Books

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Books

• Sarah Graziano
• Susan Long

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The History of Books

• Where did they come from?

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Johannes Gutenberg

• 1446 Printing Press
• Movable metal type quick arrangements
• Modified wine press
• Guttenberg Bibles
• Improved European literacy
• 47 of 200 remaining today
• Worth 2.4 million in 1978

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Books in America

• Cambridge Press
• MA Puritans in 1638
• First U.S. book producer
• Library of Congress Thomas Jefferson
• John Harvard
• Personal collection of 300 books
• Donated to Newtowne College

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William Holmes McGuffey
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• Eclectic Readers
• Early textbooks for elementary-aged children
• Stories from the Bible
• 6 Editions, some written by his brother
• Printed and used as late at the 1920s

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The American Novel
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• Style emerged in the mid-1800s
• 1850 The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne
• 1851 Moby Dick, Melville
• 1852 Uncle Toms Cabin, Beecher Stowe
• 1884 Huckleberry Finn, Twain

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Books are the heart of creating U.S. culture
and passing it on to new generations. (p31)
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Book Categories

• Trade
• Fiction Non-Fiction
• 1937, Tolkeins The Hobbit 40 million
• 1936, Mitchells Gone With the Wind 29 million
• Stephen King keeps writing for sales
• Danielle Steel new book every 6 months
• 60 lose, 36 even, 4 profit

Above pictures taken from amazon.com
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• Textbooks
• Longer life-spans, new editions
• Professional and Reference
• Dictionaries, Atlases, and the Bible
• College Text
• Only 20 30 markup (average)
• El-Hi Elementary-High School
• Appeal to curriculum in states with money to buy

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Publishers
Five book publishers accounted for 45 percent of
U.S. trade book sales in 2002, according to a
ranking by the trade journal Publishers Weekly
Chart taken from Vivian The Media of Mass
Communications, Seventh Ed., p35
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Government Printing Office

• Established 1895 to distribute government
  documents and titles
• 27,000 titles in print
• Your Federal Income Tax
• Popular seller annually around April
• Surgeon Generals report on Smoking
• Warren Commission Report on the assassination of
  John Kennedy

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Small Publishers

• Small Presses
• 12,000 in the U.S.
• Regional publishers
• Poetry
• Special subjects
• Long life-span of book

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Small Publishers

• University Presses
• Oxford 1478, first English Language Publisher
• 99 in U.S. Harvard, Penn State
• Vanity Press
• Charges the author for printing
• Special topics such as
• Family histories, clubs, cookbooks, selling to
  people who appear in special recognition books

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Authoring Process

• Speculation idea, writing, hunting
• 30,000 manuscripts per year
• 9 of 10 rejected immediately
• Fewer still make it to print
• Publisher Initiative
• Finding authors to write something specific
• Movie to book
• Sequels after original author has passed on

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Relations money

• Authors own their stories, Publishers market
• Royalties
• A percentage of the total profits paid to the
  author (15 in trade)
• Advance money paid after a contract is signed
• Agents help authors find the right publisher
  for their book
• 10 commission

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Books and the Media Today

• What should we notice about the industry?

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Blockbusters

• Ever since Harriet Beecher Stowes book Uncle
  Toms Cabin publishers look for books that will
  sell rather than books that will resonate, but
  not sell as much
• In the book Death of Literature, Alvin Kernan
  states that increased search for blockbuster
  books is Stunting good literature he also says
  the lower level in which books are written,
  edited and marketed is undermining cultural
  standards by placing less of a premium on high
  literacy.
• Publishing companies said producing books with
  limited popular appeal would put them out of
  business.

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Mass Marketing

• In choosing a title publishing houses ask these
  questions
• Will it sell?
• How can we make it sell?
• Publishers also look to see if the author is
  photogenic enough for interviews.
• Other selection criteria
• How would the author come across on the radio?
• Does the manuscript lend itself to a screenplay?
• How enticing can we make the cover?
• How much would magazine serialization boost
  sales?

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Book Censorship

• Censorship began with book burnings in the 1500s
• Some books that can be considered classics were
  or are on the banned books list, and have been
  for years
• Some banned books includeAdventures of
  Huckleberry Finn, Catch 22, Catcher in the Rye,
  Fahrenheit 415, The Grapes of Wrath, Lord of the
  Flies, and Lysistrata.

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Book Seller Lists

• Two best known are New York Times best seller
  list and Oprahs Book Club.
• Oprahs Book Club started as a segment on her
  show and is now a huge success for all the books
  on the list. Some books include Anna Karenina,
  East of Eden, House of Sand and Fog, The
  Poisonwood Bible and A Million Little Pieces.

• The New York Times bestseller list appears in the
  Book Review in each Sunday issue. Some books on
  the best seller list include The Da Vince Code,
  The Kite Runner, Memoirs of a Geisha, and Angels
  and Demons.

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Quality Measures

• People who do not like bestseller lists, and look
  for quality look for books with the following
  things
• National Book Award. For fiction, poetry and
  young people.
• Nobel Prize. For literature.
• PEN/Faulkner award. For U.S. fiction
• Pulitzer Prize. For fiction, non fiction and
  poetry
• William Holmes McGuffey Award. For textbooks

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Book Trends

• Modern paperback book was introduced by Robert de
  Graff in 1939. This was during the Great
  Depression. They were .25 and most families
  could afford that. They sold 325,000 copies in
  two months.
• Book Clubs the Book of the Month Club is the
  oldest and largest book club and has shipped more
  than 500 million books since 1926.
• Web shopping Amazon and Barnes and Nobel, you
  can get books delivered to you without leaving
  your house!
• E-books began with Stephen King, you can
  download books for really cheap. There is also a
  portable device that you can buy to load all of
  your books onto, so you can bring them anywhere
  with you!

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Book and Media Melding

• Some books are turned into movies or TV shows, or
  the other way around.
• A prime example of this is with Harry Potter.
  Some others include the show Roswell, which was a
  book series that was turned into a TV show. There
  is also Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which was a TV
  show that later had books released based on the
  show. There are also two novels based off the
  show Queer as Folk.

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More Cross-Media

• Magazine serialization
• Ronald Reagans memoirs
• Television
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer spawned a book series
• Movies
• Stephen King and Harry Potter
• Radio
• War of the Worlds caused hysteria

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