Release Date - November 1, 2008
My review of this book is a balancing act. As I read the first section of the book—which amounts to half—I found myself very close to putting it down and going on to something else. But I have a hard and fast to rule I do my best to live [...]
As the editor of a book review blog, I read and review many, many books—really, the blog is only a couple of months old, I’ve been reading advance galleys and once the books are actually released, I WILL be publishing my reviews. But that’s not what I want to talk about today, anyway. Rather, I [...]
Today Google reached an out-of-court settlement in a law suit filed by the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers by agreeing to pay $125 million. The three parties said it would “dramatically expand access” to books in the US, particularly those that are still in–copyright, but are out of print. Of the $125 [...]
Really, I don’t want to start a weekly Kindle update, but Oprah forced me to do this week’s addition to the many posts I’ve already done concerning Amazon’s e-reader. For it seems that Ms. Winfrey has decided that the Kindle is her new favorite thing and that we all should have one. Obviously, Amazon agrees [...]
In the city of St. Gallen, Switzerland, population around 160,000, the main tourist attraction is the Abbey of St. Gall. It’s library contains books dating back to the 9th century. It is one of the most valuable collections of handwritten medieval manuscripts in the world. And now, thanks in part to a $1 million grant [...]
Amazon reported earnings today and, for those financial buffs out there, its third quarter results were far less dazzling than second quarter—in other words, even the mammoth e-tailer is feeling the effects of the slow economy.
More to my interest, though, was their statement that Kindle2 will not be released in 2008, but rather 2009, at [...]
Today marks the release of The Widows of Eastwick by John Updike, a book that, to put it kindly, should never have seen the light of day. What was he thinking? What was Knopf thinking in printing 100,000 of them? Who in the world cares what happened to the witches anyway? To tell us that [...]
I love that line. It’s a quote attributed to Anne-Solange Noble, the foreign-rights director at Gallimard in France, who was speaking about the dearth of translated works available to the American reader. The entire quote is “American publishers are depriving the American readership of the cultural diversity through translation to which they are entitled. It [...]
But the real question is, do the publishers get it? In an October 14, speech at the Frankfurt Book Fair, Paul Coelho claimed that giving away digital versions of a book on the Internet could actually boost sales rather than damage them. According to Coelho, people who read a few pages online, tire quickly of [...]
Sarah Butler of the UK’s Bookseller.com reported today that Amazon won’t be launching the UK version of Kindle until sometime next year. The problem seems to be attempts to sign up Wi-Fi partners. If those of us in the US put two and two together, though, my guess is that the Kindle released in the [...]
