For the 15th annual edition, the Advisory Board of Reading Group Choices selected Julia Older's award-winning seventeenth century saga This Desired Place; The Isles of Shoals as a featured novel in both its 2009 print catalog and online website for book clubs.

The guidebook is distributed to 16,000 libraries and bookstores across the country as well as to an additional 6,000 reading group subscribers and festival participants.

Entries for book recommendations include summaries of each novel and nonfiction book, biographies of the authors and a series of starter questions that reader groups can use to prompt discussions.

The print catalog is scheduled for distribution in September. The online entry for This Desired Place is already available by title through a search box on the website at www.ReadingGroupChoices.com.

Mary Russell, director of the Center for the Book at the New Hampshire State Library, featured Highboy as "Book of the Week" earlier this August. The village mystery novel is part of the Hugh Quint series of New England cozies by Steve Sherman.

Bowker, publisher of bibliographic management and its comprehensive Books in Print catalog, reports that the number of novels published in this country increased 17% in 2007 over the previous year to a total of 50,071 new fiction titles. Adult fiction remains one of the dominant categories in publishing.

Total number of books increased to 276,649 new titles and editions published in the U.S. last year. The greatest increase came from on-demand and short-print run books — 134,773 titles. With the new ingenious print-and-bind machines, independent publishers and, increasingly, bookstores can turn manuscripts into finished books in a single pass through one of these all-in-one machines.

Now publishers can produce a single copy or thousands of copies at a time according to customer requests "on demand." This saves warehouse inventory and accompanying costs, not to mention grinding up overprinted, unsold, returned copies.