Publishers donate cash, books

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 11/09/2005 (7531 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

PUBLISHING houses are showing support for victims of Hurricane Katrina, announcing donations of cash and books to relief efforts.

News Corp., which owns HarperCollins, has pledged $1 million US to the Salvation Army, as has Viacom, Simon & Schuster’s parent, the Book Standard reports.

Random House is making a $500,000 donation to the American Red Cross’s Hurricane Katrina Relief Fund, along with matching employee contributions, Publishers Lunch reports. The company’s children’s division is donating 250,000 books to kids in the hardest hit areas.

Simon & Schuster is also planning a “substantial donation” of books. Scholastic is making a $100,000 cash donation and is planning some school-based initiatives to help.

First Book, an organization that is providing books to children affected by the hurricane, says every $5 donation will result in one book going to a child.

A national book drive is in the works, with the goal of collecting five million books for distribution to people living in shelters, school districts taking in displaced children, and schools and libraries that will need to rebuild their collections, says Publishers Lunch.

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Hollywood stars are contributing to a cookbook to raise funds for another charity.

Actors Tom Hanks, Hilary Swank and Michael Douglas will be among those sharing recipes for Morgan Freeman and Friends: Caribbean Cooking for a Cause, the Associated Press reports. Rodale Inc. will publish in 2006.

Proceeds will go to the Grenada Relief Fund, a charity that Academy Award winner Freeman helped set up after hurricanes Ivan and Emily hit Grenada last year.

Freeman also helped organize an online auction to raise funds for relief in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.

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In a breakthrough for Chinese literature, the Penguin Group has purchased the English-language rights to China’s bestselling novel for a record $100,000 US, the Associated Press reports.

The Wolf Totem, a 2004 semi-autobiographical novel by Jiang Rong about “the struggle for life on the Mongolian grasslands” will be published in English in 2007, the report says. The author’s agent says this is the biggest overseas book deal in mainland China. The publisher also agreed to a 10 per cent royalty on each book sold — double the usual standard in China.

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The short list for the Booker Prize was announced late last week. Already, a favourite has been picked by bookmakers in the United Kingdom, the British Broadcasting Corp. reports.

According to bookmaker William Hill, Julian Barnes is the 5/4 favourite, for his novel Arthur and George, which draws upon the life of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

Japanese-born Kazuo Ishiguro, a past Booker winner for The Remains of the Day is favoured 4/1 for Never Let Me Go; Zadie Smith’s On Beauty, an homage to E.M. Forster’s Howards End, is pegged at 5/1; Sebastian Barry’s A Long Long Way is at 8/1; John Banville’s The Sea comes in at 10/1 and Ali Smith’s The Accidental has 12/1 odds of winning.

The winner of the prestigious prize will be announced Oct. 10.

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Agatha Christie week begins tomorrow, coinciding with the 115th anniversary of the mystery writer’s birth and the 75th anniversary of the publication of the first Miss Marple novel.

Since 1920, two billion of Christie’s books have been sold, a count surpassed only by the Bible and the plays of William Shakespeare, the Independent newspaper reports.

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New in paperback…

A new edition of Affluenza (Berrett-Koehler Publishers), a look at the epidemic of excess in modern American society, by John De Graaf, David Wann and Thomas Naylor, has been released.

Journalist Ed Arnold seeks to explain the pre-eminence of Peterborough, Ont., in the history of Canadian hockey in Hockey Town (McClelland & Stewart).