By Jessica Annde D. Hermosa, BusinessWorld | 09/01/2009 12:20 AM MANILA - The global economic downturn has not spared the domestic book industry, hitting sales and investment plans and limiting the production of new titles, industry officials said. Limits posed by the local market are also to blame for the industry’s laggard performance, they added. But a plan to award grants to authors and recommendations to focus on foreign markets and improve the education system could pull the sector out of its rut, National Book Development Board officials said. "This year, there are almost no expansions except for a few stores in the new malls. Companies are focusing on training and retooling to prepare for the recovery," Jose Paolo M. Sibal, Philippine Book Sellers Association president, said in a telephone interview on Friday. Publishers, likewise, have hesitated from growing their businesses with only one firm availing of incentives to import more printing equipment this year,...

BY Danton Remoto Lodestar Art & Culture section Philippine Star December 29, 2008 "Read to lead” is a soundbite that we hear more often these days. Happily for us, the National Book Development Board (NBDB), the government agency tasked with doing this, is working hard and fast to make sure that our people — especially the young and those glued to their YouTubes — would also find the time to read. But words need not be fixed just on the page. The NBDB, under the inspired leadership of executive director Andrea Pasion-Flores, has taken the act of reading into the 21st century. Proof number 1: their “Tulaan sa Tren” project in the LRT Line 2 station that runs from Recto in Manila to Santolan in Marikina. It is a take-off of the poems read and posted at the Tube (subway) of London, but who cares? In partnership with the Optical Media Board and the Book Development Association of the Philippines, the NBDB chose poems from some of the country’s best writers, asked a host of celebri...