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From today’s Publishers Weekly summary of Bowker’s latest report on publishing:
Despite the belief in many quarters that the growth of e-books will mean the death of the printed book, the number of books produced by traditional publishers rose 5% in 2010, to a projected 316,480, according to preliminary figures released Wednesday morning from R. R. Bowker. That number, however, is dwarfed by the growth in output of nontraditional titles, which jumped 169% to 2,766,260. As Bowker notes, the majority of nontraditional titles consists largely or print-on-demand editions of public domain titles. Self-published titles are also included in the figure. Based on the preliminary figures, the combination of traditional and nontraditional books totaled a projected 3,092,740 in 2010, up 132% from 2010.
The e-book vs. print book thing is probably misleading (as most experts point out, it seems likely we’ll live in a world of multiple formats), but the fact that there are almost 10 times more “nontraditional titles” being published than traditional ones is pretty striking. And the fact that over 3 million books were published last year is incredibly stunning. Especially since that’s up 132% over 2010 while sales for Jan/Feb 2011 for print books were down 24% compared to last year.
The sheer number of books brings to mind Gabriel Zaid’s So Many Books: Reading and Publishing in an Age of Abundance, and reinforces my fears about how people ever discover anything amid this tidal wave of titles . . . When the average American only reads like 3 or 4 books a year, something seems a bit out of whack.
This overwhelming number of books also reminds me of this:
From the New Yorker:
The Argentinean artist Marta Minujín makes not sculpture but “livable sculpture” or, better yet, “happenings.” In her 1963 work “The Destruction,” she filled the Impasse Ronsin in Paris with her artistic creations from the previous three years (primarily splatter-painted mattresses, twisted up, hung on picture frames, sewn together with pillows) and then invited fellow artists to “intervene” with them, after which she set the lot on fire, while releasing among the spectators a hundred birds and a hundred rabbits. Minujín is perhaps best known for her work with mattresses (you can view some of her delightful deconstructions on her Web site), but she also has a thing for books. In 1983, she created a full-scale model of the Parthenon in a park in Buenos Aires made (but for some metal scaffolding) entirely of books that had been banned during the last military dictatorship (there’s an incredible picture of it here). After three weeks, the public was allowed to pick the Parthenon apart and to take the books home with them.
This week, she’s back with “The Tower of Babel,” an ode to linguistic oneness erected in the Plaza San Martin to celebrate Buenos Aires being named the World Book Capital of 2011. The structure contains some thirty thousand books in various languages, many of them donated by embassies of countries around the world (the U.S. sent one thousand books; Ecuador sent thirty-five hundred). “I don’t know why we have to have different languages,” Minujín told the A.F.P. “Art needs no translation.” Noble sentiments, to be sure, but I prefer her more irreverent reason for building the tower: “It’s really amusing to be able to climb up and down a work of art.”
Reviewed by Rachael Daum
The Urdu word basti refers to any space, intimate to worldly, and is often translated as “common place” or “a gathering place.” This book by Intizar Husain, who is widely regarded as one of the most important living Pakistani writers,. . .
Reviewed by Vincent Francone
The Whispering Muse, one of three books by Icelandic writer Sjón just published in North America, is nothing if not inventive. Stories within stories, shifting narration, leaps in time, and characters who transform from men to birds and back again—you’ve. . .
Reviewed by Camila Santos
Luis Negrón’s debut collection Mundo Cruel is a journey through Puerto Rico’s gay world. Published in 2010, the book is already in its fifth Spanish edition. Here in the U.S., the collection has been published by Seven Stories Press and. . .
Reviewed by Grant Barber
“South”
To have watched from one of your patios
the ancient stars
from the bank of shadow to have watched
the scattered lights
my ignorance has learned no names for
nor their places in constellations
to have heard the ring of. . .
Reviewed by Larissa Kyzer
When Icelandic author Andri Snær Magnason first published LoveStar, his darkly comic parable of corporate power and media influence run amok, the world was in a very different place. (This was back before both Facebook and Twitter, if you can. . .
Reviewed by Tiffany Nichols
When starting Hi, This Is Conchita and Other Stories, Santiago Roncagliolo’s second work to be translated into English, I was expecting Roncagliolo to explore the line between evil and religion that was front and center in Red April. Admittedly, I. . .
Reviewed by Josh Billings
Christa Wolf’s newly-translated City of Angels is a novel of atonement, and in this way the work of art that it resembles most to me is not another book, but the 2003 Sophia Coppola film Lost in Translation. Like that. . .
Reviewed by Grant Barber
French author—philosopher, poet, novelist—de Roblès writes something approaching the Great (Latin) American Novel, about Brazilian characters, one of whom is steeped in the life of the seventeenth century polymath (but almost always erroneous) Jesuit Athanasius Kircher. Eleazard von Wogau, a. . .
Reviewed by Brendan Riley
A rich, beautifully written, consistently surprising satire, Yan Lianke’s Lenin’s Kisses boasts an elaborate, engrossing plot with disarming twists and compelling characters both challenged and challenging. It leads the reader on a strange pilgrimage—often melancholy but certainly rewarding—through a China. . .
Reviewed by Emily Davis
Maybe I’ve been watching too much Doctor Who lately, and I’m therefore liable to see everything through science-fiction-colored glasses. But when the pages of The Miracle Cures of Dr. Aira refer to “the totality of the present and of eternity”. . .
Three Percent is supported in part by the New York State Council on the Arts.
