Jeffrey Archer

One day we're warned about a sharp decline in children's reading for pleasure. Four days later it's reported that a 9% rise in sales of children's books is the one bright light in a dismal year for publishing. Admittedly the reading for pleasure report comes from the US, but it mirrors years of jeremiads on this side of the Atlantic.

So what is going on? It's likely that, as a YA weepie, John Green's sales have hitched a lift on the reading habits of the twentysomethings who grew up with Harry Potter and so know how bewitching

The Indian market for English books is booming. Third only to the USA and Britain, it's set to become the biggest in the world as India's middle class continues to expand rapidly over the next 10 years. Keen to get a piece of the action, international publishers are flocking to set up offices in India, while many canny Indian publishers have already been reaping big rewards from backing emerging homegrown talent. India has a demographic profile very different to the US or Britain, with more than a third of its population under 30. With literacy on the rise and

The Indian book market grew by 45% in volume and 40% in value over the first half of 2011, with adult fiction the fastest-growing area of the market, according to Nielsen BookScan India figures as the panel marks its first full year of sales monitoring. The panel now covers about 35% of the total trade retail market and has signed up over 70% of organised book retail chains. In 2011, it measured 13 million book purchases, worth Rs 3.28bn, covering more than 286,455 different titles. Adult fiction was the fastest growing area of the market over the first half

Some 6,500 writers, from Thomas Pynchon to Jeffrey Archer, have opted out of Google's controversial plan to digitise millions of books.

Former children's laureates Quentin Blake, Anne Fine and Jacqueline Wilson, bestselling authors Jeffrey Archer and Louis de Bernières and critical favourites Thomas Pynchon, Zadie Smith and Jeanette Winterson have all opted out of the controversial Google book settlement, court documents have revealed.