The 2010 Book Conference held at the University of St. Gallen, St. Gallen, Switzerland, 6-8 November, welcomes three new speakers to its international line-up of plenary speakers.

Rafael Ball
Professor Rafael Ball is currently Director of the University Library Regensburg in Regensburg, Germany. After receiving his doctorate (Dr. rer. nat.) in biology in 1994 from the Institute of General Botany at the University of Mainz, he went on to train as a scientific librarian at the Library Management School of Frankfurt from 1994-1996. Following this, he took the position as the Head of the Central Library at the Research Centre Jülich where he stayed from 1996-2008 before moving on to the University of Regensburg. More…

Stephanie  Jacobs
Dr. Stephanie Jacobs studies history of art, German studies, philosophy and psychology at universities of Bamberg, Bonn, Berlin (Germany) and Perugia (Italy). Her doctoral work at the Free University of Berlin concentrated on German and French book illustration in the 19th century. Jacobs was awarded scholarships in Herzog-August-Bibliothek in Wolfenbüttel, Bibliothèque Nationale Paris, and the Mellon Center of Yale University. More…

Wulf D. von Lucius
Wulf D. von Lucius is the Director of Lucius & Lucius Verlag in Stuttgart, Germany and has been with them since 1996. Since 1970, he has been engaged in honorary positions in the book trade, both nationally and internationally, with a focus on copyright. He was chair of the STM Copyright Committee from 1990-93, Chair of IPCC 91/92 and 97/98, Chair of the German copyright committee 1994-2008 and was on the IPA’s Copyright Committee from 1997-2000. More…

We are now accepting submissions for the next volume of The International Journal of the Book. The next submission deadline is Monday 2 August 2010.

Refereeing of submitted papers will commence shortly so start the submission process early by submitting your proposal.

Paper submission guidelines are available online.

Volume 7, Number 4 contains:

• Literacy Crisis: A Realist Approach to the Acquisition and Development of Literacy in Primary Education in KwaZulu-Natal by Wendy Govender.
• Oral and Written Traditions in the Preservation of the Authenticity of the Qur’an by Kasim Randeree.
• Using Panels to Shape Visual Storytelling: Organizing Flow in the Graphic Narrative by Durwin Talon and Guin Thompson.
• The Progression of Digital Publishing: Innovation and the E-volution of E-books by John W. Warren.
• Through Thick and Thin: On the Typology and Agency of Literary Journals by Matthew Philpotts.
• The Fate of Reading, Thinking, and Learning in an Electronic Age by Heather McCullough.

• A Small Scale Study into the Effect that Text & Background Colour has on Processing and Self-Correction Rates for Childrens’ On-Screen Reading by Nicholas Vanderschantz, Claire Timpany, David Whitehead and Wendy Carss.
• A Clash of Chronotopes: Adult reading of Children’s and Young Adult Literature by Margaret Zeegers, Charlotte Pass and Ellen Jampole.
• The Children’s Picture Book as Artist’s Book: Turning the American Children’s Picture Book Form “Topsy & Turvy” by Stella Reinhard.
• From Spoken Narration to Book: Adapting Oral Traditions to Modern Fiction in Native American Writing by John K. Donaldson.
• Failure in a Successful Interpretation: The Problem of Visual Literacy in Hablot Knight Browne’s Illustrations for Bleak House by Shayla Alarie.

From Laura Miller at Salon…

When I was 12 years old, I read most of the plays of George Bernard Shaw. That’s not to say that I understood the plays of George Bernard Shaw, or even that I passionately loved them. They just happened to be around the house, in a set of neat little green paperbacks left over from my father’s college days. I doubt that puzzling over the mysteries of “Pygmalion” taught me much about the British class system, but it definitely got me into the habit of searching for understanding in the pages of challenging books.

A study recently published in the journal Research in Social Stratification and Mobility found that just having books around the house (the more, the better) is correlated with how many years of schooling a child will complete. The study (authored by M.D.R. Evans, Jonathan Kelley, Joanna Sikorac and Donald J. Treimand) looked at samples from 27 nations, and according to its abstract, found that growing up in a household with 500 or more books is “as great an advantage as having university-educated rather than unschooled parents, and twice the advantage of having a professional rather than an unskilled father.” Children with as few as 25 books in the family household completed on average two more years of schooling than children raised in homes without any books. More…

By Geoffrey A. Fowler and Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg at The Wall Street Journal…

Writer Karen McQuestion spent nearly a decade trying without success to persuade a New York publisher to print one of her books. In July, the 49-year-old mother of three decided to publish it herself, online.

Eleven months later, Ms. McQuestion has sold 36,000 e-books through Amazon.com Inc.’s Kindle e-bookstore and has a film option with a Hollywood producer. In August, Amazon will publish a paperback version of her first novel, “A Scattered Life,” about a friendship triangle among three women in small-town Wisconsin.

Ms. McQuestion is at the leading edge of a technological disruption that’s loosening traditional publishers’ grip on the book market—and giving new power to technology companies like Amazon to shape which books and authors succeed.

Much as blogs have bitten into the news business and YouTube has challenged television, digital self-publishing is creating a powerful new niche in books that’s threatening the traditional industry. Once derided as “vanity” titles by the publishing establishment, self-published books suddenly are able to thrive by circumventing the establishment. More…