Literacy/Reading

U.S. World Book Night Chief Executive Carl Lennertz talks about plans for the inaugural U.S. event to be held on April 23, 2012 — the International Day of the Book.

World Book Night is launching in the U.S. with the goal of giving away one million books across the country on April 23, 2012. Carl Lennertz, currently vice president for independent retailing at HarperCollins, has been hired as chief executive of the U.S. division of WBN and will start on September 1.

J.K. Rowling announces Pottermore; New York Times reports on bookstores charging for author events; U.K. celebrates Independent Booksellers’ Week; AMIBA seeks local first videos; Summer of a Million Books campaign begins

In celebration of National Volunteer Week, which runs from April 10 - 16, booksellers from Indigo Bridge Books and Open Books talk about the logistics of working with a team of community members happy to donate their time.

Independent booksellers and book bloggers have united to produce the Bookrageous calendar, a fundraising project that promotes the love of books.

Jennifer Frances is making her second cross-country literacy tour in Bess the Book Bus, distributing books to children along the way. Among her supporters are several independent bookstores.

Literary reading among American adults is on the rise for the first time in more than 25 years, according to new report released this week by National Endowment for the Arts (NEA).

The Association of American Publishers (AAP) has announced the latest and perhaps most exclusive celebrity to ever have participated in its Get Caught Reading campaign -- Santa Claus! In Get Caught Reading's newest image, which is inclusive of the "Books=Gifts" message, Santa takes a minute out of his busy gift-delivering eve to read a book. The image is available now on the Get Caught Reading website.

When global business news and information services provider Dow Jones & Co. launched an employee book drive to provide more than 4,000 titles for a new library that it's funding in Zambia, Jane Meyers, founder of the Lubuto Library Project, believed strongly that those books should come from an independent bookstore.

By Sandy Scott, Events Coordinator, The Galaxy Bookshop