Marginalia — book industry

What do readers want?

UWA Publishing Australian publishing book industry on reading Publishing

What do readers want?

‘Historically speaking,’ said one of the visiting publishers at the Australia Council’s 2016 publishing scheme, ‘Koreans read for educational purposes. Only recently have we started reading for pleasure. This is why non-fiction books are very big in our market: business books, science…but literary fiction is starting to sell very well.’

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Reading between the lines: notes on publishing now

UWA Publishing Australian publishing book industry publishing

Words by Charlotte Guest, Publishing Officer at UWA Publishing


As Sean Kelly wrote in a recent article for The Monthly, our public debate and mainstream media coverage has become increasingly simplistic. We have misplaced the tools for navigating complex topics; there seems to be no time for reflection. This can be said of issues for contemporary Australia as diverse as the refugee crisis to the housing crisis and the terrorism crisis. The point is they’re all ‘crises’; more and more, we are accessing these subjects through the language of extremes; we are witnessing a growing propensity to shy away from deep and sensitive analysis. As, at its core, this is largely a problem with language-use and communication, it is unsurprising that one of its victims is a primary communicative tool: the book.

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