I wouldn’t be surprised to find book-publishing pundits walking the streets of Manhattan carrying signs proclaiming “The End Is Near!” Sales in bookstores are down, heads at publishing houses are rolling, Borders is on the rocks and may not survive, Amazon.com continues to capture market share—its Kindle appears to be the first e-reader to get Read more…
Apparently Amazon will announce a new version of their popular e-reader, the Kindle, in New York on Monday, February 9th. What to look for? • A better black and white screen. Color will have to wait for another edition, but the buzz says the greyscale images will be better. Greyscale is how black and white Read more…
“New technologies have an extraordinary potential, if used to favor understanding and human solidarity.” —Benedict XVI via video on the Vatican’s new YouTube channel. The Pope on YouTube? Amazing. I wonder how this new media will change the message the Catholic Church as been delivering for over 2,000 years. Change the message you ask? Yep. Read more…
I stayed in a motel in San Simeon—home of the opulent Hearst Castle—over Christmas. In the motel lobby are two full bookcases. My kind of place. (By the way, the room was $36 a night for a large, ocean-view room. I went to sleep listening to the relaxing sounds of the surf. E-mail me and I’ll tell Read more…
I recently finished reading True Story: Murder, Memoir, Mea Culpa, a book by Michael Finkel, who was fired from the NYT Magazine for falsifying a story. It’s both his memoir of the actions that lead to his dismissal and the story of a man named Longo who killed his family. When Longo fled to Mexico after terminating his Read more…
My son, Josh, who owns American West Books, a wholesaler of books to the warehouse clubs and book trade and I are having dinner with some people from Andrews McMeel Publishing tonight. (We are in Bentonville, Arkansas for a Sam’s Club event.) I wanted to bone up on AMP and so went to check out their website. Read more…
A recent act of Congress has delivered a huge headache to publishers, libraries, schools and many retailers including bookstores—both new and used—antique stores, thrift stores, and cataloguers. The act, the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act, is a result of high lead content found in some imported toys and is aimed at protecting children under 12. Read more…
As part of their huge push on I Can Make You Thin by Paul McKenna, Sterling (owned by Barnes & Noble) dressed staff members in red tee shirts and sent them into the streets of New York. They handed out 25,000 tape measures and postcards. The staffers came from all departments of the company and Read more…
According to Publishers Weekly Daily, OverDrive, a company that provides the infrastructure for the delivery of digital content reports a 76 percent increase in library digital checkouts in 2008. And what titles ranked highest? The top three were the young adult novels of Stephanie Meyer, Twilight, Eclipse and New Moon. What does that tell us Read more…
In his column of January 2nd, New York Times columnist David Brooks writes of the annual Sidney Awards given to recognize some of the best in long-form journalism. One of this year’s awards went to “Professor X,” who, writing in The Atlantic, decried his plight teaching college students today. Brooks quotes the article in which the Read more…