People of the Book
A Blog about Book Publishing from a Catholic Perspective

That’s the question Lauren Winner asks in a recent article in Publishers Weekly. More precisely, she asks why Catholics buy so many fewer books than Protestant Evangelicals. The people she talked to – Catholic editors and marketers for the most part – have a litany of answers. Protestants are people of the Word; Catholics are people of sacrament and liturgy. Pastors recommend books from the pulpit; priests don’t. Entrepreneurial Evangelicals market books aggressively and distribute them widely; Catholic publishers are content to be diffident and small. Paracelete’s Lil Copan thinks that Catholics buy plenty of books. They just don’t buy as many religious ones:

“Though CBA readers have had a long tradition of buying mainly in CBA stores, the liturgical reader has always been just as likely to walk into an independent or a Barnes & Noble. Once they are in that bookstore, liturgical Christians may not be focused only on the religion/spirituality aisles. I have not one single fact, percentage point or overheard comment to back this up, but have observed that liturgical readers will be more likely to pick up a literary novel, a book of historical note or a book on faith formation, with no sense of pressure that they need to read something religious or even something that is considered ‘church-approved’ and orthodox.”

Copan’s remarks point toward the huge difference between Evangelical and Catholic religious culture. Protestant Evangelicals turn to Christian books for all life’s needs, from diet counseling to marriage enrichment to pulp novel entertainment. Most Catholics wouldn’t dream of buying a Catholic book for any of these things.

Apple’s iPod is transforming the music business. Book publishing may be next, says a report in the Book Standard. Sales of digital audio books are growing rapidly. Consumers by the thousands are downloading audio books onto their iPods and other MP3 digital audio players and listening on the go. Audible, the leading provider of spoken word audio, gets 14 percent of its revenue from audio books sold through iTunes, Apple’s online music store. Audible allows its customers to download books onto 135 different devices, including pocket PCs, PDAs, and smart phones. Libraries are experimenting with programs that allow patrons to check out iPods preloaded with audio books. Says the Book Standard’s reporter, “for an industry constantly confronting the fear that it is thoroughly invested in a dying product, the growing popularity of DABs may point to salvation.”

Dollar sales of religious books grew 11 percent in 2004, and the religious book sector should grow by 50 percent in the next five years, says the Book Industry Study Group. These are surprising, even startling numbers. Here’s what the BISG press release said about our sector:

Religious books have emerged as the most impressive growth category in the book publishing industry over the past four years and according to TRENDS 2005, the category – including hardcover and paperback Bibles, biblical studies, testaments, histories, spiritual titles, hymnals, and prayer books, along with other titles pertaining to religion, inspirational titles, and religious fiction - recorded the biggest gains in 2004; with an 11 percent increase reaching $1.9 billion in sales.

“The growth of religious-book sales at mainstream retailers is the key factor behind the dollar growth of 11 percent in the sector in 2004 and behind BISG’s projections for steady growth over the next several years,� stated Jim Milliot, Senior Editor for Business and News at Publishers Weekly and author of the TRENDS 2005 introductory essays. “While price increases played a part, units were up 8.5 percent in 2004, and BISG projects that they will increase at a better than 6 percent rate through 2007.�

You can read the whole press release here.

A concise “compendium” to the Catechism of the Catholic Church has been approved by Pope Benedict XVI and published by the Vatican. The Italian-language version of the book is 205 pages long and consists of 598 questions and responses. In a ceremony marking the book’s release, the Pope said that the Compendium is “a brief, concise catechism, containing all and only the essential and fundamental elements of Catholic faith and morals.” National bishops conferences will coordinate the translation and publication of the book in other languages.

Do you have opinions about what you like and don’t like about Catholic books? Loyola Press would like to hear them. In fact, they will make you a Loyola Press Advisor and give you a chance to win prizes for the privilege of listening to your ideas. Sign up at www.spiritedtalk.org.

The Cubs are hanging on to a 2-0 lead in the top of the eighth in steamy Wrigley Field, but the game is slipping away. Zambrano, the pitcher, is wilting in the 85-degree heat. Brewers on first and second, only one out, and Z falls behind the hitter, 3 and 1. The pitcher mops his brow. The batter digs in at the plate. 39,000 fans look on in silent anxiety.

Zambrano throws a nasty slider on the outside corner. The batter goes with the pitch and drives it over the second baseman. The ball descends in front of the outfielders — a sure run-scoring single. But wait. Patterson, the deeply unpopular center fielder who had already struck out twice with men on base tonight, streaks toward the ball. He lunges, lands on his chest in the grass, catches the ball in the web of his glove, springs to his feet, turns and throws a perfect strike to the second baseman to double up the amazed Brewer who thought he was going to score. Inning over. We all stand and cheer for Patterson, cheer for the Cubs, cheer for a perfect baseball moment.

The Catholic Press Association handed out 97 book awards this year. The big winner was Liturgical Press, which claimed 19 awards, (though a few of these were for its magazines and marketing programs). The CPA gave out awards in 23 categories, too many to list here. I’ll simply highlight the three winners in the “Popular Presentation of the Catholic Faith� category. First place: One Day He Beckoned by Antoinette Bosco, Ave Maria Press; Second place: De-Coding Da Vinci by Amy Welborn, Our Sunday Visitor; Third Place: Invitation To the Old Testament & New Testament by Alice Camille,ACTA Publications.

That’s the provocative title of a new book published this week by Baker. The authors, Mark Noll and Carolyn Nystrom, lay out their argument in a long piece in Books and Culture. The book will get attention among evangelicals because of Mark Noll. He is a widely-admired scholar whose books, especially The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, have had a profound impact on evangelical leaders and thinkers. His new book deserves the attention of Catholics too.

Noll and Nystrom think that the terrain disputed by Protestants and Catholics has changed greatly since Vatican II. Theological differences have narrowed. A shared sense of mission and Christian identity has intensified. The changes are most apparent to Catholics and Protestants who have gotten to know one another:

Most evangelicals who enter into greater contact with Catholics . . . practice various forms of partnership pointing toward mutual acceptance. The dramatic religious and cultural shifts of the past forty years have increased the sense of a shared Christian faith. . . More and more evangelicals and Catholics are joining to serve God together with as much creativity as God-given skills and divinely appointed limitations allow.

This unity “on the ground” is fostering a real partnership between Catholics and evangelicals, Noll and Nystrom say. As the old antagonists grow closer, they are learning from each other. They quote Peter Kreeft, the Catholic writer and convert, on what lies ahead: “I think in Heaven, Protestants will teach Catholics to sing and Catholics will teach Protestants to dance and sculpt.”

Monks at St. Catherine’s monastery in the Sinai desert are using hyperspectral digital imaging to uncover faded parts of the Codex Sinaiticus, the oldest surviving copy of the Bible. The Codex Sinaiticus is thought to be one of the fifty copies of the Bible commissioned by the Roman emperor Constantine in the fourth century A.D. Read an account of the monk’s high-tech plans here.

Meanwhile, researchers at the Palo Alto Research Center and Stanford University are working on ways to change the way we read. The PARC team is developing ScentHighlights, a software application that looks at the search terms you use and sniffs out other material that you might be interested in. The Stanford people are working on BuddyBuzz, a system that flashes text one word at a time onto small screens. Buddy Buzz may one day make it easier to read books on cell phones and PDAs. Read about them here.

“Shelf Awareness� is the clever title of a new daily newsletter “dedicated to helping the people in stores, in libraries and on the Web buy, sell and lend books most wisely.� The first issue will be launched within the next couple of weeks. Editor of the newsletter is John Mutter, longtime executive editor of Publishers Weekly. Visit their Buddhist-themed website to sign up for a free subscription.

Ignatius Press has reprinted more than 300,000 copies of the 21 Joseph Ratzinger titles on its backlist since the author was elected Pope Benedict XVI in April. It sounds like a delightful windfall for a small publisher, but Anythony Ryan, Ignatius’ marketing director, admits that managing the reprinting is “tricky.� Demand for Ratzinger’s books is high now as Catholics get to know their new Pope and search for clues about the direction of his papacy. But interest in Benedict will probably subside. When it does, impatient booksellers might pack up many of their Ratzinger books and ship them back to Ignatius. For now, though, Ryan says that “the orders are coming in fast and furiously.�

Our Sunday Visitor book editor Michael Dubruiel comments on the top ten Catholic bestsellers on Amazon.com. Three are fairly new, three are old favorites, and four are about or by Benedict XVI.

Liturgical Press is publishing two books that are derived from the remarkable Saint John Bible, the first handwritten, illuminated Bible to be created in 500 years. The Bible is a 10-year, multi-million-dollar project commissioned by St. John’s Abbey in Collegeville, Minnesota. It is being written and illustrated by a team of calligraphers and illustrated under the supervision of Donald Jackson, a Briton who carries the title of Senior Scribe to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth’s Crown Office at the House of Lords. When completed in 2007, The Saint John’s Bible will be composed of seven large folio volumes.

The Liturgical Press books are Gospels and Acts, and Illuminating the Word: The Making of The Saint John’s Bible.

Choosing the right format for new books is one of the most vexing questions publishers face. Should we publish more-profitable, more-”prestigious” hardcovers, or should we lean toward cheaper trade paperbacks? Doug Siebold lays out several reasons why small publishers like himself should favor trade paperbacks. The big corporate publishers can afford to publish a bunch of hardcover books and see which ones make it. “But for a company like mine, with a program built on developing authors’ careers, building backlist, and ensuring every book gets a chance to do as well as it can, that kind of bravura just doesn’t work,” he writes. Booksellers return hardcovers more quickly, he says, and disappointing sales in hardcover can ruin the prospects for a future paperback edition. Authors like to see their books in hardcover, but Siebold asks: What about readers?

Shouldn’t their interests be served first and foremost? And wouldn’t most readers—excepting gift-buyers and the very small percentage of people who prefer paying premium price for premium product—rather get a book that they want at the most attractive possible price?

This weekend’s Speaking of Faith on National Public Radio is constructed around Paul Elie’s book The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage, the wonderful account of the lives and writings of Thomas Merton, Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy, and Dorothy Day. Go to the show’s website for program listings. You can also listen to the program there.

When it comes to books, less is more, writes Times critic William Grimes. Books have become bloated:

All books should be exactly as long as they need to be. There is no ideal length. But like mainstream Hollywood films, nonfiction books have shown a tendency to expand in recent years, for no particular reason. Directors cannot bring a film in at 90 minutes anymore. Likewise, my shelves are overloaded with nonfiction titles that, 30 years ago, would have been 225 or 250 pages. I’m not sure why. Fatter spines do look more imposing, and readers may feel, subconsciously, that $30 should buy them a thick, substantial volume. But time and again, I find, the extra weight comes from empty calories.

Grimes helpfully draws attention to publishers of concise books, including Norton’s How to Read series of short introductions to major thinkers.

This blog will take an occasional look at the evangelical Christian publishing world, the largest segment of the religious publishing business. The latest development is the rise of what one editor calls “hip, fun and smart fiction for modern and savvy women of faith” — in short, Christian chick lit. Steeple Hill, an imprint of romance publisher Harlequin, launched a line of “faith-based fiction” last year. Doubleday-Broadway is following suit. “Christian girls just want to have fun too,” says Jean Golan, editor at Steeple Hill. It will be good clean fun. Says Golan:

“The stories may not include alcohol consumption by Christian characters, dancing, card playing, gambling or games of chance (including raffles), explicit scatological terms, hero and heroine remaining overnight together alone, Halloween celebrations or magic or the mention of intimate body parts.”

Will this be a literary papacy? Benedict XVI has published a new book, a scant two months after beginning his reign. The Europe of Benedict: In the Crisis of Cultures was released this week by the Italian publisher Cantagalli. According to an AP report, the book was written by Cardinal Ratzinger over the past decade. In it he discusses the Christian roots of Europe, the need to protect life, and the challenges of faith in the modern world. The “Benedict” of the title seems to refer not to the pope but to St. Benedict of Norcia, the sixth-century monk who is the patron saint of Europe.

Americans prefer Barnes & Noble to Borders by a wide margin, according to a recent survey of consumer attitudes. Bookbuyers would also rather shop at Amazon.com than at their local independent bookstore.

Here’s the hierarchy of bookbuyers’ preferences: B&N - 33%; Amazon - 23%; independents - 21%; Borders - 13%; Waldenbooks - 3%. Consumers under age 30 preferred B&N. The over-30 crowd likes Amazon. These numbers were based on a survey of 15,000 consumers, and has a margin of error of less than one percent.

Twelve people showed up for our reading group last night – too many for the table reserved for us at the local Borders. We took over a section of the store’s Seattle’s Best Coffee café and spent the better part of two hours talking about Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood. I was slightly apprehensive. Our group is just getting started. When I read the book (something I had never done), I wondered if this famously difficult novel was a good choice for a parish reading group that is just getting off the ground.

Not to worry. Not everyone loved the book, but everyone grappled with it seriously. We had a good time discussing how O’Connor’s grotesque characters portray spiritual confusion that is hardly unfamiliar, how a love of Christ underlies her morbid vision of the world, how her story leads her characters to self-knowledge and the possibility of redemption. When we talked about what we’re taking away from the novel, many people mentioned Hazel Motes, the main character. His name suggests his problem. He’s in a haze that keeps him from seeing the “motes� in his eyes, an echo of Jesus’ warning about motes and planks and self-delusion.

On the way home I wondered about my apprehension about discussing Wise Blood. I had been worried that people would have trouble decoding O’Connor’s symbolism, that they wouldn’t understand how she uses the fantastic and the bizarre to communicate meaning. But my fellow readers readily understood what O’Connor was talking about. My apprehension is a relic of my literary education. Flannery O’Connor is supposed to be “difficult.� But she’s a great artist, and great artists connect with their readers more easily than the critics think.

Publishing executive Bill Barry, who began his career at Image Books, is the new publisher of Doubleday Religion, replacing Michelle Rapkin. Doubleday head Steve Rubin said that Barry’s mandate will be to double the religion unit’s sales within three years through both organic growth and acquisitions. Rubin said that Doubleday Religion will continue to focus on all areas of religion — “catholic with a small ‘c’” — and will also continue to co-publish books with WaterBrook, an independent Doubleday imprint. Barry, who is now president of DK Books, takes over his new job on August 1.

Many publishers are working hard to boost sales of their books through their own websites — a development that unsettles some booksellers. Random House and other big publishers in the U.S. are moving in this direction. Can small publishers be far behind? A recent piece in the Toronto Globe and Mail looks at the practice from a Canadian perspective. Publishers say they are not competing with booksellers. The head of the Canadian Publishers Council says that “publishers do not want to focus on selling one-sies.” Nevertheless, it seems inevitable that publishers will be selling more of their books directly. The question is: how large will this business get? The publishing blogger Booksquare is skeptical:

The entire premise centers around ensuring the customer knows who publishes a specific book, in addition to title and author. That’s a lot of information for the poor soul who just wants something to read. And while it may hurt to know this, who actually produces the book is the least important part of the equation.

Amy Welborn has some children’s book recommendations at Open Book. She’s clear about what she doesn’t like:

One of my rules of thumb regarding any kind of children’s literature is We Hate Messages. I call it “prescriptive literature” - books as medicine to fix what’s wrong with you. Of course literature teaches and heals, but books that expressly set out to do so usually fail, especially as literature.

Over the past fifteen years or so, children’s literature has, of course, been intent of fixing the ill of “intolerance” by pushing “diversity” in children’s stories. And I don’t mean simply presenting the world as it is (which is, by definition and experience, diverse) by by telling us all What a Good Thing It Is To Be Diverse, etc.

Those books are lame.

UPDATE: Amy’s readers respond with more than a hundred recommendations.

Catholic bloggers are taking note of David Scott’s new book A Revolution of Love: The Meaning of Mother Teresa. Thecla Mauro pens a thoughtful post and The Anchoress would like you to buy it through her website. What does Mother Teresa mean? Mauro, quoting David Scott, suggests this:

We have to walk the path that Jesus walked, a path that begins in giving yourself away. She told us that love begins where the self leaves off. “You must first forget yourself, so that you can dedicate yourself to God and your neighbor.”

It sounds so simple, almost trite. How many times in life have we heard that we should put others before ourselves, or “forget” ourselves. Most of us don’t even think of the meaning behind those words. Yet Scott makes the reader understand that Mother Teresa was perfectly serious in her challenge, and that far from being a trite idea, easily shrugged off, she was preaching something quite radical.

In fact, particularly in our time, a time of boundless self-involvement and exhortations to self-love, Mother Teresa was proposing an idea of true revolution, the revolution of abandoning the concerns of self, completely, to look only at Jesus and at the rest of people who share our world.

The Thomas Merton Society gathered in San Diego last weekend to discuss the life and work of the famous Trappist, whose books still sell well, and who remains a powerful Catholic voice 37 years after his death. Merton wrote 60 books and pamphlets. His famous autobiography The Seven Storey Mountain influenced a generation of readers. Many Catholics rejected Merton because of his liking for Zen Buddhism and Eastern mysticism, but his reputation as a substantial spiritual writer endures. Says Paul Elie, who wrote about Merton in his wonderful The Life You Save May Be Your Own :

This is a person who really wanted to know God . . . . It is important to say that Merton’s search for God wound up somewhere. If you read one of his books, you feel that he actually found something. He is not just searching for God better than I am; in his searching he has found something.

“Any rational business person looking at this practice would think that the industry has gone mad,â€? declares Steve Riggio, the CEO of Barnes & Noble. He’s talking about the practice of returns. Back in the Depression, publishers helped struggling booksellers by letting them return unsold books as long as they continued to order new ones. Today, about a third of all adult hardcover books are returned to publishers, according to a recent Wall Street Journal piece (stuck behind the Journal’s subscribers-only wall). The effects are gruesome:

Authors don’t get royalties on unsold books. Publishers sell returned copies at distressed prices after paying to truck them thousands of miles around the country. Books that can’t be sold at any price are pulped for a total loss. . .
Worst of all, the increasing rate of returns has helped ignite a destructive cycle. So many books come back that publishers say they have raised prices to compensate for the anticipated lost revenue. That in turn makes many books harder to sell, creating more returns.

Riggio would like to eliminate returns. He would move unsold books off the shelves by discounting them, just as other retailers slash prices on ripe produce and last season’s fashions to get them out of the store. Publishers would have to give steeper discounts to make this possible, and so far no one has taken that step.

Publishers may not like the current system of returns, but they may well wonder how the trade book busines would fare without them. Wouldn’t booksellers be more reluctant to order books if they were stuck with what they buy? And aren’t Catholic trade books just the kind of book that booksellers might avoid if they have any doubt about its appeal? It’s a conundrum. But I tend to agree with Riggio. It’s not good business, and bad business practices tend to disappear.

The first Pope Benedict book to hit the stores is We Have a Pope! Benedict XVI, by Matthew Bunson, published by Our Sunday Visitor on May 19. The OSV team beats John Allen by more than two weeks. Allen’s The Rise of Benedict XVI : The Inside Story of How the Pope was Elected and Where He Will Take the Catholic Church will be released June 7. Bunson is editor of OSV’s annual Catholic Almanac, and is a veteran compiler of many reference books, including this one. Go here for a roundup of the Pope Benedict books.

The new issue of the New Yorker includes a short story by Fr. Uwem Akpan, S.J., a Nigerian Jesuit priest. “An Ex-Mas Feast� is a gritty tale of a family living on the streets in Nairobi, Kenya. In an online interview, Fr. Akpan says “I hope I am able to reveal the compassion of God in the faces of the people I write about. I think fiction has a way of doing this without being doctrinaire about it.� Fr. Akpan is currently studying creative writing at the University of Michigan.

Basil Pennington, the Cistercian monk and writer, who introduced contemplative prayer techniques to a popular audience, died on June 3 at St. Joseph’s Abbey in Spencer, Massachusetts, where he had lived most of his life. Fr. Pennington was the author of Centering Prayer, one of the great Catholic best-sellers of the 80s.