“Faster than an Amazon Associate could blink, Amazon.com sent out notices on Wednesday, telling Associates that due to California‘s new budget, which includes a new sales tax on Amazon.com purchases, their accounts would be terminated, IF the sales tax was signed into law,” which it…
Penguin UK has unveiled a new addition to its already robust series of, well, series. Beginning with eight books by Evelyn Waugh (and eventually to include more titles and authors), the new Hardback Classics Editions are given an elegant, minimal design treatment with nothing beyond…
Colson Whitehead, author most recently of Zone One a post-apocalyptic novel, has announced that he will be playing in the 2011 World Series of Poker and writing about it at Grantland, the new sports and pop culture website created by ESPN’s Bill “The Sports Guy”…
Poetry Thursday, everyone. Welcome. Obvious pronouncements that it’s best for individuals to use their own imaginations to interpret poetry aside, the folks at Teleportal Readings do a hell of a job creating stunning, visually imaginative brain candy from the words of writers. The following video…
Just when you thought you had an understanding of how cynical Amazon.com truly is, well, they go and top themselves. Take this report from Emily Witt at the New York Observer: While it’s easy to be cynical about old publishing’s faux-gentlemanly approach to getting promotional…
The end of librarians? Principal At “School For Writers” Accused Of Plagiarizing David Foster Wallace More on the B&N takeover Hachette adds online tool for disabled readers eReader adoption hits 12% and wealthy Hispanics are their biggest users The ‘worrying’ battle for books Isabel Allende…
(Via Time Magazine.) In a 2001 study, Francis Thackeray, the director of the Institute for Human Evolution at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, found cannabis and cocaine residue on fragments of a clay pipe in Shakespeare’s garden. Now Thackeray wants to … … dig up Shakespeare’s…
Although the FBI is in charge of the investigation, local police say they think they’ve captured the man who placed two bombs in a Borders bookstore located in a shopping mall outside Denver last weekend … although they didn’t know they’d captured him. According to…
When Google’s eBookstore was a mere twinkle in leviathan’s eye, many bloggers and smaller booksellers were curious about the structure of any affiliate programs the company would have. Many believed that in order to compete with Amazon‘s already well-placed program the internet giant would have…
According to the Chicago Tribune, Chicago is, quite literally, about to cement its reputation as a hub for writing in the US. Irish engineer and businessman Malcolm O’Hagan plans to open the American Writers Museum in Chicago…as soon as he can raise the funds. We’ve written…
Meghan Cox Gurdon responds to YA controversy Religious book sales are up Did New York “save” its libraries? Join the The Reading Rainbow flashmob Novelist has a town built in his honor Are Amazon’s top reviewers bought? LeVette Fuller Wins $20,000 Great Graphic Novel Library…
In the report below, a reporter from a Denver TV station conducts an on-air telephone interview — yep, she holds the phone up to her microphone — with authorities at the mall outside Denver where two “devices” and one “item” were found over the weekend…
On Friday, guest host of NPR’s On the Media Mike Pesca posed a great question in a fascinating piece on conventional wisdom. “Just who or what is coming up with this conventional wisdom?” Pesca asked. “And do they get paid by the platitude?” Conventional wisdom–though…
Downsizing publishers, shrinking markets, fewer reviews, disappearing retailers — the Boston Globe‘s Alex Beam takes note, in his newest column, of yet another rapidly developing problem facing authors: Class action suits. “It’s a stretch, legally speaking, but the ever-creative plaintiffs’ bar never runs out of…
What a town, New Orleans. And what a group, librarians. One of the stories we heard again and again from cab drivers and people working in the hospitality industry was how ALA had been the first group to come to New Orleans after the terrible…
At The Millions Lydia Kiesling has written an article that expresses displeasure with the current cultural fondness for acts of curation. To “curate,” she writes, a verb formerly evoking museums and archives, a verb with family ties to assistant priests in country parishes, is enjoying…
Neil Postman once noted the insanity of a country that uses its days of remembrance and patriotism to sell refrigerators. It’s a tradition that’s honorably mocked by AK Press, which is having a “Fuck the Fourth Sale.” (“Our biggest ever!”) Radical shoppers are encouraged to…
As if things weren’t bad enough for Borders — a too-brief Associated Press wire story says two “crude” explosive devices were found planted in a Borders store in a mall in Golden Colorado, a Denver suburb, on Saturday morning, after police responded to a report…
While the nation’s librarians’ are off at the American Library Association’s Annual Conference in New Orleans, we thought it might be interesting to take a closer look at who these librarians really are, and where they’ve been. Jessamyn “putting the rarin’ back in librarian” West…
Yesterday, Mary Speck reviewed Havana Real: One Woman Fights to Tell the Truth About Cuba Today for the Washington Post and said this about it: “With her vivid portraits of family and friends, including Cuba’s determined dissidents, Yoani Sánchez dissolves the abstractions used to fuse individuals into…
Last year Andy Baio recreated Miles Davis‘s Kind of Blue album as an 8-bit CD called Kind of Bloop which he sold and funded via Kickstarter. Though he had licensed the music, he was sued by the photographer Jay Maisel over Baio’s use of a…
In memory of the actor Peter Falk, who died Thursday in Beverly Hills.
Library Director Bill Ptacek and King County Library System have won Gale/Library Journal‘s prestigious “Library of The Year” award. We’re proud to say that we’ve been fans of King County Library System director Bill Ptacek for a little while now. We lauded Ptacek’s recent decision…
On Wednesday, Amazon rolled out a press release announcing that it had swung a major deal — 47 books — for a major author — the late Ed McBain — to pump up Thomas & Mercer, its new mystery publishing imprint for print books. On…
Lars Iyer, author of Spurious (the first novel in a trilogy that will include Dogma and Exodus) discusses Kafka, comedy, friendship, and the apocalypse at the new literary website Full-Stop.net. Here a few highlights on the topic of friendship… thought I highly recommend the entire interview. I wanted to…
Catching up on my Biblioklept yesterday, I caught the following video of Žižek talking about parenting (with some actual parenting thrown in for good measure) that would’ve been a bit more relevant for Father’s Day. Oh well. Happy five days after Father’s Day, everyone. Enjoy.
News to me, via Lapham’s Quarterly: In 1969 Vladamir Nabokov was interviewed for an article in The New York Times, and was asked, “How do you rank yourself among writers (living) and of the immediate past?” His response: I often think there should exist a special typographical sign for a…
Attention Librarians: We’re going to ALA this year! And to celebrate our inaugural visit we’re giving out some swag. And not just a piece of swag here and there, but bags (literally) stuffed with the stuff. And by stuff we mean books. Good books. Great…
This story just keeps getting stranger and creepier by the day. According to this post by Robert Mackey on The Lede blog of the New York Times, in May Tom MacMaster (a.k.a. Amina Abdallah Arraf, a.k.a. A Gay Girl in Damascus, now known to be the Scottish…
In light of this New York Times report about booksellers charging for events, Slate media critic Jack Shafer points us (via Twitter) to this 2008 analysis of the economics of in-store events by Penguin’s Colleen Lindsay: Okay, let’s say that you’re a bookseller and want…
