LISNews: Librarian News

Feedmag has an Interview with André Schiffrin, Dave Eggers, and John Donatich on the state of publishing, and the impact emerging technologies might have upon it. They talk about how Amazon.com, ebooks, and print-on-demand will change the role of the editor, and if large corporations will change fundamentally the way we read and what books are available to us.

\"More people are literate, college educated, and book buying than ever before. We have a greater number of publishers in business, and stats released just last week revealed that independent presses produce seventy percent of the books in a U.S. market that generates more than forty billion dollars in sales annually. \"

The Village Voice has an interesting Story on several literary magazines that have optimistically expanded into a new arena: book publishing. The alternative presses continue to grow.

\"The literary magazine presses seem like nothing so much as a return to Epstein\'s cottage industry; in both their structure and their sense of responsibility to the writer, there is something profoundly nostalgic about these publishing projects, while their attempts to draw around them a creative community seem haunted by memories of other, now extinct New York bohemias.\"

Here is an interesting article from the New Press. A mother of a prisioned man has bought 50 books for a section of the jail that is without them.\"Rocky Graziano, a spokesman for the Lee County Sheriff’s Office, said mentally ill inmates are kept out of the jail’s general population for safety reasons.

Unfortunately, isolation meant to protect them also keeps those inmates out of the jail’s library, said Bette Scruggs, an education program coordinator at the jail.\" -- Read More

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution has this article on Banned Books Week (September 23-30).\"Harry Potter made the list. So did \'\'The Catcher in the Rye\'\' and \'\'The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.\'\' The most popular children\'s books? No. The ones adults most wanted removed from library shelves in the 1990s.\" -- Read More