Here we go! Sony has revealed that it has sold 300,000 of its digital e-book Reader globally since the device was launched in October 2006 and that it is working on a wireless version of the product to rival Amazon.com’s Kindle. Sony’s unit retails for $300, which, in my opinion, is still too high, but [...]
I picked this up from Publisher’s Weekly this morning:
“Marcella Edwards at PFD has secured a new deal for William Trevor in the UK and the US. Rights for a new novel and a long-awaited collection of stories from one of Ireland’s most celebrated writers have been sold to Tony Lacey at Penguin UK and to [...]
Peter Matthiessen won the National Book Award in the fiction category for Shadow Country. “I had a hard time,” he said in his acceptance speech, “persuading people that fiction was my natural thing, not nonfiction.” Alexander Hemon’s The Lazarus Project and Marilynne Robinson’s Home were front-runners. Salvatore Scibona’s The End, a debut novel published by [...]
I met Michael in Los Angeles when my firm consulted on his retirement plan. I was an actuary while Michael was in many ways a scientist himself, so to a degree we hit it off. As much as anything else, he was an idea man—the world interested him and he did his best to figure [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
The finalists in the fiction category offered a mixture of veterans and new authors. The five nominees include Home, the third novel by Marilynne Robinson, a Pulitzer Prize-winner for her 2004 novel “Gilead”; Shadow Country, by Peter Matthiessen, a founder of the Paris Review; and The Lazarus Project, by the Bosnian author Aleksandar Hemon. They [...]
The White Tiger, a debut novel by Aravind Adiga has won the 2008 Man Booker prize and with it the £50,000 prize. The novel is described as a ‘compelling, angry and darkly humorous’ novel about a man’s journey from Indian village life to entrepreneurial success. It was described by one reviewer as an ‘unadorned portrait’ [...]
Obviously, I was wrong. I had my money on Amos Oz, but that’s all right—I didn’t actually place the bet anyway. As it happened, according to Ladbrokes, there was a flurry of last minute wagers that made Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio the favorite to win. Makes one wonder whether or not word leaked since Le [...]
