Cuban dissident blogger — and Melville House author — Yoani Sanchez had her meeting with former President Jimmy Carter in Havana yesterday. (See our earlier report.) As a Miami Herald story details, after Carter met with Fidel Castro and his brother, President Raul Castro, Carter…
Every day 200 million people fill out a “Captcha” to prove that they are not a computer. You know what I’m talking about, these things: Captcha stands for “completely automated public Turing test to tell computers and humans apart,” in reference to Alan Turing‘s famous…
According to a new study conducted by Yahoo Research “a whopping 50% of all content consumed on Twitter is generated by only 20,000 users.” The study examined 260 million posts sent via Twitter “between July 28, 2009 and March 8, 2010 containing bit.ly-shortened URLs.” As…
“Ninety books written, designed and illustrated by Dublin children are on display at Trinity College as part of a project that encourages them to create their own worlds,” according to this report in the Irish Times. “‘We had a lot more zombies in the beginning,’…
Bookless libraries…… Libraries closing is not the end of civilization We’re gettin’ more of the good Dr. Seuss A twitter murder mystery Book app trash talk Finalist for the Man Booker Intl. Announced & awwww… it ‘s so hard being a Booker judge Conman who…
A portion of the proceeds from Banana Yoshimoto’s forthcoming novel “The Lake” will go to Japan disaster relief. – Learn More
In a move that’s sure to give the Castro brothers more heartburn about Melville House author Yoani Sanchez (blogger and author of the forthcoming Havana Real), it was reported yesterday that former President Jimmy Carter plans to meet today with Sanchez and other prominent…
Yang Hengjun, a Chinese-Australian political thriller writer who lives part-time in Sydney, has gone missing in China, possibly detained by the Chinese government for his liberal politics and blogging. According the Sydney Morning Herald, Yang “has not been seen since phoning a colleague from Guangzhou…
John Le Carre has blown some literary minds down under: After being announced at a ceremony in Sydney as one of the finalists yesterday for the Man Booker International Prize — which is worth £60,000, or about $96,000 — he issued a statement saying he…
What one blogger smartly calls a “deliciously entertaining but instructive controversy” — and what others might call a shitstorm — has broken out on a fan blog that reviews new ebooks for the Kindle called Big Al’s Books and Pals. It started when Big Al…
Panorama of restricted Prague library Zadie Smith fights to save her local Augmented reality app for librarians How green is your ebook? Keats letter sells for $150,000 NYPL Young Lion Finalists announced Perez Hilton gets a children’s book deal? Pop-Up bookstore opening in shuttered Borders…
The last giant of British chain bookselling is now officially up for sale. The fate of Waterstone’s, which is currently under the ownership of the struggling HMV Group, has been the subject of much speculation since HMV announced their dwindling profits several months ago. Up until…
The venerable Washington DC bookseller Politics and Prose has found a buyer, two in fact: former Washington Post reporters Bradley Graham and his wife Lissa Muscatine. The store, which was founded by Barbara Meade and the legendary Carla Cohen, who died in October, has been…
Yesterday, in response to David Orr‘s NYT essay about the poetry issue of O: The Oprah Magazine, in which he objects to “using poetry to overcome personal challenges,” I wondered whether poetry can or should serve such practical purposes. Is poetry meant to rehabilitate or…
Here’s a bit of wonkery about publishing that probably sounds familiar to any seasonal business. In publishing there are generally 3 seasons we respect. At Melville House, we call those seasons spring, summer, and fall. (Where’s winter you ask? After this winter, I prefer not…
Will anyone buy B&N? Why Google books failed Help buy an independent bookstore Tiny church finds original King James Bible Borders executives want 8.3M in bonuses Politics and Prose finds a buyer Thousands join Dorchester books boycott Author’s LGBT story censored by Running Press Seamus…
Well, just when poor old Borders had won back the hearts of even its most die-hard opponents — hey, how good can it be for book culture if 650 bookstores go out of business in one fell swoop? — the company’s management goes and does…
Writing in the New York Times Book Review, David Orr contemplates the fashion shoot of young female poets in O: The Oprah Magazine’s first poetry issue, and feels that something is terribly amiss. “Spring Fashion Modeled by Rising Young Poets.” The words are heart-sinking. For…
“Dedicated teacher Leonora Rustamova wrote a book to engage five teenage rebels in her class. But after it went up on a website she was dismissed,” according to a report in the Observer. In an effort to engage a group of hard-to-reach teenagers, high school…
I haven’t met Bill Ryan but I like his style. I mean, if I were Salman Rushdie‘s publicist, I’m sure it’d give me a little bit of dread and heartburn to know it’s likely this notorious guy was waiting to pounce on my author. A…
Chip Kidd discusses new Murakami cover Catherine Cookson trust self publishing her entire catalogue iPad as picture book Amazon preparing to launch massive cloud film/music service Tennessee Williams at 100 Amanda Hocking on her book deal Waterstone’s bid to reclaim his book chain Additions to the…
A Fast Company report says that “The U.S. Trade Representative’s Office has listed China’s leading search engine Baidu as a key member on its list of global counterfeit-assisting services.”But the report says Baidu responded quickly, announcing it had “issued anti-piracy tech for its e-book system.”…
We’ve written before about how some European countries benefit from what’s generally known as a “net pricing” deal — that is, a rule that prohibits significant discounting of book prices, so that retailers share a level playing field. In France and Germany, for example, net…
This is where the amateurs take their seats at the back. Five-million dollars is the estimate put on a single illuminated page from the Shahnamah of Shah Tahmasp of Persia. The five-hundred-year-old “Book of Kings” is considered the finest illustrated manuscript in existence and the…
Last year geneticist Craig Venter made news when, according to Forbes, he “announced that he and a team at his eponymous institute have created a genetic code synthetically and inserted it into a bacterium called Mycoplasma capricolum.” At SXSW this month (via Forbes), Venter described two…
Since starting my very first job in publishing in the mid 2000s, the thing that’s always left me a bit dumbstruck when I think about it is how crazy it is as a business. Seriously, think about how publishing works for a moment and ask…
Twitter-sourced Japan Charity book published in one week Amanda Hocking signs four book deal with St. Martin’s Lawrence Ferlinghetti is 92! Turkish court censors journalist The Economist’s take on Borders Nook Color gets app store eBook consumption patterns The best children’s/YA book trailers What are Google’s…
So on the day after one of the most important developments in the history of the book — Judge Denny Chin‘s decision to reject the Google Books Settlement case (see yesterday’s Moby coverage) — what was the reaction amongst publishing insiders in New York? In…
Like many people, I love physical books. I like how they feel, how they look, sometimes how they smell, how they can be bent, dog-eared, dropped and written in. But one thing I don’t like is flipping a book’s page. I hate it when I…
The design blog Unbeige reports that star designer Rodrigo Corral has been tapped to take over as creative director of Farrar, Strauss and Giroux beginning next month. Corral began his career as a designer at FSG in 1996, later moving to Doubleday and eventually opening…
