This week the publishing industry has been rocked by HMH laying off more staff, Random’s restructuring, and Penguin’s announcement of salary freezes for those earning over $50,000. But I looked outside this morning, and the truth is that the sky is not falling. In fact, I’m beginning to believe the days are dawning more brightly.
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 [...]
Last week a Publisher’s Weekly report that Harcourt Houghton Mifflin (HMH) had put a freeze on acquiring new books sent a tremor through the book world. But as the matter has begun to shake out, it seems the report was a bit overblown—or, at least that’s what is being heard from the folks at HMH.
Assuming all goes according to plan today and tonight, tomorrow the world will wake to the glorious dawning of a new America. The monstrosity of the Bush administration that has crippled this nation will be coming to an end, and a new, enlightened era will be about to begin. In the eyes of the world [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
