New books on Osama bin Laden and the Navy SEAL unit that killed him are coming soon. Even christian book publishers are gearing up the presses for theological debates on the dead fugitive.

Random House Book Publishers says it hopes to have a collection of essays out quickly on the al-Qaida terrorist leader, who was killed in a helicopter raid and gunfight on Monday in Pakistan. The Free Press says it’s planning an e-book “as fast as possible” based on material from Peter Bergen’s “The Longest War: The Enduring Conflict between America and Al-Qaeda.”

Bin Laden was killed by a unit called Navy SEAL Team Six, ending a nearly 10-year hunt for the mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

St. Martin’s Press is moving up publication of “SEAL Team Six: Memoirs of an Elite Navy SEAL Sniper,” by Howard E. Wasdin and Stephen Templin. The book was scheduled to come out May 24 but likely will be released within a week.

This month sees the 400th anniversary of the publication of the King James Bible. It is the greatest book in the English language from any book publisher or christian book publishers perspective. It made English, and remade England.

It has been printed in millions of copies and hundreds of editions. It gives us our most memorable phrases and arresting images – from ‘an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth’ to a ‘sting in the tail’.

Called into being by a king, it has carried ideas of truth and freedom and justice and human dignity to the furthest corners of the globe. Its cadences can be heard in the speeches of Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King and President Obama. It is the spice in the new English of the Indian Subcontinent. And yet, extraordinarily, this supreme achievement was the work of a committee – or so we have always been told.

Closer examination reveals a very different story, which overturns our notions of the chronology of this great book and reintroduces an unjustly neglected name to our pantheon of great writers, William Tyndale.

James VI of Scotland succeeded the childless Queen Elizabeth I as James I of England in 1603. There were high hopes for him, and none higher than James’s for himself. He had been king of Scots since he was in his cradle. He was learned; a polished, published author and a patient, canny politician. Above all – and in sharp contrast to the ageing Elizabeth, who had  frozen into a sort of querulous immobility – he had vision and ambition.

James I had set himself three main tasks. He wanted to end the long, debilitating war between England and Spain. He was determined to bring about a political union between his two separate kingdoms of Scotland and England. And he even dreamt of reuniting the Christian church, which had been riven by the Reformation into warring factions, as Catholics fought Protestants and Protestants fought each other. All three conflicts, James resolved, would be settled by his deft mediation as the universal Rex Pacificus – ‘the peacemaker king’.

It was indeed an ambitious programme. Less than a decade later, it mostly lay in ruins. England and Spain were at peace, but the English parliament had thrown out a  union with Scotland; while the Gunpowder Plot, in which a handful of renegade Catholics had schemed to blow up king, Lords and Commons, had set back Catholic emancipation by generations.

One thing, however, survived from the wreck: the scheme for a new, agreed translation of the Bible. The scheme had first been floated at the Hampton Court Conference, held in Henry VIII’s Thames-side palace in 1604 to try to resolve the bitter disputes within the Church of England between the Puritans, who wanted a stripped-down Protestantism, and the bishops, who were determined to retain a more ceremonious national Church. James, who presided as an anything but impartial chairman, leapt at the idea.

Fifty-four scholars were nominated as translators, of whom 47 actually served. They were divided into six separate ‘companies’ or committees, two meeting at Oxford, two at Cambridge and two at Westminster, and the Old and New Testaments and the Apocrypha were parcelled out among them. Each committee then went through its alloted portion, line by line and word by word.

They began with the original texts in Hebrew, Greek and Aramaic; they compared and contrasted later translations in Latin and many other languages; they scoured reference books and commentaries; they  consulted with other scholars on specific issues. And, being academics, they debated and quarrelled endlessly and ferociously.

Contrary to popular belief, however, what the  translators did not do was to start the work of translation from scratch. Their instructions, whose substance was dictated by James himself, were quite explicit  on the point. Instead, they were to base themselves on the main English Bible translations of the 16th  century: ‘Tindall’s (sic), Matthew’s, Coverdale’s, Whitchurch’s, Geneva’.

And the greatest of these, and the foundation of all the others – including the King James version itself – was Tyndale’s. It was one translator against 50, but there is no doubt where the balance of creativity lies.

William Tyndale, martyr, Bible-translator and a controversialist so formidable that he left even Sir Thomas More floored in argument, was a near-contemporary of Henry VIII: Tyndale was born in about 1494; Henry some three years earlier.

And Tyndale, like the young prince, benefited from the first wave of Renaissance scholarship in England. Tyndale probably laid the foundations of his excellent knowledge of the Classics at Katharine Lady Berkeley’s Grammar School at Wotton-under-Edge, Gloucestershire, a few miles from his place of birth. And he polished it at Magdalen College, Oxford, where Wolsey had cut his teeth as star student and ambitious young don.

Tyndale’s academic career progressed  smoothly, too. He graduated BA 1512; in 1515 he was ordained a priest and, a few months later, he began his further studies for the MA. But the next year, Tyndale’s life – and the whole history of the 16th century – changed.

The great Dutch scholar and book publisher Erasmus had spent much of the past decade in England, where he had been one of Henry VIII’s youthful mentors. The Bible had been one of his preoccupations and, in 1516, he published the fruits of his labours in the form of the first printed text of the Greek New Testament, with a radically revised Latin translation alongside.

Erasmus called his work the Novum Instrumentum (The New Tool) and it divided his world like a freshly honed razor. On one side were men such as Sir Thomas More and, for a long time, Henry VIII himself. They were determined that the Bible should remain a clerical monopoly in Latin, safe from the prying eyes of  ordinary folk. On the other side was the German reformer Martin Luther, who was equally determined to put the Bible into the language of the people and let it do its work in the world.

Tyndale was with Luther, and his life’s work now became to translate the Bible into English. He began his task in England. But the clerical establishment proved bitterly hostile and threatened him with the terrible charge of heresy, for which the punishment was burning alive.

In one such encounter his persecutor told him ‘we were better without God’s law than the Pope’s’. Tyndale replied in words that have echoed down the centuries.

‘If God spare my life,’ he said, ‘I will cause a boy that driveth the plough shall know more of the Scripture than thou dost.’

Realising now that ‘to translate the New Testament… there was no place in all England’, Tyndale fled abroad, first to Cologne, then to Worms and, finally, to the great trading city of Antwerp.

In 1526 he published his first version of the New Testament. Then, somewhere and somehow, he learned Hebrew and began the even greater task of translating the Old Testament.

He worked with his usual speed and, in 1530, he published the first five books of the Old Testament, known as the Pentateuch.

A translation of the Prophet Jonah followed, and he began work on the historical books, Kings and Chronicles. Finally, in 1534, he published a thorough revision of his New Testament in which he improved his own high standards.

It is an astonishing achievement. Still only in his thirties, Tyndale was working underground, with little assistance and few resources. He had to deal with much of the drudgery of printing and distribution himself. And yet this was the result:

‘Though I spake with the tongues of men and angels, and yet had no love, I were even as sounding brass: and as a tinkling cymbal. And though I could prophesy, and understood all secrets, and all knowledge: yea, if I had all faith so that I could move mountains out of their places, and yet had no love, I were nothing.’ (I Corinthians 13. 1-2)

All the great phrases, which have become the very fabric of the language, are there, too: ‘the spirit is willing’; ‘fight the good fight’; ‘the powers that be’. Yet More denounced Tyndale’s great work as ‘a filthy foam of blasphemies’.

This was because Tyndale, basing himself on Erasmus, had dared to translate key words in their Greek meanings as ‘elder’, ‘congregation’, ‘love’ and ‘repent’, instead of the officially approved ‘priest’, ‘church’, ‘charity’ and ‘do penance’.

A hundred years of strife was in the difference, and Tyndale was one of the first victims. He was betrayed to the Flemish authorities, condemned and, having been strangled first (out of respect to his scholarship), his body was burned at the stake.

It is hard to exaggerate the difference between the lonely, hunted Tyndale and the comfortable cohorts of the Jacobean translators, with their fellowships and deaneries. Nine-tenths of Tyndale’s New Testament are reproduced word for word in the King James version.

This is no more radical a revision than the work of any modern publisher’s editor in preparing an author’s manuscript for the press. But there is an alchemy nonetheless. Tyndale had written for the ploughboy. The Jacobean translators were preparing an official text for an established Church which, Protestant though it was, had taken over much of the pomp and circumstance of its old Catholic predecessor.

So back came the traditional translations of the disputed words, such as ‘church’ and ‘charity’. Out went Tyndale’s vivid colloquialisms.

‘In the twinkling of an eye’ became ‘in a moment of time’. ‘Tush, ye shall not die’, Tyndale’s Serpent tells Eve in the Garden of Eden.

‘Ye shall not surely die’, the Tempter says more decorously in the King James Bible. And everywhere the translators aimed for smoothness and dignity: ‘If the words are arranged this way, the statement will be more majestic,’ one argued.

The result should have been an uneasy compromise. Instead it was a miracle. Tyndale supplied the muscle; the Jacobeans the majesty. And English ever since has been able to move effortlessly from one to the other. At the same time, the language began another and even greater journey.

In 1607, halfway through the work of the Jacobean translators and christian book publishers, the first lasting English settlement was established in North America, fittingly enough at Jamestown.

With the Empire as the medium and the King James Bible as the message, English had begun its path to global dominance.

As a broadcaster, Melvyn Bragg has discussed more topics with more specialists and more energetically than most of us could ever hope to do. The 400th anniversary of the King James Bible provides him with the perfect opportunity to write something with christian book publishers which reflects that breadth of encounter.

The Book of Books has three parts. The first takes us “from Hampton Court to New England”. It’s a broadly chronological account, putting the KJB in historical context and paying proper attention to earlier translations, with Tyndale (published in 1526) justly recognised as pre-eminent. The book explains how the KJB was commissioned, planned and executed. Then the camera angle widens and we are taken on the first of the KJB’s many journeys: across the Atlantic on the Mayflower; to the English civil war, where it provided ammunition for both sides; to the Restoration era in Britain; and to the Great Awakening in America.

In part two, “The Impact on Culture”, the journey extends to science, language, literature and political thought. The writer shows how the KJB was hugely influential among those who formed the Royal Society. Its language forms an important strand in present-day idiom. It can be seen as great literature in its own right, and has hugely influenced British and American writers. Bragg gives us a whistle-stop tour from Shakespeare to Toni Morrison, with way stations including Milton, Bunyan, Defoe, Blake, Melville, Faulkner, Eliot and Golding. “After all the pounding it has taken”, Bragg writes, this Bible “is still a source for such great imaginative writers today”.

The writer shows how the KJB survived attacks by philosophers such as David Hume and Thomas Hobbes during the Enlightenment. This leads him to make a strong case for how it will survive the so-called New Enlightenment of Richard Dawkins and others. Bragg does a grand demolition job of Dawkins’s limited vision – his failure to recognise the positive dimension to belief and to appreciate the critical importance of the historical backdrop. He ends this section of the book with an account of the KJB’s influence on the actions of individuals, presenting Mary Wollstonecraft and William Wilberforce as cases in point.

Part three is “The Impact on Society”. Here the KJB’s journeys take us first into slavery, and then the American civil war and its political consequences. A global perspective emerges. The Book is seen as “the prime educating force in the English-speaking world”, and Protestant missionaries as especially important in this process. The text has played an important role in developing social attitudes to sex and the place of women, and in the rise of socialism. Above all, it helped form our modern notion of democracy. This, Bragg argues, could be the KJB’s “greatest achievement” of all – Bragg’s book publishers agree.

The book’s strengths are its judicious selectivity and its breadth, yet both carry risks.

All readers will want to cite other examples: I would add the Virgin Mary to his discussion of biblical women, and one could easily double the length of the chapter on global spread by showing how the KJB has influenced literature across the Commonwealth. Nor do I doubt that specialists will dispute specific points. The linguist in me worries when I read that there are “literally thousands” of present-day idiomatic expressions in the KJB (my estimate is roughly 250) – but I’m happy to turn a blind eye to the occasional linguistic infelicity in the interests of seeing the wider picture.

Which is what we get. Bragg’s strengths as a novelist yield an account that is personal and imaginative, full of excitement and energy. He is inclusive, too, addressing believers and nonbelievers alike. The chapters are short and usually end with a cliffhanger. Indeed, I have never read an account of the Bible quite so compelling.The key lies in the subtitle: The Radical Impact of the King James Bible. At the end of his prologue, Bragg says that whoever we are in the English-speaking world, and regardless of whether we have religious convictions or not, he hopes to persuade us that this version of the Bible “has driven the making of that world over the last 400 years, often in most unexpected ways”.

Just when do books wear out?

That the big question, especially after Book Publishers announced this month that libraries will only be able to circulate its e-book titles 26 times before they’ll have to buy a new copy.

It set 26 as the cap, arguing with an average two-week borrowing period, it works out to a year — the length of time when printed books wear out and popularity wanes.

Technically, e-books will never fall apart. And librarians argue many printed books circulate far more than 26 times, and are still in good shape after more than 100 checkouts.

The new rule, which went into effect on March 7 for new titles, has upset librarians, sparking some in the United States to call for a boycott of HarperCollins books.

While Canadian librarians aren’t making such threats, the Toronto Public Library is holding off on any new HarperCollins purchases until the new restrictions are clarified.

“This announcement was discouraging,” said city librarian Jane Pyper. “We respect the publishing industry. We want a viable and vibrant Canadian publishing industry, in particular. We want Canadian content.

“We also want something that’s fair to public libraries and viable and sustainable for the library sector.”

While e-books represent less than 1 per cent of the 32 million items that the Toronto library circulates each year, they are growing in popularity. The library currently carries about 11,000 e-book titles, and they are checked out about 17,000 times each month.

On Christmas Day and Boxing Day, after people had ripped off the wrapping paper on new and self publishing reading devices like Kobos and Sony readers, the library had an unbelievable surge in hits on its website for patrons wanting to download e-books, Pyper said.

With each e-title, the Toronto library can only circulate that single copy to one borrower at a time. Patrons can borrow 10 books for up to 21 days. After the due date, the book disappears from the individual reader and the item can circulate again.

The New York Times says nine million devices are in use in the United States, according to Forrester Research. Market research firms here estimate 500,000 Canadians had readers by the end of last year.

“It’s important for the future to understand that the public libraries will be in e-collection market,” said Pyper. “We want to own books, we want to preserve them, and we want the public to have permanent access to them.”

E-books range in price from $20 to $30 and there are no library discounts — unlike print versions, she said. And given the library’s financial woes, pricing or the need to repurchase books has an impact on the budget.

When asked for comment, a spokesman with HarperCollinsCanada said no one was available.

In an open letter to librarians, Josh Marwell, president of sales at HarperCollinsPublishers in the United States, explained that the company’s previous e-book policy was almost 10 years old, developed when there were few such readers.

“We have serious concerns that our previous e-book policy, selling e-books to libraries in perpetuity, if left unchanged, would undermine the emerging e-book ecosystem, hurt the growing e-book channel, place additional pressure on physical bookstores, and in the end lead to a decrease in book sales and royalties paid to authors,” Marwell wrote.

He added the 26 checkout cap can provide a year of availability for titles with the highest demand and much longer for other titles. “If a library decides to repurchase an e-book later in the book’s life, the price will be significantly lower as it will be pegged to a paperback price point.”

The ease with which consumers can borrow e-books makes book publishers nervous. Random House of Canada only started selling e-books to libraries last month, and two big U.S. publishers, Simon & Schuster and MacMillan, do not sell e-books to libraries.

Susan Renouf, former vice-president and associate book publisher of McClelland and Stewart, said the HarperCollins cap highlights the uncertainty in the publishing world.

“It’s the wild west out there. There are no norms on this new business,” said Renouf, who is a strategic consultant to Association of Canadian Publishers.

Some experts predict e-books could represent half of the book market within five years.

“I think this is a huge boon to reading,” Renouf said. “There is a renewed interest in reading, reading culture and new ways of reading.”

She believes it’s an exciting opportunity for the small independent publishers to sell books, eliminating distribution challenges.

“At the same time, if the new norms come in and where we have been unable to persuade consumers that there is a monetary value to quality reading, we’ll have no business model,” she said. “Until the norms settle, it’s a roller-coaster ride.”

Top 5 e-books

Here are the five most popular e-books downloaded in the last two weeks in the Toronto Public Library:

The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest by Stieg Larsson

The Sentimentalists by Johanna Skibsrud

The Help by Kathryn Stockett

The Confession by John Grisham

The 4 Hour Workweek by Timothy Ferriss

Source: Toronto Public Library and Christian Book Publishers

Just two months shy of his fourth birthday, Colton Burpo, the son of an evangelical pastor in Imperial, Neb., was rushed into emergency surgery with a burst appendix.

He woke up with an astonishing story: He had died and gone to heaven, where he met his great-grandfather; the biblical figure Samson; John the Baptist; and Jesus, who had eyes that “were just sort of a sea-blue and they seemed to sparkle,” Colton, now 11 years old, recalled.

Colton’s father, Todd, has turned the boy’s experience into a 163-page book, “Heaven Is for Real,” which has become a sleeper paperback hit of the winter, dominating best-seller lists and selling hundreds of thousands of copies.

Thomas Nelson, the christian book publishers, said it had broken company sales records. The publisher, based in Nashville, began with an initial print run of 40,000 copies. Since the book came out in November, it has gone back to press 22 times, with more than 1.5 million copies in print. On the New York Times best-seller list for paperback nonfiction last Sunday, “Heaven Is for Real” was No. 1. The book remains in the top spot this coming Sunday.

Much of the book’s success has been fueled by word of mouth, since it did not begin with the usual best-seller channels: there has been no elaborate book tour, big-name book publishers or brand-name author. But it has gained traction with a few well-placed appearances on the morning show “Fox & Friends,” “The 700 Club” and CNN.

The book has sold just as strongly in national chain bookstores like Barnes & Noble as it has in Christian specialty shops, said Matt Baugher, the vice president and book publisher of Thomas Nelson. Mass merchants like Wal-Mart have pushed the book heavily in their stores, and large orders from churches and ministry groups are growing steadily.

“We all are perhaps desperate to know what is on the other side of the veil after we die,” Mr. Baugher said, adding that his initial skepticism about the Burpo family’s story was short-lived. “This was a very down-to-earth, conservative, quote-unquote normal Midwestern family. We became fully convinced that this story was valid. And also that it was a great story that would just take off.”

The book was an instant hit in Barnes & Noble outlets and was near the top of the best-seller list on its bn.com. The chain’s religion buyer was an early advocate for the book, ordering copies for every store, said Patricia Bostelman, the vice president for marketing at Barnes & Noble.

“When you buy the religion subject, you are presented with many stories about heaven, personal experiences about near-death and the afterlife,” Ms. Bostelman said, noting that several other books with “heaven” in the title have sold well recently. “But what was unusual about this book was that it was the story of a little boy. It deactivated some of the cynicism that can go along with adults capitalizing on their experiences.”

Todd Burpo wrote the book with Lynn Vincent, who collaborated with Sarah Palin on “Going Rogue.” Mr. Burpo, the pastor of Crossroads Wesleyan Church in Imperial, a farming community in southwest Nebraska, said in an interview that he had shouldered some criticism over it.

“People say we just did this to make money, and it’s not the truth,” Mr. Burpo said, referring to anonymous online comments about the book. “We were expecting nothing. We were just hoping the publisher would break even.” (He said he planned to give away much of the royalty income and spend some of it on home improvements.)

At first, he and his wife, Sonja, were not sure if they could believe their son’s story, which came out slowly, months and years after his sudden illness and operation in 2003. The details persuaded them, Mr. Burpo said. Colton told his parents that he had met his younger sister in heaven, describing her as a dark-haired girl who resembled his older sister, Cassie. When the Burpos questioned him, he asked his mother, “You had a baby die in your tummy, didn’t you?” While his wife had suffered a miscarriage years before, Mr. Burpo said, they had not told Colton about it. “There’s just no way he could have known,” Mr. Burpo said.

And the Burpos said that Colton painstakingly described images that he said he saw in heaven — like the bloody wounds on Jesus’ palms — that he had not been shown before.

Eventually the Burpos decided to tell their story beyond their town. Mr. Burpo, in his Sunday sermons, had already introduced some anecdotes to his congregation. Through a pastor friend, they met Joel Kneedler, an agent with Alive Communications, a Christian literary agency in Colorado Springs. Mr. Kneedler sold the book to Thomas Nelson, a publisher known for Christian titles like “40 Days With Jesus” by Sarah Young. The advance was in the low five figures.

The book’s list price is $16.99, but that is discounted to $9.34 on amazon.com.

At the outlets of Barbara’s Bookstore, an independent chain mostly in the Chicago area, the book is No. 1 on the store’s nonfiction best-seller list. Interest in it began to perk up around mid-February, said Greg Sato, a store manager.

“Of the nonfiction books lately that seems to be the one that people are asking about the most,” Mr. Sato said. “I have pegged it in the same vein as ‘The Five People You Meet in Heaven’ or ‘The Shack.’ Like an Oprah book, but a little more religious or spiritual.”

Colton, who appears as a blond, round-faced little boy on the cover of the book, now plays the piano and trumpet, is fascinated by Greek mythology, listens to Christian rock and loves Nebraska football.

Telling his story matter-of-factly, Colton said he was pleased that people were finding the story inspirational.

“People are getting blessed, and they’re going to have healing from their hurts,” he said. “I’m happy for that.”

Books such as Harry Potter, The Book Thief or The Hunger Games have crossed the traditional lines between teen and adult fiction, something some book publishing literary types say is a bit of a trend.

Jamie Broadhurst, vice-president of marketing at Raincoast Books, said that 10 years of publishing Harry Potter really showed him the blurring of the lines between young adult and adult fiction.

“Consumer and Book Publisher surveys showed that about 20 per cent of the audience for Harry Potter are adults who don’t have children,” Broadhurst said. “Raincoast and Bloomsbury went so far as to produce both children’s and adult covers, but we found in actual fact that adults were equally comfortable reading book with a ‘kids’ cover.’ Harry Potter showed that the strength of the story mattered a whole lot more than preset genre labels.”

Vancouver’s Melanie Jackson, who writes young-adult novels, says there isn’t that much difference between young-adult fiction and adult fiction.

“I think young-adult fiction is getting to be more popular, but I don’t think that’s a new thing, I think that’s the way things used to be,” Jackson said. “The crowd that’s reading Twilight, I’m guessing it’s mostly schoolgirls, young women. Those same groups of people were just mad about Gone with the Wind, there was a total frenzy. There’s also Robert Louis Stevenson writing really bloodthirsty books – Treasure Island is full of murderous intents and plans.”

Phyllis Simon, founder and co-owner of Kidsbooks, names The Hunger Games series as one that appeals to all ages. The series is about a future dystopia in which people fight each other to the death while others watch.

“It’s kind of disturbing, it’s got its moments, but it’s very popular, and very compelling,” Simon said, adding that the brevity of young-adult fiction is also attractive. “You get a great read in 200 pages – you don’t have to plow through 500 pages.”

Teen fiction is more focused on storytelling, which makes it appealing, said Andrew Wooldridge, publisher at Orca Books, a Victoria-based company that puts out about 70 books each year, many of which are sold in schools.

“A lot of adult literary fiction is focused on characterization and plot and literary techniques, while teen fiction is mostly straight-ahead storytelling, and it seems to me that people find that appealing,” Wooldridge said.

“The lines are definitely blurring. A lot of the adults I know are reading teen fiction now. I think it’s becoming more sophisticated, but my theory is that it’s more focused on the story than adult fiction can be.”

Jackson said the same plot devices work in young-adult fiction that do in adult fiction, or even in Alfred Hitchcock films.

“You just apply it to someone who’s 14, as opposed to someone who’s 40,” she said.

In her book Fast Slide, protagonist Clay Gibson works at a North Vancouver water park, where’s he’s framed for a theft. His anger-management problem doesn’t help the situation when there is a death by drowning on a high-thrill slide at the park.

“No one believes him and it hasn’t helped that he’s lost his temper earlier on,” Jackson said. “It’s always more exciting when a protagonist witnesses something and no one believes them.”

Fast Slide was named a Best of 2010 book by Resource Links magazine – for book publishing companies.

In her other recent book No Way Out, the main character, 15-year-old Sam Jellicoe, is sent against his wishes to live with his mother and new stepfather in Winnipeg. He’s in a department store when a gunman takes hostages, locks the doors and shuts off all the power.

“He has to figure a way out and stay safe,” Jackson said. “He’s on his own and no one can help him.

“You have to isolate the young person and have them facing things like Jim does in Treasure Island, dealing with Long John Silver.”

The Book Thief by Markus Zusak is marketed as a teen book, but it is also popular among adults with its Kurt Vonnegut-like style and adult subject: the Holocaust.

The book is narrated by Death – who makes asides every now and again – as the story tackles one of man’s darkest subjects through the eyes of an orphaned young girl. Published in 2005, The Book Thief has won numerous awards and was a New York Times No. 1 bestseller.

Some popular authors – notably Alice Hoffman and Annabel Lyon – move between genres, writing some books for teens and others for adults.

Jackson says the most essential thing to do when self-publishing or writing for teenagers and young adults is to get rid of all the adults as soon as possible.

“My favourite book when I was a kid was called Swallows and Amazons by Arthur Ransome,” she said.

“He had these kids living on an island, and the mother has left them on their own. They pretended to be pirates, but they also had to deal with real-life criminals.

“He handily got rid of all the adults, so it was the kids against the world.”

Stories such as those Charles Dickens wrote about orphans use this same strategy.

“There are no adults to help them, and you feel their terror, but if they were protected you wouldn’t read the book,” Jackson said.

Jackson’s two recent books are also designed for “reluctant” readers, and particularly boys.

“They would appeal to reluctant readers, but if you look back to the Maltese Falcon, by Dashiell Hammett, it’s very sparely written. The guy didn’t use long words – same with Hemingway, really,” Jackson said. “Those writers in the ’20s and ’30s, that’s how they wrote mysteries, because you can fashion an atmosphere of suspense very well when the writing is kind of terse.”

Her books are also short, and good versus evil is clearly delineated. Jackson said this type of book can get kids interested in reading, and that with practice their skills will become more sophisticated.

“Once they read enough they will grow up a bit and be able to read stories by someone like Alice Munro, where things aren’t so black and white and every character is kind of sketchy,” she said. “You’re not really positive what to think, but that’s for much more sophisticated readers.”

Wooldridge said Orca’s Rapid Read series, which is intended for adults reading at a low level, has gone back the other way.

“It’s become very popular in high school because they’re nice, straight-ahead quick novels,” he said.

Meanwhile christian book publishers have also had success – and sold more than one million copies – with their series Orca Soundings, for teens who are reading below grade level.

“We’ve got established Canadian authors who are writing good short novels. Instead of dumbing down books for kids who aren’t reading well, we try to focus on good stories told by strong authors, and they’ve been hugely successful.”

Bargain hunters were out in force this weekend as liquidation sales began at 200 Borders locations slated to close as part of the company’s bankruptcy filing.

The affected stores — about one-third of the bookseller’s locations — are expected to close by the end of April. Twenty-one underperforming stores in Southern California will be shut, including stores in Sherman Oaks, Century City, Long Beach and Orange.

Huge “store closing” and “everything must go” posters covered the windows at Borders in Pasadena and Glendale, which were bustling with customers Sunday. Many sections were already picked over, including from christian book publishers, with shelves left bare and items such as notebooks, journals and photo albums strewn about.

Most items were discounted 20% to 40%, with markdowns expected to increase in coming weeks.

“As long as there’s a deal, I’m going to take advantage of it,” said Jordan Francke, 27, who was checking out the games section at the Glendale store.

“It’s just the changing landscape of literature these days. It’s all electronic,” Francke, a children’s book publishers and television schedule coordinator, said of the chain’s bankruptcy. “I can only imagine it’s a struggle for a place like Borders to stay relevant.”

That’s a harsh reality for regular customers such as Kathleen O’Reilly, 52, who was at the Pasadena Borders carrying a shopping basket laden with discounted stationery and magazines.

The Pasadena resident said she was “old school” and enjoyed seeing and touching books before making a purchase. She said she would miss visiting the store with her teenage daughter.

“I spend several days a week here,” said O’Reilly, a self-publishing counselor at a high school. “I actually debated whether I even wanted to come because I was worried I’d be too upset to see the store torn apart.”

Business is expected to continue as usual on the company’s website and at stores that aren’t closing.

After a slew of competitive blunders and missteps in the last decade, Borders Group Inc. found itself in trouble and had to cut staff, shut stores and shake up its top management.

Critics said the company botched its move into the book publisher digital age, causing sales and earnings to plummet. At the same time, mass merchants including Wal-Mart Stores Inc. and Target Corp. became major players in the book-selling market, often offering lower prices than Borders and rival Barnes & Noble Inc.

But Borders maintains it isn’t done for good. In a letter e-mailed to customers and posted on the company’s website last week, Borders President Mike Edwards said the company hoped to emerge from Chapter 11 as “the destination of choice.”

About 6,000 of the chain’s roughly 19,000 workers will be laid off as part of the closures. Among them is Rich Kilbury, a christian book publisher, who was pushing a cart stacked high with books at the Pasadena location Sunday.

“It’s depressing, but we kind of saw it coming,” he said. “Business had dropped off.”

The promise of discounts attracted Victoria Rose to the Pasadena store, where she was browsing mystery and thriller books. The 60-year-old high school English teacher said she was never a regular customer because she could find a better selection and lower prices elsewhere.

“I rarely come here,” she said. “Between Amazon and Vroman’s, I’m well-taken care of.”

Blogger starts a blog. Blogger solicits photos or texts or emails. Blogger gets a book deal. That formula has been wildly successful for the last few years, but is showing signs of market saturation.

There were roughly 100 book deals involving blogs or Internet memes last year according to Book Publisher’s Marketplace.

Christopher Weingarten, 31, was one of them. A year ago, he decided to start a blog about dogs, dressed as hipsters. He gets readers to submit photos and attaches a witty caption.

Over three million hits and thousands of submissions later, he just recently landed a book deal, with the book hitting bookstores in July. While the freelance music writer discloses that his book deal was not six-figures, it was “certainly more than the $3,000 advance I got for doing a book about music.”

Blog-to-book deals have also changed the humor genre in general. “Now if you’re funny, you start a blog or a Twitter feed, and cultivate an audience that way and a publisher finds you,” says Patrick Mulligan, Senior Editor at Gotham Books, an imprint of Penguin, which specializes in blog-to-book deals.

One of Gotham’s blog-to-books is “Texts From Last Night”, which features random and funny texts sent from submitters, who are typically in a drunken stupor when texting. The blog on which it is based gets around four million page views a day. The book is in its sixth printing. The blog co-founders say the website brought in about one million dollars in revenue last year, and it’s now being converted into a TV show.

They bristle at the notion that they’re taking other peoples’ contributions and running away with the money from an ebook publishing book deal.

Usually publishers require bloggers to put in at least 70 percent new content into the books and often try to market them to a new audience.

“You can’t just sort of repackage the greatest hits on a website,” says Megan Thompson, Senior Literary Agent with LJK Literary Management which represents a number of blog-to-book authors, including the people behind “Geek Dad”, and “Black Heels to Tractor Wheels.” “Why would someone buy the cow if they can get the milk for free?” she says.

Penguin’s Gotham Books was able to find a new audience with the popular LOLcat series. “It’s 50 year old women from the midwest who have ten cats who are buying it,” says Mulligan. “When you make something a book and take it off the Internet, people who never stumble upon this website find it in book form.”

Some overnight authors are commanding lucrative deals, even if it isn’t as frequent as it once was. “When people were going crazy for this stuff, we got into really competitive auctions where people were spending into the mid six-figures for some of these books,” says Mulligan. “That just becomes tough for book publishers to make money.”

Still, the publishing industry is mindful that the genre has some staying power.

“It’s what happens in publishing,” Mulligan says. “Something becomes hot, it becomes over-published, and then it wanes, and then there will be this awesome new blog in 2012, and we’ll go crazy again for it.”

Borders Group Inc may find that filing for bankruptcy is the next plot turn in its many-chaptered struggle to survive.

Bankruptcy court could push the second-largest bookstore chain, its lenders and book publishers to make sacrifices and give the company a chance to keep going. As it stands now, book publishing sources see little progress in financial talks with lenders, and the company continues to need cash.

Borders President Mike Edwards said on Thursday in a statement announcing a conditional credit agreement with GE Capital that while refinancing is preferred, restructuring in court — referring to a bankruptcy filing — is a possibility it is considering.

Borders spokeswoman Mary Davis declined to comment beyond that statement.

The standoff comes after a year in which Borders has cut costs, refinanced and brought in new investors to cope with shriveling sales and market share.

Now the company has stopped payment to some vendors and even asked its most important suppliers — the book publishers — essentially to loan it the money due for books shipped months ago.

Only with those concessions by book publishers as well as other new landlord and vendor financing agreements will the company’s bank replace a maturing credit line.

“Bankruptcy is a wonderful tool for taking the majority of interests and implementing a plan that may be over the objections of a minority of interests,” said Michael Epstein, a managing partner at chess restructuring advisory firm CRG Partners who is not involved in the situation.

The company would be able to close unprofitable stores more easily and book publishers would begin getting paid again in most cases for any products shipped in bankruptcy, he said.

On the other hand, he cautioned, the company would need to have a plan for the changes it wants to ensure that it closes the right stores before the clock runs out.

Since 2005, bankruptcy law has allowed only about 9 months for retailers to easily close stores — a deadline many industry players say is one of the reasons why Circuit City ended up quickly liquidating its assets in bankruptcy.

In a bankruptcy restructuring, the company will likely not be obligated to pay christian book publishers for the books it shipped before the bankruptcy filing, according to Ken Simon, a managing director at Loughlin Meghji restructuring advisory firm who is not involved in the matter.

If the restructuring stays out of court, the vendors will have to be paid back in full or agree to a cut.

“The lack of liquidity is the reason why companies have to go into bankruptcy,” Simon said.