Good Housekeeping launches £25k novel competition

01.12.11 | Benedicte Page - The Bookseller

Good Housekeeping has launched a £25,000 competition for budding novelists in association with Orion and agent Luigi Bonomi.
The competition appears in the magazine's January issue, which goes on sale today (1st December).
Good Housekeeping is looking for previously unpublished writers in any genre apart from children's, with first prize a £25,000 advance, help from the Orion editorial team and Bonomi, and the chance to have the winning book published with coverage in the magazine.
The judges will include Kate Mosse, Bonomi, Orion fiction publishing director Kate Mills and Good Housekeeping editorial director Lindsay Nicholson.
Nicholson said the magazine was "looking forward to discovering the UK's next big literary talent". Mills commented: "I'm always meeting writers who are feverishly working away in isolation and this is a fantastic opportunity to get that hard work read and recognised, with a great prize."

.Star writers to add 'glamour' to library drive

Louise Jury, Chief Arts Correspondent- Evening Standard - 29 Nov 2011

Joanna Trollope will help launch a new library in Mansfield

 Star authors are to attend library openings and events as part of a drive being launched in London tonight by publishers and booksellers to help libraries survive.

Despite the closure of many libraries as spending cuts bite, an analysis by the Society of Chief Librarians estimates at least 40 new or significantly refurbished libraries will open next year including the Idea Store at Watney Market in Tower Hamlets.
Tony Durcan, the society's president, said libraries remained a positive service even if their staff were "stressed" by the demand for savings. "Those funding them deserve to see that there is a huge public demand for our reading role," he said.
The Reading Agency and 40 UK publishers are working together to help promote new books while bringing added glamour to libraries. Authors will help launch new or refurbished libraries, starting with Ben Fogle at the new Canada Water library and Joanna Trollope in Mansfield. New writers will be promoted in library tours and thousands of books will be given away.
Mr Durcan said: "If booksellers can raise the profile of the public library service and if we can encourage people to read, whether people buy or borrow the books, it can only be a good thing. It reinforces our message of the pleasure of reading and underlying that is the importance of being able to read to operate properly in society."
Joanna Prior, managing director of Penguin's general division, said: "In 2012, we will stitch libraries into the fabric of our big industry reading promotions, push library membership and help tell a positive PR story about the importance of libraries to a healthy reading nation."
James Daunt, managing director of Waterstone's, said both bookshops and libraries had to do "anything we can" to help each and other and aid literacy.

The Koha Saga: A gift that keeps giving

by Glyn Moody - The H Open. 29 November 2011

The world of libraries is not one we normally associate with passion and high drama. And yet that is precisely what the long-running saga of Koha, the open source library management system, has been filled with.
Koha began back in 1999, when a local library in Horowhenua, on the north island of New Zealand, was faced with a Y2K problem with its existing library system. Because that system was proprietary, there wasn't much the library could do about it, and so it started looking at open source alternatives. Remarkably, when it found that there weren't any, it decided to start one. The name it chose was "Koha", a Māori word with a complex meaning to do with gifts brought by visitors.
The Horowhenua Library Trust (HLT) contracted with Katipo, a New Zealand company, to write the system. Here's the company's background to the collaboration:

Horowhenua Library Trust and Katipo Communications Ltd made a joint decision to release Koha as Free Open Source Software under the GPL in 1999 before we started the project. It was recommended to Horowhenua Library as a risk management strategy, to ensure that they could get support and development work done by suppliers other than Katipo, and because there wasn't already an open source system available. Since we released Koha other libraries have picked it up and paid Katipo and other developers to add features and improvements.

Indeed, Koha has become a huge success, not just in terms of its uptake by libraries around the world, but also as measured by the business ecosystem of companies offering support that has grown up around it. Sadly, as soon as money entered the equation, things started to get messy, as this excellent LWN.net history of the Koha project explains:

One of these support businesses was US-based LibLime, founded in 2005 by Koha developer Joshua Ferraro. In 2007, LibLime purchased Katipo Communications' assets in Koha, including its copyright on the Koha source code, and took over maintenance of the koha.org web site. For several years, life continued on as it had before; koha.org was the home of the project, and LibLime participated in Koha's ongoing development as did several other support-based businesses, many individuals, and many libraries.

The first signs of trouble began to appear in mid-2009, when LibLime announced that it would be providing its customers with a version of Koha built from a private Git repository, instead of the public source code maintained by the community as a whole. Many in the community regarded this as an announcement that LibLime was forking the project, a claim that Ferraro denied.

Despite that detailed denial, the Koha community were unconvinced, and set up a new site, koha-community.org

Read the full story at The H Open.

eBook Sales Register Lower in September

PublishersLunch

The AAP announced their tabulation of sales for September from reporting publishers. In the closely-watched ebook sales category--where the AAP's monthly number is the only standing statistic we have to go on, the 18 reporting publishers recorded sales of $80.3 million, down from $88.8 million in August. million in August. (Two university presses, Stanford and University of Nebraska, were added to the tabulations starting this month.)

With strong fall shipments of printed books, ebook sales were lower than both hardcover and trade paperback adult sales, and comprised 15.6 percent of all recorded trade sales. (As a reminder, the AAP counts religious sales as trade; we do not in calculating our percentages, in part because their "religious" category includes both print and ebook sales.)

One trend that does continue: the gain in ebook sales compared to a year ago (up $40 million) could not overcome the decline in print sales, with the monthly total for September of $512.6 million down 6.5 percent from $548.2 million a year ago.

How Mapin Publishing Put Indian Illustrated Books on the Map

Publishing Perspectives
Bipin Shah, founder of Mapin Publishing, recounts how he ventured into publishing illustrated books on India for the rest of the world — and built a global brand.


DISCUSSION:
What is the Future of Adult Illustrated Book Publishing?
It’s not quite the same having someone "gift" you an app as it is finding a giant, gift-wrapped edition from Rizzoli under the Christmas tree.