Borders is reported to be near to swinging a deal to stay alive, according to a Business Week/Bloomberg report by Chris Burritt and Matt Townsend. According to the report, issued at 4:30 Tuesday afternoon, the company is said to be “close to arranging financing that…
The imminent release of the Apple iPad (on April 3rd) is leading to more and more stories about it — such as this New York Post report that says “Apple’s manufacturing partners now expect to ship 2.5 million iPads between March-May, considerably ahead of her…
French publishing giant Gallimard “and two other French publishers plan to sue Google for scanning books without prior permission,” according to a report by Barbara Casassus for The Bookseller — a report, by the way, that doesn’t bother to say who those other two publishers…
Government forces in Iran appear to be cracking down on bloggers. A report by Hamid Tehrani at Global Voices online says, The Iranian state-run news website, Irna [fa] and ultra conservative newspaper Keyhan [fa] announced this month that members of Iran Proxy, a group fighting…
In a follow-up to this bizarre report on MobyLives about Melville House author, Raj Patel (Stuffed and Starved), being declared the messiah by followers of the New Age religious sect Share International, the Guardian reports here that despite Patel’s emphatic denial on his website, followers…
The “final countdown” has begun for Borders, says Jim Milliot in a Publishers Weekly report, referring to the fact that it’s time for the company “to repay or renegotiate the $42.5 million loan due April 1 to its largest shareholder, William Ackerman.” The company has…
“What’s so hard to understand about Random House‘s strategy” concerning Amazon and the iPad, asks Mike Shatzkin in a commentary on his Idealog blog. As many have observed (including MobyLives, such as here), Random is the only one of the Big Six who have opted…
A Michael Cader report at Publishers Markeplace discusses yet another aspect of the book biz that’s going to change, and change rapidly, thanks to Apple and Amazon and the already-fabled agency system of book pricing: It’s going to thin out the vast muddle of wholesales…
A group of Scottish booksellers has filed a complaint with the government’s Office of Fair Trading against Amazon for “bullying” them out of business, according to a report by Mike Merritt for The Scotsman. Many of the shops also sell books through Amazon’s UK version…
This post on the Huffington Post by Katla McGlynn is a wonderfully bizarre collection of children’s book covers aptly headlined, “The Creepiest Children’s Books Ever.” Perhaps The Long Journey of Mr. Poop is the weirdest, but it’s got some pretty stiff competition….
In this post at The Daily Beast, education expert Diane Ravitch reports on the victory of Texas conservatives in the battle over textbooks in the public school: “The conservative majority of the Texas State Board of Education adopted new guidelines for social-studies textbooks that reflect…
Whether or not the mysterious sinking of a South Korean military vessel on Friday had anything to do with North Korea, the world should turn its attention to the possibility that the death of Kim Jung Il could mean an increased likelihood of more military…
This article in the Boston Globe reports that, “a team of scholars at Germany’s Berlin-Brandenberg Academy of Sciences will complete the first phase of what will ultimately be an unprecedented, two-decade effort to throw light on the origins of the Koran.” The international project, called…
This year’s winner of the Oddest Book Title prize — aka the Diagram Prize — has been announced — its the “splendidly eccentric” Crocheting Adventures with Hyperbolic Planes, by Dr. Daina Taimina, according to a Guardian report by Charlotte Higgins. She says it barely beat…
If you were one of the gazillions of people who loved reading Curious George books as a kid, you may have wondered “why the monkey hero of the ‘Curious George’ children’s books is so fond of travel, so prone to mischief, yet always narrowly escapes…
A few months back, the race for the revered position as Professor of Poetry at Oxford University turned into an ugly brawl, whereby a poet (Derek Walcott) known in America for some prominent instances of sexual harassment ran against another poet (Ruth Padel) who, after…
Gadget Lab’s current column at Wired suggests that the new, inexpensive Kobo e-Reader is the real Kindle-killer, at a mere $150, not the iPad: “The bare-bones reader looks very similar to the Kindle, but it is just over half the price. You get access to…
“Return with me now to the lusty days of yore,” writes Ron Rosenbaum in his newest Slate column … … when engagé public intellectuals battled it out over Trotskyism, anarcho-syndicalism, and just who betrayed whom in the bloody streets of Catalonia during the Spanish Civil…
Kenan Malik‘s From Fatwa to Jihad: The Rushdie Affair and its Aftermath (forthcoming in June from Melville House) has been longlisted for the George Orwell Book Prize. The award is “the pre-eminent British prize for political writing” that is “judged to have best achieved George…
“For decades, Arabic fiction was associated with the name of one man: Naguib Mahfouz, winner of the 1988 Nobel Prize for literature,” observes Hamza Hendawi in an Associated Press wire story. Now, “Nearly four years after his death, his native Egypt is experiencing an unprecedented…
A surprising report by Gerrit Wiesmann in the Financial Times says, “Random House, the world’s largest book publisher by sales, could keep its books from Apple’s iPad when it goes on sale next month, as the Bertelsmann unit fears the effects of the tablet device on…
And Agence France Presse report says that “Japan‘s top book publishers Wednesday formed an alliance to harness the growing e-book market as Amazon’s Kindle and e-book readers by Sony and other companies are set to battle for market share.” The Electronic Book Publishers Association of…
Ai, the National Book Award winning poet who was born Florence Anthony but changed her name to the Japanese word for “love,” has died of natural causes at the age of 62, according to a Los Angeles Times report by Carolyn Kellogg. The poet, who…
In this Tacoma Weekly report, Matt Nagle says cookin’ the books isn’t so bad because this April Fools’ Day, “University of Puget Sound’s (UPS) Collins Memorial Library celebrates the marriage of reading and eating at the library’s fourth annual Edible Books Festival.” For the past…
Today is the birthday of Gloria Steinem, feminist, activist, writer and founder of Ms. Magazine, who was born this day in Toledo, Ohio in 1934. Her books include Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions, Moving Beyond Words, and Revolution From Within: A Book of Self-Esteem which…
Not that Amazon.com seems to give a damn — if it did, it would be trying to counter a sensational string of wickedly bad press that’s been going on for months now — but it seems that even when the behemoth from Seattle behaves for…
“Ebook growth continues to accelerate; how long can this go on?” asks Mike Shatzkin in a commentary on his always-interesting Idealog.com. First, a look at the math: The IDPF’s figures for January show nearly a 4-fold increase in ebook sales over the prior January. Recent reports suggests…
“Saudi poet Aydah Al Aarawi Al Jahani is being embraced as a hero by women and poets alike not only in the Arab world but further afield because she refuses to quit the highly popular Abu Dhabi TV show ‘The Million’s Poet’ despite pressure from…
England has an ambitious plan afoot to modernize their public libraries. According to this report in the Independent, the plan proposes: “Library-goers should have the right to order any book —- including out-of-print editions —- and free access to e-books under a new plan for…
Today is the birthday of Lawrence Ferlinghetti, born this day in in Yonkers, New York, in 1919. Ferlinghetti was one of the founding poets of the Beat movement in San Francisco in the 1950′s, and an important figure in American letters in his role as…
