News & Notes is a weekly Saturday post featuring book- and publishing-related news, links to interesting articles and opinion pieces, and other cool stuff
Bookish News
- In Q1, Sales Rose 26% at Amazon as It Works to Improve Shipping Times (Publishers Weekly)
- Workers To Hold Mass Strike On May 1, International Workers’ Day, including workers from some major online retailers, such as Amazon and Target.
- Barnes & Noble workers say [NJ] warehouse is unsafe. Now they want Gov. Murphy to shut it down (NJ.com)
- U.K. Booksellers Call for Government Help (Publishers Weekly)
- Amazon UK to cut price of its ebooks to reflect removal of VAT (The Guardian)
- Harlequin Introduces Larger Mass Market Paperback, following on the heels of Kensington’s announcement last week. (Publishers Weekly)
- PW, Independent Publishers Launch #ReadIndie Campaign (Publishers Weekly)
Worth Reading/Viewing (not all book-related)
- A Side Effect of the Covid-19 Pandemic? Reading Got a Lot Harder (The Chronicle of Higher Education)
- The end of coronavirus: what plague literature tells us about our future (Marcel Theroux, The Guardian)
- ‘This is beyond the Great Depression’: will comic books survive coronavirus? (Sam Thielman, The Guardian)
- Literary lockdown: how translating a Dan Brown novel made for a thriller plot. In 2013, a team of translators went into lockdown for a month and a half to translate Inferno for worldwide publication. Now, their story has become a movie. (Julia Webster Ayuso, The Guardian)
Free Books Online
A number of authors and companies are offering free fiction to lift your spirits while you’re on lockdown.
- The Book of Hopes: Words and Pictures to Comfort, Inspire and Entertain Children in Lockdown (ed. by Katherine Rundell)
More Stay-At-Home Resources
- This Architecture Studio Released A Series Of Templates Children Can Use To Create Paper Cities During Lockdown (deMilked) You can download the templates here: Paper Skyscraper; Create Your Own City; Drawing Trees
Bea's Book Nook
Do we really need another paperback size? Though if the font is easier to read, it may be worth the inconvenient size and higher price.
Bea’s Book Nook recently posted…Friday Memes: The Suicide House by Charlie Donlea
Nicole @ BookWyrmKnits
I’m not sure I would want a larger “Max” Mass Market Paperback. On the other hand, if I have to pick between Max and Trade Paperback, I’ll go with the Max.
Also: yes. Reading is so much harder right now. And yet, when I let myself be a mood reader instead of trying to stick to a reading plan, I’ve been reading a LOT.
Nicole @ BookWyrmKnits recently posted…BookWyrm’s Alphabeticals ~ P
Lory @ Emerald City Book Review
I read a lot last month but at least half of it was comfort re-reads. Reading can be a solace, depending on what it is.
Lory @ Emerald City Book Review recently posted…Month in Review: April 2020
Lark_Bookwyrm
A lot of my reading has been comfort rereads since this whole thing started, too. It does indeed help.
Incidentally, I haven’t visited your blog in a bit (I’m sorry!) — how are you and your family holding up to whatever the quarantine rules/recommendations are where you’re living?
RO
Wow! That’s interesting to see that book sales have increased over at Amazon based on all that’s happening. I love to hear about more people reading, particularly they youth. I’d like to see that number go even higher moving forward. I wonder if this has to do with the fact that most of the libraries have been closed? Thanks a bunch for the update and hope you’re doing well! Hugs, RO
RO recently posted…SOME MORE USELESS STUFF
Lark_Bookwyrm
I think a lot of the children’s book sales have been because schools are out and libraries are closed. But it’s not all “fun” reading — a lot of the juvenile sales are workbooks and curriculum books, as parents take on the task of educating their kids or at least enriching what the teachers are doing remotely. (I’m not knocking teachers; I think most of them are doing an amazing job in really difficult circumstances. But there is so much that goes on in class that can’t be replicated online or through worksheets, and a fair bit of time at school is not instructional time (taking roll call, getting kids ready to go to the gym/cafeteria/out for recess/art or music class/library, and then settling them down again afterward, and so on.) So what teachers are providing is, for many elementary and even middle-school kids, only taking an hour or two a day. Parents are desperate to find other stuff for their kids to do that isn’t just watching TV or playing video games. Hence, workbooks, educational books, and books for fun.