Previews, Reviews, and Collection Development
A collaborative blog covering books, media, and publishing, including early previews of the hottest titles by Library Journal's review staffers, and op-eds and guest blogs by notable contributors. Follow us on Twitter: @LJReviews
Allright, audiobook heads, listen up! The Audio Publishers Association yesterday announced the contenders for the 2012 Audie Awards. I was pleased to see a few titles that were listed on LJ’s Best Audio for last year, like Tina Fey’s Bossypants, which is nominated in several categories; The King’s Speech, and, my personal fav, Black Mask [...]
In honor of President’s Day, let’s talk some Abe Lincoln. Honest Abe has been sucked into the current zombie/vampire/mash-up craze. Based on the novel Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter by Seth Grahame-Smith, who previously brought us the New York Times best seller Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, this “real story of the 16th president” comes to [...]
With the economy still in the gutter, it’s hardly surprising that LJ’s 2012 Book Buying Survey of public libraries nationwide turned up a book budget decrease of more than two percent on average. Nor is it surprising that, as budgets are cut, some respondents have adapted their purchasing policies, particularly in the high-circ area of fiction. And with ebooks taking off, one might expect the materials budget breakdown to shift somewhat in their direction.
But it is a shock to discover that book circulation, having soared over the last decade, has suddenly gone flat.
On February 7, Saladin Ahmed’s highly anticipated Muslim-inspired fantasy debut landed on bookstore and library shelves. The first title in a projected trilogy set in a medieval Islamic world, Throne of the Crescent Moon introduces readers to Doctor Adoulla Makhslood, the last of the true ghul (ghoul) hunters, the dervish Raseed, and Zamia, a young [...]
Anyone who watched the Giants trash the Pats (said the proud New Yorker) at last Sunday’s Super Bowl were treated to an abbreviated trailer for the upcoming The Avengers flik. A longer version now is on the web. Check it out! Does that look cool, or does that look cool? It’s clobberin’ time for any [...]
My friends over at Titan Books tell me that to commemorate the centenary of Bram Stoker’s April 20, 1912, death, the Horror Writers Association has generated a short-list of the 20th century’s best vampire novels. A jury of writers and scholars selected six titles that they believe have had the greatest impact on the horror [...]
DC Comics announced earlier this week that it is taking the daring and potentially dangerous step of releasing a series of prequels to its iconic Watchmen property. I speak in grave terms because Watchmen is considered the greatest graphic novel ever produced as well as one of the 100 greatest novels, period (according to TIME [...]
In the summer of 2011, Library Journal launched its Librarian-Publisher Dialog series, which has included conversations with Madeline McIntosh, president of sales, operations, and digital, Random House; Josh Marwell, president of sales, HarperCollins; Dennis Johnson, publisher of Melville House; and Bob Harras, editor in chief of DC Comics. Here, we take a slightly different tack, [...]
Awhile ago, I was asked if I was going to see The Great Gatsby in 3-D when it hits theaters December 25. Typically, I’d offer a snarky comment but after seeing Hugo and Tintin in that exaggerated format, I may have to change my stance. Initially, presenting something like Gatsby in 3-D seemed like an [...]
If you’re lucky, at every conference there’s a revealing unconference going on inside of it. This was very much the case with Digital Book World 2012, which drew the usual cliques of publishers, authors, agents, entrepreneurs, editors, and marketers last week to New York. As at the 2011 show, keynotes, studies, and panels about international [...]
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