as you can imagine, generates a lot of interest and curiosity. When French writer J.M.G. Le Clézio won the Nobel Prize for literature in 2008, you would have been hard pressed to find anyone in the United States familiar with his work. Also, at that time, some four U.S. presses had published Le Clézio’s works: David R. Godine, University of Nebraska Press, University of Chicago Press, and Curbstone Press. David R. Godine printed 6,000 copies of The Prospector in 1993 and still had 420 copies when the Nobel Prize was announced. Of course, those didn’t last long—they quickly sold out, and back orders started piling up.

University of Nebraska Press also reaped the benefits of having a Nobel Prize winner in its catalog. It had in its stock two titles by Le Clézio: The Round and Other Cold Hard Facts and Onitsha. Sales for the works weren’t exactly brisk, but once Le Clézio won the Nobel, demand increased, and the two titles contributed a healthy $100,000 in sales to the press. University of Nebraska Press lucked out again in 2009 when Herta Müller was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. The press published Müller’s Nadirs. News of Müller’s win generated some 3,000 backorders for the title. Hip hip hurray for the underdog!

Curiously “Starsky et Hutch” speak French.

But there remain some common complaints. Americans are loud. They’re overweight. They don’t care about other countries and couldn’t find France on a map. Recently on a plane I was sitting next to a Romanian woman who now lives in Chicago. She told me she had watched an American television quiz show, and the host asked the question, What’s Romania? The contestant, the Romanian woman assured me, guessed it was a type of lettuce.

As a person fond of both Europe and the United States, I just smiled. Not long ago someone here in France asked me if Chicago was a neighborhood of New York.

What does this have to do with literature? One of my favorite blogs is Three Percent, devoted to modern and contemporary international literature. It’s so called because only 3 percent of all books published in the United States are translations. According to Three Percent, among books of literary fiction and poetry, the figure is only 0.7 percent (in 2008 the most commonly translated language in this category was French, with 16 percent of the total, but that added up to only 59 books).

I’m afraid, at least in literature, the stereotype of Americans is true. We all spend time in the produce section, but few of us ever buy a Romanian book.

Publication Studio Makes A Book from Mike Merrill on Vimeo.

I was reading the local newspaper this morning and came across an interesting article about a print-on-demand publisher called Publication Studio. Their publishing model is unique in that Publication Studio aims not just to print and bind books but to create a community interested in the books. The publisher thus sponsors get-togethers to discuss publishing trends, books, what have you.

The publishing “laboratory” has its offices in the Ace Hotel in downtown Portland, Oregon. Cofounded by Matthew Stadler and Patricia No, Publication Studio creates jank editions, which are basic photocopies bound in manila file folders, using an Instabook III machine. Profits are divided evenly with the author. Anyone can publish a book with Publication Studio for a fee. The studio also publishes bootlegs for authors whose work is temporarily unavailable, usually when the author’s original publisher has fulfillment issues.

Some of the works published by Publication Studio are available for sale on the studio’s web site.