Coronavirus Update - Medical Masks

서울의 하늘이/ Sky Seoul

Coronavirus Update - on mask usage

Coronavirus: Did Attitudes Similar to those of Anti-Vaxxers Play a Role?

Coronavirus and clean air/ Coronavirus e aria pulita

This video was shot on February 23rd, when residents of Seoul were pleasantly surprised, in the midst of the coronavirus crisis, by unusually clear skies. It turned out there was a reason for that.

Questo video è stato girato il 23 febbraio, quando gli abitanti di Seoul sono stati piacevolmente sorpresi, nel mezzo della crisi del coronavirus, da cieli insolitamente chiari. Si è scoperto che c'era una ragione per questo.

Noteworthy

Submissions are open for the upcoming TransHumance show at Con-temporary Art Observatorium

Coronavirus 1

Petrarch 1

Publishing culture in Italy

Aldus on the state of publishing in Italy in 2018. Has the situation changed since then?

“The number of active publishing houses is growing– 4.902 publishing houses published at least one title during the year (+0.5% compared to 2016). Compared to 2010, 755 new publishing houses are active on the market and have to try to position their brand and publishing projects in bookshops, in distribution channels and among more or less specialised segments of readers.

Production of titles on paper is growing – In 2017, Italian publishing houses published 72.059 titles (new titles and new editions of miscellaneous adults’ and children’s books, in addition to educational titles, numbering 4.037, excluding e-books), up by 9.2% compared to 2016. DTP programmes, new digital printing and packaging systems, greater familiarity with foreign markets and new generations of authors make it much easier than in the past to access production and build catalogues. The real barriers to entry are now more to do with communicating with readers and distribution. In Italy, no more titles are published, in proportion to the population, than in the case of other major continental publishing industries.”

The Bankruptcy People

Steven Beattie reporting last December on the near-disaster which befell Galley Beggar Press. - the original publisher of Lucy Ellman’s gargantuan experiment in 21st century modernism, Ducks, Newburyport—  after it entered into a book printing deal with the online and popup British retailer The Book People:

“The announcement on Tuesday that U.K. online and pop-up retailer The Book People has been forced into receivership is having ripple effects throughout the U.K. book retail and publishing industries, including a potentially disastrous financial impact on the small independent publisher Galley Beggar Press. 

The seven-year-old press is owed £40,000 by The Book People as a result of a special run on Galley Beggar’s marquee fall title, the Booker Prize nominee Ducks, Newburyport. 

On Wednesday, the publisher launched a GoFundMe campaign in an attempt to raise some money to cover the shortfall, which co-director Eloise Millar writes poses an existential threat. In her appeal, Millar states that the publisher entered into an agreement to print 8,000 copies of a special edition of Lucy Ellmann’s 1,000-page novel when it landed on the Booker Prize shortlist.”

It is still somewhat unclear to me whether this deal was a mandatory requirement of being listed for the Booker; as people with more than passing interest in books know, the standard business model in book retailing is for bookstores to distribute books but not buy them outright. That is, unsold books remain the publisher’s problem, not the book store’s.  Is this model different in the U.K.? And if not, by what leverage could the Book People have insisted on an 8,000 copy run? Was the retailer itself acting as an agent of the Booker Prize organization?

There is, finally, a Canadian angle to this as Ducks was also published by a Biblioasis. If there was financial fallout for the latter house, it would be interesting to know. It’s worth recalling that many years ago Steven reported on Biblioasis gambling on a large print run when one of its own original titles — as I recall, Light Lifting by Alexander MacLeod — was shortlisted for a Giller Prize. Did the gamble pay off in this case? Do other publishing houses take similar risks and suffer losses? These questions matter because the reality of these presumptive print runs strongly affects future choices publishers might make.

Finally, as Mark Medley once observed, anglophone CanLit is particularly fond of prizes — the rationale being that they ipso facto assist sales. Is the reality more complicated than this?

Noteworthy

Catherine Owen on Frances Boyle’s This White Nest 

Au site d’éditions Pow Pow, la biographie de Julie Delport

Musica improvvisata italiana/ Improv Italian music

Bruno Gussoni, Frank Pellerini and friends