To: All Macmillan authors/illustrators and the literary agent community From: John Sargent This past Thursday I met with Amazon in Seattle. I gave them our proposal for new terms of sale for e books under the agency model which will become effective in early March.…
MobyLives has filed numerous reports on how the word “negotiation” is not in the lexicon of the folks at Amazon, and how disagreeing with the behemoth from Seattle often leads to a thuggish response — and how that response is a dangerous kind of censorship.…
Things continue to look bad for Borders: According to a report by Paula Gardner at AnnArbor.com, yesterday morning an email from Shereen Solaiman, senior v.p. of human resources, announced the company was “moving forward with the unfortunate but necessary step of reducing our payroll by…
Several major British writers, including J.K. Rowling and Philip Pullman, are opting out of the Google Book Settlement, reports a Times of London story by Judith Evans. Pullman’s agent, Caradoc King, tells the Times, “Why should we have to do this because Google decided to…
Howard Zinn, historian, activist, professor, and author of one of the most popular historical surveys ever written about American history, A People’s History of the United States, which “had for its heroes not the Founding Fathers — many of them slaveholders and deeply attached to…
Jerome David “J. D.” Salinger, famous for writing just a few, slim but beloved books in a few years followed by decades of reclusive, cantankerous silence, died yesterday at his home in Cornish, Vermont at the age of 91. Accorrding to a New York Times…
“It takes six people to lift it,” according to this report in the UK Guardian, “yet the splendid Klencke Atlas, presented to Charles II on his restoration and now 350 years old, has never been publicly displayed with its pages open.” That oversight will be…
Now it can be told — you think the mega-smooth launch of the iPad was another example of that mercilessly controlled Apple magic? Not according to this report from The Onion: CUPERTINO, CA—Claiming that he completely forgot about the much-hyped electronic device until the last…
Yesterday, Julia and Malcolm Wright, representing the estate of Richard Wright, author of Native Son, repeated their opposition to the Google Book Settlement. Today, Thursday, January 28, is the deadline for authors to opt out of the settlement. According to a New York Times report…
Well, it finally happened: Steve Jobs announced Apple‘s new e-reader, the iPad, after a typical Apple roll-out in which it seemed there was no escape from the news industry’s willingness to shill for the behemoth from Cupertino. You can read all about the new device,…
Yet another publisher is in coming under fire for depicting white characters on the cover of a book about black people. As Rocco Staino reports in a School Library Journal story, “Little Brown Books for Young Readers is changing the covers on Trenton Lee Stewart’s…
After a complaint from a parent over the way the Merriam Webster dictionary defined “oral sex,” the Menifee Union School District in Southern California has pulled the book from its classrooms and libraries. According to a report from the local newspaper, the Press-Enterprise, which does…
Surprisingly not the same thing! I figured everyone in the blogosphere (and elsewhere) is going to be chatting up the iPad (we certainly are), so I’m going to step back for a minute and talk about a different kind of end: the bookend. Apparently these…
Yesterday, a MobyLives story asked, “Is Borders secertly in trouble?” A press release from the company later in the day may have confirmed that, well, yes it is: The release announced that “Ron Marshall has resigned as President, Chief Executive Officer and a Director of…
Last week The New York Times announced the installation of a metered pay-wall for its website beginning in 2011, and we asked here what precisely this might mean. Though it’s difficult to say with any assurance, we wrote that it’s indeed possible for the Times…
Well everyone, get excited! Why? Because tonight Melville House kicks off our “Publishing in the Age of Blah Blah Blah” series with an absolutely amazing group of authors! Starting at 7, Brooklyn authors will discuss… e-books! We’ll have John Wray, Lev Grossman, Heidi Julavits, Myla…
Today is the birthday of mathematician, photographer, and writer Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, aka Lewis Carroll, born in Cheshire, England in 1832. Carroll is most widely known for his children’s stories Alice in Wonderland, and Through the Looking-Glass—about a young girl Alice’s adventures in fairyland. Alice…
Poor Aldous Huxley. After The Doors of Perception, nobody really wanted to talk about the books, exactly ….
American publishers have been nervous about the status of the country’s second biggest bookselling chain, Borders, for quite a while, a worry that intensified after the recently severed British branch went bankrupt. Still, it’s been heartening to see that the chain has held on, paid…
The great literary review magazine the London Review of Books — better known as the LRB — “has run up mountainous debts of £27m,” or about $44 million, reports Richard Brooks in a Times of London story. Brooks says the debts are “up from £23.2m…
A report in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram asks, “What do the authors of the children’s book Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? and a 2008 book called Ethical Marxism: The Categorical Imperative of Liberation have in common?” Answer: They are both named Bill…
Being portrayed in a Hollywood movie by a big star is a certain kind of immortality. So I guess Allen Ginsberg officially rests with the immortals now. Opening this week at the Sundance Film Festival, is the film Howl, which tells the story of Ginsberg’s…
In this story at Haaretz, reporter Ofer Aderet talks with “the last person alive who knew Kafka personally”: 106-year-old Alice Herz-Sommer. She lives alone in a small apartment in London, is remarkably healthy, and movingly eloquent in discussing her memories — of surviving the Holocaust…
Following up on an earlier Moby story: The folks at Bloomsbury may keep making the same disgusting error over and over, but at least they’ve improved on their response time to public outcry about it: A story in Publishers Weekly by John A. Sellers reports…
Admit it: The kind of shorthand being used in text messaging that used to make you — Mr. and Ms. Literary Type Person — cringe is now something you are using less and less begrudgingly. You’ve actually texted that person waiting for you in the…
“I’m quite prepared to be entirely forgotten…†So said W. Somerset Maugham near the end of his life. And if he hasn’t been “entirely†forgotten -— his most popular titles have never been out of print —- the precipitous eclipse of his reputation might not…
Bestselling thriller writer Tess Gerritsen was intrigued when she noticed stories about an Attributor study in which “publishing losses from illegal downloads are estimated to be three billion dollars” (see the earlier MobyLives report). So, as she explains in this post on her website, she…
In the US, they put cartoon characters and movie stars on the postage stamps. Sigh. In Australia, they put writers on their stamps! As this story from the Sydney Morning Herald reports, As one of those increasingly rare letter writers who eschews email, David Malouf…
Some just released results from the Book Industry Study Group (BSIG) survey of “consumer attitudes toward e-book reading†confirm what some of America’s largest publishers have predicted and feared: that a majority of e-book users will currently choose a lower priced e-book over its print…
The following post by Edward Jay Epstein, author of the forthcoming The Hollywood Economist: The Hidden Financial Reality Behind the Movies (available from Melville House on February 23rd), is the fifth in a series leading up to publication of the book. You can read more…
