Last year, World Book Night (WBN) launched in the United Kingdom (U.K.) and Eire (the Republic of Ireland) and readers across the British Isles gave 1,000,000 books to people who infrequently or almost never read in order to spread the love of reading. In 1995, UNESCO proclaimed April 23rd the International Day of the Book (also known as World Book and Copyright Day).
On April 23, 1616, William Shakespeare (1564-1616), and Miguel de CervantesSaavedra (1547-1616)both died.[1] Note that advocates of World Book Day and World Book Night often like to say April 23rd was also Shakespeare’s birthday, but this is conjecture. Shakespeare was baptized on April 26, 1564, so he would have been born a few days earlier.[2]
World Book Day UK & Ireland is not held on April 23rd in part so it does not coincide with Easter school vacation and in part because April 23rd is the Feast Day of Saint George, the patron saint of England. In 2008, World Book Day UK and Ireland was held on March 6th. This year, World Book Day UK and Ireland is being celebrated on March 1st.
World Book Night, Ltd. is a charitable company registered in England and Wales (company number 07406565; charity number 1138588).The company’s registered office is at 4 Uxbridge Street, London, England W8 7SY.
Julia Kingsford is Chief Executive of World Book Night, Ltd. The Chairman of the Board of Trustees is Jude Kelly. The other trustees are Jamie Byng, Penny Chapman, Mark Cousins, Michael Goldman, Ursual Mackenzie, Fiona McMorrough, Martin Nield, Lemn Sissay.
Click here to see the 25 World Book Night titles. Click here to learn more about World Book Night. To find out more about how the books were chosen click here. To find out more about the books' journey click here.
WBN organizers in the U.K. state on their Web site, “It is difficult to quantify the value of reading on people’s lives, especially given the shocking statistics in the UK that outlines that one person in six struggles to read and write. Poor skills compromise health and well-being, confidence and employability. World Book Night’s charitable mission is to advance the education of the public by assisting in the promotion of literacy and the celebration of books and reading by creating unique moments which focus attention on adult literacy. By focusing on the enjoyment and engagement of reading we aim to reach and inspire those who have never discovered the value of reading.”
World Book Night is the brainchild of the Honourable James Edmund “Jamie” Byng, the second son of Thomas Edmund Bying, 8th Earl of Strafford. Jamie Byng is the Managing Director of the Scottish publishing house Canongate Books.
Byng had the idea during a round-table debate on World Book Day at the Book Industry Conference in May 2010. Last year, 20,000 volunteers distributed 1,000,000 books in March of 2011. The second World Book Night will be held on April 23, 2012.
In the British Isles, World Book Night is advised by a cross-industry steering committee made up of members of the many stakeholders. The members are Mark Bell,Commissioning Editor at the BBC; the aforementioned Jamie Byng, Managing Director of Canongate Books; Richard Cable, Managing Director of the CCV Division at Random House; Tracy Chevalier, author and former Chair of the Society of Authors; Rebecca Ikin, Marketing Director at Pan Macmillan; Tony Durcan, Director of Culture, Libraries and Lifelong Learning, Newcastle; Minna Fry, Associate Publisher, Press Division, at HarperCollins; Jonny Geller, Managing Director of Curtis Brown Agency Book Department; Seni Glaister, Chief Executive, The Book People;[3] Jamie Hodder-Williams, Managing Director of Hodder & Stoughton;[4] Bob Jackson, Managing Director of Gardners; Julia Kingsford, Chief Executive of World Book Night, Ltd.; Kate McFarlan, Managing Director of Clays;[5] Fiona McMorrough, founder and Managing Director of FMCM PR Agency; Miranda McKearney, Director of The Reading Agency;[6] Cathy Rentzenbrink, Publisher Relationship Manager at Waterstone’s;[7] Martin Neild, formerly Chief Executive of Hodder & Stoughton, Headline and John Murray,[8] and still works as a consultant to Hachette;[9] Joanna Prior, Managing Director of Penguin General Books and Chair of World Book Day 2012; and Jane Streeter, President of the Booksellers Association and runs the Bookcase in Lowdham, Nottingham.
World Book Night, Ltd. lists the following organizations as partner organizations: The Reading Agency (www.readingagency.org.uk), World Book Day & Quick Reads (www.worldbookday.com) and (www.quickreads.org.uk), Publishers Association (www.publishers.org.uk), and Booksellers Association (www.booksellers.org.uk). WBN organizers encourage bookstores and libraries to put up displays of the WBN books in their regular editions and note “The UK’s first year saw book sales of the picked titles soar, which is wonderful for all parties concerned.”
In an interview with Jamie Byng for The Scotsman posted on Scotsman.com on March 4, 2011, Chitra Ramaswamy wrote “World Book Night...Celebrations kicked off in London's Trafalgar Square last night with what was billed as the largest literary gathering in history, hosted by Graham Norton and featuring heavyweights such as Pullman, Atwood and Le Carr reading from their favourite books. The BBC is broadcasting the action live tonight from London, Manchester and Glasgow. Patrons include everyone from Damon Albarn to JK Rowling. That Byng has managed to organise all this in a few months is testament to his bulging contacts book as much as the nation's love of the written word” (“Interview: Jamie Byng, publisher”).
Bying reported that on March 4, 2011, 1,400 libraries, 850 booksellers, and over 100 prisons were participated in WBN events and there were 400 discrete events. "I wrote a letter to all the librarians, booksellers, publishers and agents, asking them to come up with the 25 books they would like to see on the list. We got 500 lists back and sent them to the awards committee."
Ms. Ramaswamy noted “In an industry threatened by digital publishing and the takeover by chains and supermarkets, WBN has galvanized people.” Byng told her, "Penguin provided all the boxes for free that are being sent out to the 20,000 givers. Random House and Hachette did all the physical distribution for nothing. Pentagram designed the books for nothing. Clays, the biggest printer in Britain, printed the books at cost. And none of the authors are taking a royalty. One of the really lovely things has been seeing the industry come together in an unprecedented way. It shows what's possible. There hasn't been any government funding."
However, Ms. Ramaswamy also pointed out that WBN was not without critics. “Of course there have also been detractors who point out that giving away 8 million worth of books in the midst of recession, library closures, and struggling independent shops is bad business. Others have derided World Book Night as being more about marketing than ‘the gift economy’ Byng is so keen to promote. Ian Jack, writing in a national newspaper, compared the exercise to ‘that flickering vision, the Big Society’. The Scottish writer Nicola Morgan has launched an alternative World Book Night inviting people to buy a book from a favourite bookshop and gift it to someone so sellers don't lose out.”
Byng countered, "I can understand why there is a concern that giving away a million books is going to eat into sales. But it will also increase sales. I would say in 95 percent of instances the people who are given the books would never normally have read them. These are books that will travel through word of mouth, and that increases sales. And the number of independents who are into it way eclipses the few who are against it. Nicola's idea is absolutely great. I love anything that promotes reading and her idea doesn't run counter to WBN. The thing that frustrates me about some of the negative feedback is that we wouldn't be having any of these conversations if we hadn't done this."
Byng himself was a WBN Giver last year and told Ms. Ramaswamy he planned to hand out forty-eight copies of Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist in Notting Hill.
[1]As I explained in “What is World Book Day?” Shakespeare and Cervantes died on the same date, but not on the same day, because Cervantes died in Spain, which had adopted the new Gregorian Calendar, while Shakespeare died in England, which did not adopt the Gregorian Calendar until 1752, and was still on the Julian Calendar in 1616. Shakespeare and Cervantes actually died ten days apart.
[2]Today, Christian parents may wait up to several months before they baptize their newborn children, but when the rate of infant mortality was high, they felt obliged to have their children baptized immediately.
[3]The Book People is a family-owned Web-based English bookstore headquartered in Surrey.
[4]Hodder & Stoughton is a publishing house founded in 1868. It was the publisher of Winston Churchill, G.K. Chesterton, H. Rider Haggard, and Mary Stewart. Today, it publishes the likes of John le Carré and John Connolly and is the British publisher for Stephen King. It is part of Hachette UK.
[5]Clays is a publishing house that is nearly 200 years old. It publishes approximately 160,000,000 books per year. A quarter of a century ago, it was acquired by St. Ives plc.
[6]As I mentioned in “Public and Academic Library Closures in the U.S., U.K., and Eire, Part VI,” The Reading Agency, an independent charity of England and Wales that is one of eight founding charities in the Free Word Centre in Farringdon, London, funded in part by Arts Council England, which is part of the Department of Culture, Media and Sport.
[7]Waterstone’s is a bookstore chain.
[8]John Murray was a publishing house founded in 1768 that was owned and operated by the same family for seven generations. The company’s first bestseller was Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage by Lord Byron, which it published in 1811. Four years later, Jane Austen gave the company Emma to publish. John Murray later published the likes of Charles Darwin and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. In 2002, John Murray was acquired by Hodder Headline, which had been in business for nine years by that point and had become part of the WH Smith retail and publishing group in 1999, as recounted by Amanda-Jane Doran in Publishers Weekly, Volume 249, Issue 20, May 20, 2002.
[9]In 2004, the French publishing group Hachette Livre, part of the Lagadere Group, purchased Hodder Headline from WH Smith, originally a newspaper and bookshop chain, which was in the process of divesting itself of non-core businesses, and had paid £185,000,000 for Hodder Headline in 1999. This deal was worth approximately $400,000,000. Hachette Livre offered £210,000,000 in cash to WH Smith and assumed £13,000,000 in debt – Hodder Healine’s net pension deficit. Hachette Livre established Hachette UK Book Group as an umbrella for Hodder Headline and other British publishing houses it had previously acquired. This was recounted by Amanda-Jane Doran in Publishers Weekly, Volume 251, Issue 32, August 9, 2004.
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