Western

Patrick Leigh Fermor‘s peregrinations across Western, Central, Eastern, and Southeastern Europe have become almost as legendary as his wartime exploits with the Greek Resistance. The Broken Road: From the Iron Gates to Mount Athos is the long-awaited third volume of his reminiscences of his teenage walking tour from Holland to Constantinople in the 1930s. Long-awaited because after […]

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That same Japanese craft-based sensibility that brought us origami and ikebana has obviously been at work again—in book stacking. Thanks to Rocket News 24, we can now gaze in wonderment at the awesome creativity and dexterity of bookstore shelf stackers in Japan, as they build book displays that would put their Western peers to shame. [...]

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The recently announced merger of Penguin and Random House, which is owned by Bertelsmann in Germany, sent shock waves throughout Western publishing circles. This new leviathan will publish a quarter of all books appearing in English, with annual sales of close to $4 billion, yet it is being treated by The New York Times and other media as a routine and perhaps even beneficial development.

André Schiffrin, 76, a leading figure in the New York book publishing world, quit Pantheon in 1990 to establish a not-for-profit independent publishing house, The New Press, explaining that economic trends prevented him from publishing serious books.

Schiffrin describes the crisis in Western publishing in his 2011 book, The Business of Books: How the International Conglomerates Took Over Publishing and Changed the Way We Read. In 2010, in Words and Money, he commented on the role of conglomerates in the newspaper and film business.

Offshoring has taken on new meaning in recent years. The Web, electronic file transfer, advancements in foreign technology and faster, better ways to communicate globally have all stirred the waters of opportunity for tapping the American marketplace from overseas. A global marketplace has swelled beyond what many expected. For some, this means greater opportunity, savings and growth. For others, it means the promise of more jobless Americans, more abandoned factories, more unfair labor competition. For many book publishers, specifically, it means more options for manufacturing books cost-effectively. It means new options for digital content creation, design and editorial. It means increased profitability, growth