“The Obama administration is seeking to compel a writer to testify about his confidential sources for a 2006 book about the Central Intelligence Agency, a rare step that was authorized by Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr.,” according to a report by Charlie Savage in…
A GalleyCat item by Jason Boog points us to a beta page at Amazon that shows the most popular passages being highlighted by readers of Kindle editions. As Amazon explains at the page, “The Amazon Kindle, Kindle for iPhone and Kindle for iPad each provide…
Jake Grovum of Stateline.org takes a comprehensive look at the “Amazon tax” situation in this thoughtful essay. As Grovum notes, the bottom line is that despite the fact that “shopping online can be a handy way to avoid paying sales tax on books, CDs and…
Decorate! Here’s the thing about real books. If you don’t like one, you don’t just throw it away (or, in digital speak, delete it). You make do. It can be a door-stopper, a gift to a friend you don’t particularly like, or its pages can…
A report at the BusinessInsider details how “Amazon has very successfully transitioned away from being a site for just buying books, movies, or music.” In fact, “In its last quarter, Amazon’s sales from other goods, like electronics, was greater than its sales from media like…
Do we really need to write about this? No!!! But it’s just so freaky, especially with that picture, that we will: USA Today reports here this breaking news, “The mother-daughter duo of Mary Higgins Clark and Carol Higgins Clark has three spots in the Top…
Apple iPad infatuation? Cory Doctorow isn’t having any of it. In a rip-snorting commentary for Publishers Weekly, he says Here’s what most mainstream press reports so far haven’t told you. The iPad uses a DRM system called “code-signing” to limit which apps it can run.…
Despite rumors that have been circulating to the contrary — see the earlier MobyLives report — Heather Reisman, owner of Indigo Books & Music, Canada’s biggest book retailer, says she has no intention of selling the business. Reisman made the statement during an interview with…
Now you can take your library with you, without an e-reader! According to this post on the Inhabitat site, “If you’re not quite ready to donate excess texts or replace them with electronic versions, David Garcia Studio offers an innovative solution: Archive II, a circular…
You wouldn’t know it by looking at this five-sided, seemingly children’s-oriented, picture book, but it may hold the key to your early retirement. The book, The Clock Without a Face by Eli Horowitz, Mac Barnett, and Scott Teplin, from McSweeney’s, is a mystery-cum-interactive nationwide scavenger…
In case you missed it, as I did, last week was National Record-a-Thon week sponsored by Recording for the Blind & Dyslexic. According to this report in the Philadelphia Inquirer, “hundreds of volunteers across the country, spent several hours last week turning books – from…
As someone who works in publishing, I, like all of you readers, find myself going through multiple books a week, whether for business or pleasure. I’m one of those people that lives in a small New York apartment and still manages to fit into it…
Yes, that’s right: we will judge you. Well, we’ll judge your book trailers, which one might consider reflections of you (and your work), whether you’re an author, editor, agent, publicist–whoever! In order to take this judgment (what if I don’t win?!), you’ll probably want a…
The seriousness of Orlando Figes‘ folly continues to settle in in the UK, and more people seem to be trying to use the incident to prompt a serious reconsideration of the country’s libel laws. The latest is an editorial in the New Statesman by one…
Alice Miller, the psychologist whose 1981 book The Drama of the Gifted Child sold over one million copies, caused a sensation, and “changed the way people thought” about childhood, has died at the age of 87 at her home in Provence. Her death occurred on…
Forget the argument about which is qualitatively better — E Ink or LCD? — is reading on screens rather than paper bad for your eyes? As Nick Belton observes in a commentary on the New York Times Bits blog, “It turns out the answer isn’t…
The star book at the LA Times Book Festival’s Rare Book Round-Up was a garage sale special, bought for one dollar and appraised at the festival for $6,000, according to this report in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer‘s book blog. Brought to the Round-up’s booth at the…
Gawker tips us to a really unfortunate captioning job on the front page, no less, of the Washington Post, where they seem to think Malcolm X is the president of the United States ….
The shocking revelation that the late, mega-selling pop historian Stephen Ambrose committed “fraud on a massive scale” in his concoction of interviews with President Dwight D. Eisenhower isn’t getting much play in the American media — not as much play, say, as the story of…
Monday came and went without any striking new revelations of stupefyingly childish behavior by Orlando Figes, although there were two developments that were the opposite of a surprise: as this Financial Times story reveals, Figes is now officially on “sick leave” from his job at…
A report from a tech magazine in Taipei, Digitimes, says that as of March, manufacturers there are shipping more Nook Ereaders to Barnes & Noble than they are Kindles to Amazon. According to the report, “demand for nook was picking up,” and it “accounted for…
MobyLives reader Steve Mitchemore tips us off to a post by Pierre Joris saying that the story about the discovery of a previously unseen photograph of Arthur Rimbaud (see yesterday’s MobyLives report) is a hoax. According to Joris, the photos “are in fact the work…
The e-book has arrived in New Zealand. A story in the Dominon Post reports that Whitcoulls, one of New Zealand’s largest bookselling chains, will launch the country’s “first mainstream digital books offering,” making about two-million e-book titles available beginning next month. New Zealanders do not…
According to this “Quasi-Scientific” survey by New York Observer reporter Paul Young, it’s “tough to say.” He offers the following survey of last week’s New York Times bestseller list: Hardcover Fiction 1. Changes, by Jim Butcher (@longshotauthor); 19 following, 7593 followers, 762 listed, 527 tweets…
A series from awesome Canadian artist Kate Beaton. More after the jump.
The excrement is really hitting the fan for Orlando Figes in the wake of his confession on Friday that it wasn’t his wife who’d been writing nasty Amazon reviews of books by other historians, as he’d first claimed — it was him. (See the earlier…
A New Yorker magazine story by Richard Rayner reports that the late, popular historian Stephen Ambrose, author of Band of Brothers and numerous other bestsellers, appears to have lied about the thing that first made him famous: his supposed interviews with President Dwight D. Eisenhower.…
Both metaphorically and in reality, it has been hard for literary historians to get a picture of French poet Arthur Rimbaud. He produced his best know work while still in his teens, then quit writing to travel the world. Little is known of his activities…
Alan Sillitoe, the British novelist who “changed the way the working class was represented” and led Britain’s “angry young man” school of literature in the 1950s, has died of cancer at the age of 82. Despite writing such seminal books as The Loneliness of the…
In a short comment on his blog, Seth Godin — author of the recent hit book Linchpin: Are You Indispensable? — offers a simple yet radical proposal: Give your books away. I’m asking a favor: Would you give your copy (or lend, I’m fine either…
