Booksellers’ picks of the year: international fiction

Canadian booksellers contacted by Q&Q all pointed to American author Erin Morgenstern’s debut novel, The Night Circus, as one of the top books of 2011. “The buzz has been huge, and all the reviews I’ve seen have been raves,” says Christopher Johnson, a manager at Nicholas Hoare in Toronto.

Michael Hamm, manager of Bookmark in Halifax, credits much of The Night Circus’s buzz to the fact that early adopters of Harry Potter and the Twilight series have grown up reading supernatural tales. “Now that they’re adults, they’re looking for a fantastical book, and this one certainly fits the bill,” he says.

Another top seller this fall is The Marriage Plot, U.S. novelist Jeffrey Eugenides’s follow-up to Middlesex, which won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2003. “A lot of people hold Middlesex in such high regard that it’s kind of hard to top that,” Hamm says, “but I read [The Marriage Plot] and I loved it.”

Booksellers contacted by Q&Q also consider The Sense of an Ending, British writer Julian Barnes’s 2011 Man Booker Prize–winning novel, one of the year’s biggest successes. “That was selling well before it was given the award, and now it’s selling even more,” says Ian Donker, manager of Book City in Toronto, adding that The Sense of an Ending is an in-house favourite.

Japanese writer Haruki Murakami’s ambitious new novel, 1Q84, has been extremely popular in Canada since its release in October, according to booksellers. Other top 2011 titles include Nobel Prize–winning Portuguese author José Saramago’s posthumous novel, Cain; British novelist Alan Hollinghurst’s new title, The Stranger’s Child; and American writer Stephen Mitchell’s translation of The Iliad.

Kobo Reading Life and Facebook partner for “frictionless” social e-reading

Soon Facebook users won’t have to click a button to tell their friends what they’re reading. Yesterday at F8, Facebook’s annual developers conference, Kobo CEO Michael Serbinis announced that its e-reading app, Kobo Reading Life, will be seamlessly integrated into the Facebook interface as part of the website’s Open Graph product, along with services for music, film, games, and news media.

During the conference’s keynote speech, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg referred to Open Graph as a means of “frictionless sharing,” meaning once a user signs up for an app, it will automatically track their media usage, which will then be shared, in real-time, with friends as part of Facebook’s new Ticker feature.

“You don’t have to ‘like’ a book, you can just read a book. You don’t have to ‘like’ a movie, you can just watch a movie…” says Zuckerberg, referring to the website’s ubiquitous Like button. Facebook’s new Timeline feature, available now as a beta program, also gives users the ability to build personal reports, such as how many pages read in a single week.

In a video interview at F8, Kobo Reading Life product manager Jason Gamblen and Serbinis offered more insight into the integration. Through the Reading Life app, Serbinis says, a Kobo user can track “all the books you’ve ever read, what you’re reading right now, times a day you read, stats about yourselves, friends that you share books with.” Gamblen explained that when a Facebook user adds Kobo to their Timeline, they can also account for the number of books read, the amount of time and the most popular days spent reading. Users are also eligible for awards by hitting milestones such as reading 50,000 pages or a certain number of classic books.

Reading Life’s “social e-reading” features allow people to connect and engage with other Kobo users via Facebook. “Our best recommendations come from friends, not the 400th Harry Potter review on some e-commerce site,” says Serbinis, who also briefly mentioned a new initiative, Kobo Pulse, which will be officially announced in the next couple of weeks.

J.K. Rowling to sell Harry Potter e-books directly through interactive fan site

In the lead-up to today’s much anticipated announcement from J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter fans had been told not to expect a new novel in the series, but that didn’t stop fevered speculation otherwise. While those still holding out hope for an eighth Harry Potter instalment may have been disappointed by today’s revelation, Rowling’s plans to launch a website containing troves of previously unpublished material are sure to have others salivating.

Most fans will have to wait until October 1 to access Pottermore, an interactive website containing 18,000 words of new material delving into the minutiae of the Harry Potter universe, but the first million users who register on July 31 – Harry Potter’s birthday – are being promised early access. At a press conference this morning in London, Rowling said the website will also include social media elements, allowing users to interact with each other. As quoted in the Guardian:

“I wanted to give something back to the fans that have followed Harry so devotedly over the years, and to bring the stories to a new generation,” Rowling revealed. “I hope fans and those new to Harry will have as much fun helping to shape Pottermore as I have. Just as I have contributed to the website, everyone else will be able to join in by submitting their own comments, drawings and other content in a safe and friendly environment. Pottermore has been designed as a place to share the stories with your friends as you journey through the site.”

The publishing world will no doubt closely monitor Rowling’s success in adapting the Harry Potter universe to the largely untested (save for certain examples) medium of the Web. Even more significant is the decision to begin selling e-books of the novels, which so far exist only in print, directly through the website (with technical support by e-book vendor OverDrive), bypassing established retailers. The digital editions will appear in ePub (meaning they will be compatible with all e-readers), with Rowling’s U.K. and U.S. publishers – Bloomsbury and Scholastic, respectively – receiving a cut. From the Guardian:

“It means we can guarantee people everywhere are getting the same experience,” said Rowling, of her decision to go it alone. “[I am] lucky to have the resources to do it myself and am therefore able to do it right. It’s a fantastic and unique experience which I could afford in every sense. There was really no other way to do it.”

Until recently Rowling had been reluctant to release the Potter novels as e-books, but she said that after downloading and reading an e-book for the first time she had a change of heart.

“It is my view that you can’t hold back progress. E-books are here to stay. Personally I love print and paper [but] very very recently for the first time I downloaded an e-book and it is miraculous, for travel and for children. So I feel great about taking Harry potter into this new medium,” Rowling said.

Daily book biz round-up: turning poetry into e-books, and more

• Breaking lines: the challenges of translating poetry collections into e-books
• British children’s fantasy and sci-fi author Dianne Wynne Jones has died
• Muggles can now rent Harry Potter films through Facebook, but still no word of e-book availability
• Call for 2011 Matrix magazine/Pop Montreal Litpop Awards, now with creative non-fiction category
• A designer’s interpretation of classic record albums transformed into book covers

Harry Potter, Dan Brown dominate U.K. list of best-selling books

The stereotype has it that England is filled with recondite literati ensconced in mahogany-lined libraries reading leather-bound volumes of Romantic poetry and plump Victorian novels. This as compared to the beer-swilling philistines in America, gorging themselves on a diet of Dan Brown and Tom Clancy (if they read at all). Well, newly released data indicates that this conception is flawed. Readers in the U.K., it would seem, have every bit as much devotion to Dan Brown as their counterparts across the Atlantic.

As noted in the Guardian over the weekend, Brown took the number one spot on Neilsen Bookscan’s list of the U.K.’s best-selling books released since the company began collecting data in 1998. According to the service, which tracks 90 per cent of book purchases in the U.K., The Da Vinci Code moved 4,522,025 units between 1998 and 2010, which accounted for a staggering £22,857,837.53 in revenue. Angels and Demons, Brown’s prequel to The Da Vinci Code, took the fourth spot on the list, with 3,096,850 units sold, accounting for sales of £15,537,324.84.

Not surprisingly, the bulk of the top 10 is devoted to Harry Potter: all seven of J.K. Rowling’s books about the boy wizard are featured, with the first in the series, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, taking the number two spot. The only place in the top 10 not devoted to Brown or Rowling goes to Stephenie Meyers’ Twilight, which clocks in at number nine. In fact, one has to make it to number 13 before a title by an author not among the three already mentioned appears: Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones.

Perhaps surprisingly, Stieg Larsson does not crop up on the list until number 17, although the three novels in the Swedish author’s Millennium Trilogy came in at numbers one, two, and three respectively on the list of U.K. bestsellers for 2010.

Daily book biz round-up: Yann Martel heads to Europe; Harry Potter heads to Orlando; and more

Scoops! Lots of ‘em!

• On the eve of Yann Martel’s European tour, the Guardian runs a not-so-nice account of the genesis of Beatrice and Virgil
• Meanwhile, Martel gets moral support from author of The Boy in Striped Pajamas
• Evaluating Canadian publishers’ websites
• Heather Reisman dons black robe, joins secret society of rich and powerful
• London mayor wants Harry Potter theme park to be built in his city, not in Orlando
  
• Steve Jobs unveils the iBookstore-ready iPhone 4
• Apple’s iBookstore sales numbers not particularly meaningful
• Forget about books on phones – now you can get books on vinyl!
• Joe Schuster Award-winners announced

Daily book biz round-up: BEA wind up; iBookstore launch disappoints; and more

The news of the day, in six handy bullet points:

• Publishers Weekly takes a last look at this year’s BookExpo America
• Looks like Apple hasn’t signed many publishers in advance of today’s international iBookstore launch
• Wired calls iBookstore launch disappointing, recommends Kobo instead
• Guinness World Records finally goes digital with iPad app
• Looks like Harry Potter might be going digital soon, too
• No more White Pages in Toronto

Bookmarks: Jane Austen, Margaret Atwood, the Brontë sisters, and more

A few bookish links from across the Web:

• To help you with the holiday shopping season, The Inkwell Bookstore Blog compiles a selection of gifts for the Jane Austenite on your list, including the Pride and Prejudice board game 
• Margaret Atwood picks the top ten gifts to give a budding novelist
• The New Yorker has compiled the top ten books of 1709. The most colourful title? Cotton Mather’s The Golden Curb for the Mouth, a sermon against swearing
•  The Brontë sisters get a little help from the Twilight phenomenon: The Guardian reports that new films of Emily’s Wuthering Heights and Charlotte’s Jane Eyre are being cast with younger, hotter stars to appeal to Twihards 
• You’ve heard of the proposed Harry Potter theme park. How about a theme park dedicated to Gulliver’s Travels? 
• Bask in “the soft periwinkle glow of the Alaskan morning,” because the results of Slate‘s “Write like Sarah Palin” contest are in
• The blogosphere has been buzzing with the best books of the decade lately, so what about the decade’s worst books? 

Bookmarks: Coolio cooks, Anne of Green Gables tweets, and more

A few sundry links from across the Web:

• “Living in a Gourmet’s Paradise?” Rapper Coolio now has his own cookbook, Cookin’ with Coolio
• A new audio-book version of the Bible is available, featuring Richard Dreyfuss as Moses, Luke Perry as Judas Iscariot, and — who else? — James Caviezel reprising his role as Jesus Christ. The L.A. Times Jacket Copy reports the audio-book is described as a “verbal cinema” complete with a musical score and sound effects
• You can now be a follower, or “kindred spirit,” of Canada’s favourite redhead. Anne of Green Gables is using Twitter
• We’re well aware how prevalent bad sex is in fiction … so how about awards for good sex? 
• You are officially invited to attend Hogwart’s School of Witchcraft and Wizardry … with a new iPhone Spells app 
• Sad but true: Finn Reeder, Flu Fighter is a book for middle-school aged children about the ubiquitous H1N1 virus

Bookmarks: why McCarthy won’t autograph, the definitive titles of the Noughties, and more

• James Jones, author of From Here to Eternity, fought to keep a gay subplot in the novel.

• Cormac McCarthy talks about the film version of The Road in the Wall Street Journal and why you won’t find a signed copy of the book

• Remember when Scholastic tried to censor a tween book because one character had two moms? Mobylives reports that parent fanatics are at it again, this time trying to ban the entire Scholastic catalogue

• Dalton Higgins is this month’s writer-in-residence at Open Book Toronto.

• The Telegraph posted their definitive Books of the Noughties. Nothing very surprising – White Teeth, Atonement, Brick Lane -  Dave Eggers’s memoir comes in fourth, right behind good ol’ Dan Brown, Obama’s memoir, and bien sur, Harry Potter at number one. Sigh.