According to Simba Information’s annual report, “Business of Consumer Book Publishing,” Travel books (including guidebooks, travelogues, and personal narratives) generated $142 million dollars in 2006, placing it seventeenth out of nineteen categories tracked by Simba. Only the sports and graphic novels markets were smaller. Sales of travel books in 2006… Read more   

I was surprised, a few weeks ago, to see a picture of Elie Wiesel staring back at me from the essay page of the Sunday New York Times Book Review. The picture was an old one, but he had the same pained, prophetic look that he did thirty… Read more   

In the early 1980’s, I worked for a company owned by the Xerox Corporation, and I remember when they proclaimed the coming of the paperless office. Xerox, the inventors of the photocopying machine, was going into the “document management” business. While the people who actually worked in America’s offices were… Read more   

Ever wonder why the technology-fueled productivity gains of the 1990’s that transformed the U.S. economy seems to have bypassed book publishing? Doesn’t it feel like it takes longer than ever for your book to get to market? Rachel Donadio tries to explain this paradox in an essay that appeared in… Read more   

All this talk about the specter of China brings me back to the summer of 1964. It was late July or early August, and the mighty New York Yankees were in third place. The Yankees won every year in those days, so it was only a matter of time before… Read more   

The accuracy of yet another bestselling memoir has been called into question. According to Publishers Weekly, a newspaper from Down Under has questioned the accuracy of key dates in Ishmael Beah’s highly regarded bestseller, A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier. The Australian reports that it has evidence… Read more   

I’ve always thought of cities as being cultured, not literate. What comes to mind is the baroque beauty of European capitals, with their cathedrals, opera houses, coffee houses, outdoor cafes, bookstores, newspaper kiosks, twisting cobblestone streets, and public spaces. Centers of commerce and culture (and sometimes government), they are places… Read more   

A very nice piece in the New York Times by Joe Nocera on why everybody but Wall Street loves Amazon. Over the holidays, Nocera was treated to Amazon’s famous obsession with the “customer experience.” He had ordered a PlayStation on Amazon as a gift for his son, and started to… Read more   

Remember the Seinfeld episode from season three about the library cop? The New York Public Library contacted Jerry because they claimed he had taken out a copy of Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer in 1971 and never returned it. The NYPL sent its crack “Investigaton Officer,” Lt. Bookman,… Read more   

The day before the sixty-sixth anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pear Harbor, I came across the following tidbit in Cindy Adams’ gossip column in the New York Post: “The History Channel has nixed future WWII programming. They claim: Doesn’t fit our demographics. The History Channel!?” I was knocked for… Read more