Shannen and the Dream for a School

It was wonderful to see on the front page of the Globe this morning that Shannen's dream for a school in  Attawapiskat was finally coming to fruition...Parliment has said that they would take steps to ensure that all first nations children would have the same quality of education as all Canadian children. As mentioned before, Second Story press has published a wonderful book on this story: Shannen and the Dream for a School.

YAY Ian Rankin!

There are over 400,000 books published in the English language every year and that is a number that is not going down. Anyone can publish a book these days...all you need is a laptop + and ISBN...so why bother with a publisher at all? Ian Rankin addresses that very issue in The Bookseller. PS: Just read The Complaints...awesome!

National Book Count

The second Canadian Book Count conducted by the National Reading Campaign has finished and the reports are good!

The study found: 

• 3.4 million books were sold or circulated (or about five books per second)
• 1.15 million print books were sold by retailers, both national chains and more than 260 independent bookstores across Canada
• 111,053 English-language e-books were sold
• 2.1 million print books were borrowed from 28 participating library systems (covering more than 13.7 million people)
• 63,196 e-books were downloaded from the participating library

For more info you can read the brief on CBC.

Learning to Love Airport Lit

There is a fun piece in today's NYT about books and reading on the plane. Dominique Browning talks about the pleasure of reading "low-brow" books on the plane...not junk reading but a nice balance of compelling and stimulating reads. I know I look forward to plane rides, just so I can get five hours of uninterrupted reading!

Go Away! I'm Reading

How cool are these! Blogger Erin Bowman, designed these excellent book covers. They are downloadable and there are there are a bunch to choose from.

25 Things I Learned From Opening a Bookstore

This is a hilarious piece that booksellers and librarians can relate to! My favourite is "If someone comes in and asks where to find the historical fiction, they're not looking for classics, they want the romance section".

Step Backwards in Time

My favourite new YA book for the spring season is called The Night Sky in My Head. It’s reminiscent of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime because of the unusual perspective of the narrator, which in this case is 14 yr. old Mikey. He’s suffered head trauma in a terrible accident and has a big scar on his head, but he can’t remember what happened. However, since the accident Mikey has acquired the ability to go backwards in time. He’ll walk by a bus shelter, or beside the river, and see visions of particular events that happened there. These visions are clues to a mystery, one that involves Mikey’s absent father, his new friend Ralph and the unusual scar. The suspense builds as pieces of the puzzle start to come together until we finally understand the circumstances surrounding the tragic accident. It’s a gripping story that will challenge YA readers and lead to some interesting discussions.

Now this is my kind of conference!

February 9th - 12th in New York is the Roger Smith Cookbook Conference...imagine a whole three days in NYC talking about cookbooks! The list of panelists is fabulous. There is a whole session on Libraries and Cookbooks: 

Cookbooks in Libraries: Gateways to Food Studies”

Libraries are treasure troves of traditional, digital and human resources not always known to people.  Cookbook authors and other food writers interested in locating historic and cultural contexts for their work will hear about library resources and their many uses.

Chair: Barbara Haber,  Research Librarian and Food Historian

Panelists: Rebecca Federman, New York Public Library; Kathryn Allamong Jacob, Curator of Manuscripts at the Schlesinger Library, Cambridge, MA; Krishnendu Ray, New York University

Quillcast

Quill and Quire, Canada's industry magazine for publishing, has started a series of podcasts in conjunction with The Walrus. This one is Henry Holt's President and Publisher Steve Rubin's keynote address at last years IFOA International Visitor's series. It's well worth a listen.

The Value of the Independent Bookstore

On Q this week, Jian Ghomeshi's Q debate was on the value of the independent bookstore. His panelists were Slate magazine's Farhad Manjoo and Type Books co-owner Joanne Saul. The debate is quite good...but I know which side I'm on! It is at the beginning of the show...about 5 minutes in: date January 31st. Another good piece on this topic is Richard Russo's op ed piece in the NYT.
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