LISNews: Librarian News

Chip Kidd is currently associate art director at Knopf, an imprint of Random House. He is known for the book covers he has designed. There is a great video of a talk he gave at Google. The first ten minutes is about his new book that he wrote but the final fifty minutes is about book covers he has designed. He show slides of the different covers and talks about the thought process to create them. He also shows several slides of covers that never made it to production. This is interesting because you get to see what the cover to "The Road" might have been if Cormac McCarthy had liked the first proposal. Video here.

Since the first publicly-funded library opened in the USA in 1833, many generations of children have been inspired and nurtured by local librarians - none more so than the two generations of children in Old Greenwich, Connecticut who have had the privilege to be members of the Young Critics' Club at Perrot Memorial Library.

Full discussion at BookBrowse. Entry contains a link to an interview with Kate McClelland.

Sara Nelson, the editor in chief of Publishers Weekly, the main trade magazine for the book industry, has been laid off in a restructuring by the publication’s parent company, Reed Business Information.

According to a statement from Reed, which operates a broad range of trade publications, the layoffs affect about 7 percent of the staff (including executive editor Daisy Maryles, bookselling editor Kevin Howell, children's reviews editor Elizabeth Devereaux and director of business development Rachel Dicker ...Shelf-Awareness) .

As a result of the restructuring, Brian Kenney, editor in chief of School Library Journal, will now be editorial director of three magazines: Publishers Weekly, School Library Journal and Library Journal. NYTimes.

Do elaborate Web sites and videos really sell books? As in so much of publishing, no one really knows.

Full essay in the New York Times