Tim Egan: Why Seattle Is A City Of Readers
“Nature, in the form of the predominant gloom that pervades our skies for much of the year, forces us inward — to a creative frontier that matches the geographic one. Thus, an obscure poet at a midweek reading on a winter’s eve, hoping for an audience beyond a few bookstore employees, will be happily shocked to find the room packed. People in Seattle love to come in out of the rain and tell stories, or to hear them.” – Crosscut
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The New York Times – Publishing is becoming a winner-take-all game. Nobody dominates it like Madeline McIntosh and Penguin Random House: “After a steep drop at the start of the pandemic, book sales not only recovered but surged. Unit sales of print books are up nearly 6 percent over last year, according to NPD BookScan, and e-book and digital audiobook sales have risen by double digits. Reading, it turns out, is an ideal experience in quarantine…Because of its enormous publishing program, with more than 300 imprints globally and a backlist going back nearly a century, the publisher leads the literary world on seemingly every axis, from the highest-brow fiction to pulpy commercial authors.
It publishes Nobel Prize winners like Kazuo Ishiguro and Alice Munro; Pulitzer Prize winners like Colson Whitehead, Anne Tyler and Jon Meacham; and prose deities who shaped 20th-century American literature, including Cormac McCarthy, John Cheever, Eudora Welty, Saul Bellow, William Faulkner, John Updike and Joan Didion. It publishes blockbuster authors like Dan Brown, E L James, John Grisham and Danielle Steel. It publishes mega-best-selling children’s and young adult authors like Dr. Seuss and John Green. It publishes the Obamas, whose memoirs Penguin Random House acquired with a record-breaking $65 million advance…”
In publishing, as in other industries, the pandemic has accelerated forces that were already at play, delivering several years’ worth of change in just a few months…”
How To Survive The Internet? Books!
“On the one hand, we feel that everything is moving so fast, but we simultaneously feel trapped in our social structures and patterns of life, imprisoned, deprived of meaningful choice.” – Harper’s