Al Purdy’s education

On Tuesday, while reporting on the fate of Al Purdy’s cottage, Q&Q contacted the famous poet’s old school, Trenton High School in Trenton, Ontario. According to physics teacher Eric Lorenzen, who recently dug out microfilm with the famous Canadian poet’s Grade 11 transcripts, Purdy had an average of 42.3 per cent and a grade of 54 per cent in English grammar. He dropped out in 1936, the document lists “disinterested” as his reason for leaving.

For the record, here are some other notable authors who left school in the past, according to Education Reform: H.G. Wells, Leon Uris, Jack London, Rod McKuen, Carl Sandburg, Mark Twain, Charles Dickens, William Shakespeare (supposedly), George Bernard Shaw and William Faulkner.

2018: the year of total digital takeover?

The end is nigh … 

In a survey of 840 international industry experts conducted by the Frankfurt Book Fair, nearly half said that by 2018, digital sales will overtake those of conventionally published books.

According to an article in today’s Bookseller, 27% of the experts surveyed in 2008 said that digital books would never overtake the printed word; this year, only 22% still hold that belief. 

A whopping 80% said they embraced this technological future rather than seeing it as a threat to the publishing methods of old.

From the article:

“Now is the time to seek out new strategies, to scour the market, to engage in international benchmarking,” said Juergen Boos, director of the Frankfurt Book Fair. “The one true business model is still a long way off and investments are still being held in check–at the same time, however, the fear that content will only be distributed free of charge on the Web in the future seems to have been averted for the time being.”

With news this month of Disney’s digital book push, the rumoured Apple Tablet “redefining newspapers, textbooks, and magazines,” the possible arrival of the Kindle in the U.K., and e-book sites launched by The Daily Beast and Sony, 2018 suddenly seems a lot closer …

Excelsior! Disney buys Marvel

What do Bambi and Wolverine have in common? If all goes according to plan, they’ll both soon be part of the Disney family. According to The Wall Street Journal‘s Market Watch website, the deal, which was announced today, involves a stock and cash transaction that would see Marvel shareholders receive $30 per share plus “approximately 0.745″ Disney shares for each Marvel share held. The price for the entire deal is in the neighbourhood of $4 billion U.S.

From Market Watch:

“This transaction combines Marvel’s strong global brand and world-renowned library of characters including Iron Man, Spider-Man, X-Men, Captain America, Fantastic Four and Thor with Disney’s creative skills, unparalleled global portfolio of entertainment properties, and a business structure that maximizes the value of creative properties across multiple platforms and territories,” said Robert A. Iger, President and Chief Executive Officer of The Walt Disney Company.

The deal brings Disney one step closer to complete world domination. Future crossover issues of Marvel comics will likely feature Mickey Mouse in a fight to the death with Magneto and Dr. Doom, and the Fantastic Four joining the X-Men in a rousing rendition of “It’s a Small World.”

Bookmarks: Mamet directs Anne Frank, Anna Porter visits the Y, and more

Some book-related links:

• David Mamet to direct Anne Frank film for Disney (NB: the Guardian‘s headline is “David Mamet to tackle Anne Frank,” which is just not nice)
• Anna Porter on her appearance at New York’s 92nd St. Y
• Jay-Z, Bob Costas, and Warren Buffet – book blurbs often make for strange bedfellows
• The top ten cafés in which to write a novel
• George Jonas wonders, are books seasonal?
• What can books tell us about banks?
• When it comes to sci-fi, it’s all about the quantum flux

HarperCollins U.S. to try new publishing model

In a move that should have people talking at the upcoming London Book Fair, HarperCollins U.S. has announced plans to launch a new-style publishing program. The man in charge is publishing veteran Robert S. Miller, who is credited for building Disney’s Hyperion publishing program.

According to a press release from HarperCollins:

As President and Publisher of the yet-to-be-named entity, Miller will publish approximately 25 popular-priced books per year in multiple physical and digital formats including those as yet unspecified, with the aim to combine the best practices of trade publishing while taking full advantage of the internet for sales, marketing and distribution. Authors will be compensated through a profit sharing model as opposed to a traditional royalty, and books will be promoted utilizing on-line publicity, advertising and marketing.

The references to leveraging the web sound like the usual breathless PR-speak, but compensating authors through a profit-sharing model does indeed sound like something new and notable. Who knows what it’ll mean for the authors in practice, but it’ll probably be an experiment worth watching.

Meanwhile, The New York Times has posted an article examining HarperCollins’ plans, in which it reports that Miller also aims to reduce (or altogether eliminate) costly returns. The article doesn’t make clear how he plans to do this, except to say that:

The new group will also release electronic books and digital audio editions of all its titles, said Jane Friedman, president and chief executive of HarperCollins, a unit of the News Corporation.

“At this moment of real volatility in the book business, when we are all recognizing things that are difficult to contend with, like growing advances and returns and that people are reading more online, we want to give them information in any format that they want.”

Disneyfied?

Bookninja has linked to an article (posted by Yahoo! News) about teachers in Maryland using Disney comics to inspire a love of reading, and, perhaps unsurprisingly, they’re decidedly skeptical about the whole idea.

Garsh, Mickey. Isn’t Disney so civic-minded and not clawing desperately at its few remaining untapped markets?

Bookninja goes on to imply that reading Disney comics will rot the young minds of schoolkids. Though we at Quillblog love the ’ninja people, today we must respectfully disagree with them. As any serious comics fan knows, Disney has always set an inordinately high bar with their comics for kids, most notably with their classic (and still running) Gladstone line. The original Carl Barks-penned Uncle Scrooge comics – with their globe-trotting Gunga Din-style adventure plots – are especially high-water marks, on a level with Herges’s Tintin series and Jeff Smith’s Bone. This Quillblogger recalls many a happy Sunday afternoon spent reading Uncle Scrooge, which probably taught me more about the pleasures of narrative than many of the middling YA novels my teachers tried to force down my throat.