Waiting for books...

Know what's crazy? The way books are reverting back to their old ways, being released in installments; making us wait. Mark Twain, Arthur Conan Doyle, and many other authors during their time had novels released chapter by chapter in installments in newspapers.

It's happening again...Series and trilogies are so big right now; it's officially "the thing" for an author to do. It's interesting to me that you can read a book and instantly go online and find out if there will be a sequel, what it will be called, and when it will be released. I imagine it's like Twain's fans waiting until the next installment in the newspaper to find out what Tom Sawyer was up to! I'm currently anxious to find out what happens to Cassia, the heroine in Ally Condie's Matched.

I took a Print Culture class at BYU as my capstone and I learned some awesmoely interesting things about the history of print and the book industry. I found out that the reason I have to wait until November for Crossed, the sequel to Matched, to come out is because of Harry Potter. Thanks, Potter.

Apparently after Harry Potter got so popular, there were some problems with the British publishing company, Bloomsbury, releasing their copies before Scholastic could. So, of course, the crazed American fans would contact the British company and have them ship out their earlier editions. This did not work for Scholastic, they were losing money!

"Hence, the millennial release of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire brought with it major changes in terms of how it and the three remaining installments in the series would be issued in the English language. Bloomsbury, Scholastic, and Raincoast (Potter's Canadian publisher) would guarantee one another's territorial publishing rights by agreeing to what the book industry calls a 'global lay-down date.' Together they would agree on a single day on which they would release their respective editions simultaneously, thereby denying shoppers the opportunity to exploit systemic imbalances in the global market for Potter books...While it's unclear whether Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire was the first book to be issued this way, it undoubtedly was among the very first to follow what's gone on to become a common industry practice for hotly anticipated titles." (The Late Age of Print, 146)

Thanks a lot, Potter and crazed American fans.

To learn more about crazy Harry Potter fans, might I recommend the documentary We Are Wizards? You can find it on Hulu...