“A Norwegian writer said he was ‘spooked by the scary similarity’ between the Utoya massacre and a book he wrote 23 years ago about a crazed political extremist who commits mass murder on an island,” the UK Telegraph reports. In his 1989 book Thygesen’s Terrorist,…
We’ve written previously about the forceful new dictums being enacted by Canada’s biggest bookstore chain, Indigo. For one thing, earlier this year it announced that it would arbitrarily deduct a fee for “co-op” (promotional displays) from every book sold, rather than allow publishers to buy…
On the same day that Amazon announced that the Kindle would soon be available for sale in Toys R Us stores, the Seattle based Big Fish electronic gaming company issued a press release concerning their new “Hidden Expedition: Amazon River” game for the Kindle. It’s…
Apparently, when Simon and Schuster didn’t do so well with the last book by “Anonymous,” Little, Brown decided that the problem wasn’t so much that withholding information about the author was a flawed marketing strategy, but that that S&S wasn’t vague enough. According to this article…
As MobyLives prepares to take its August hiatus, my thoughts turn to summer reading. As Henry Ward Beecher puts it: There is a temperate zone in the mind, between luxurious indolence and exacting work; and it is to this region, just between laziness and labor,…
Vonnegut & Ockler Books Removed from Missouri High School Library The Perils of Copy Protection Susan Sontag in a bear suit… World Book Night Comes to the USA in 2012 Linda Ronstadt Inks Book Deal for Memoir Calls for long-form nonfiction Author publishes one word…
Next month, as part of its Art of the Novella series, Melville House is publishing five classic novellas all with the same name: THE DUEL. Now all we need is… one great video trailer. Okay, so we’re a little, ahem, critical of the videos made…
According to this Reuters report, over 140,000 of NYC’s children have been banned from checking out library books because of unpaid late fees. In an unprecedented showing of debt amnesty, New York Public Library has granted debt amnesty to these delinquent children in order to…
Last year Michael Hastings’ Rolling Stone article “The Runaway General” caused a shitstorm of controversy for the Obama Administration. The fracas forced President Obama to fire General Stanley McCrystal from his post as commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, and it thrust a previously unknown…
It’s the last place you’d expect to read such a recommendation, but in a commentary for the Wall Street Journal, Stu Woo suggests “Amazon.com may want to embrace the tax man.” As Woo notes, “The company has retaliated against the 10 or so states that…
Among the pleasures of designing the wide variety of books we publish at Melville House, perhaps the best is getting to immerse myself in so many different cultures. Whether it’s young lovers in Tokyo or the highest reaches of the Russian government, with every title…
A Publisher Plays Coy With Book Release Adults Go Wild Over Latest In Children’s Picture Book Series Book Publishers Challenged by Distribution Problems Indigo Asks Publishers to Ship Directly to Stores Toys-R-Us to Carry the Amazon Kindle Not the Booker prize 2011: Nominate now Amazon…
Here’s an amazing tale about Borders from Jim Mullen, syndicated newspaper columnist, in the Hanford Sentinel. You just have to read it, to believe it: I’m going to tell you a true story about the now-defunct Borders bookstores. Years ago, I wrote a book about…
Margaret Atwood has always been at the cutting edge as a writer and as a celebrity. She invented a device that allowed her to sign books abroad from her Toronto based home. She did that for her novel Oryx and Crake, which is largely considered…
Alfred Hitchcock was a giant of twentieth-century film and one of the foremost innovators in the suspense and thriller genres. Indeed, many of the ingredients for those genres are traceable to him. Since he was a man who excelled in finding just the right mix…
Is Taylor Swift the Jane Austen of our day? No, but this Daily Beast feature does a serviceable job of trying to suggest a connection between the two. The piece contends that Swift’s “lyrics seem to have gotten a little help from a literary predecessor,”…
Man Booker Longlist Do Nothing But Read Day The worst sentence of 2011 Amazon sales up 51% UK Poetry Society public funding withheld Books-a-Million withdraws offer for 30 Borders stores Afghan PEN survives against all odds Ebook Market Grows 76% in the U.S. The End…
The news over the weekend was that Apple is finally enforcing the June 30th cut-off date from their resolution to remove all other external-linking retailers from the app store. Kobo and the Wall Street Journal (subscriptions to the WSJ app were externally linked) both took…
An IT manager at the National Library of Scotland has been jailed for defrauding the library of £500,000. According to a report in the Scotsman, “Chief information officer David Dinham was sentenced to two years yesterday after he secretly awarded his own IT company library…
It’s hard to understand BBC Radio 4‘s recent decision to reduce its short story broadcasting by two thirds, to just one a week. Not only is the move unpopular, it doesn’t make any sense. You might not guess it from a glance around your local…
“Historians and archaeologists,” says a story in the Guardian, “plan to reveal the true face of the author of Don Quixote of La Mancha, Miguel de Cervantes“ -– that is, if they can find him. It seems Cervantes’ body was lost in 1673 during a…
While the US debates the deficit and Greece teeters on the edge of default, the UK is also reeling from proposed cuts to their public services. Austerity is in, and the public sector is taking a major drubbing. Libraries in particular have been a target of budget-conscious…
Murdoch scandal gets booked Canadian Book Sales Down 10.8 Percent Rebel Bookseller 2.0 Literary highlights of Comic-Con Bookless apps and a reflection thereon Literature as a means of political manipulation in Turkey What’s a book? The largest library in history Abusing George Orwell
A British High Court has ordered MacMillan to pay more than £11m ($18 million) “for unlawful conduct by its Education Division in Rwanda, Uganda and Zambia,” as the result of a 16-month inquiry by the Serious Fraud Office, according to a report in The Independent.…
Well, it’s Monday morning, and unless there were some fruitful, secret 3 am chats between the leaders of Congress and President Obama, the United States is no closer to a solution to the debt ceiling problem than it was on Friday. As Republicans whine and…
“These are dark days for the book business,” an article in The Economist tells us, citing the shrinking retail space available to book buyers and sellers with the demise of Borders. “Yet the problem is not the supply: writers will still scribble for scraps. Nor…
Well, there are a lot of things you can say about reader reviews on Amazon.com, and among them is that they seem to be, as a rule, written by a pretty humorless lot. But one book has been garnering a lot of attention lately…
Beijing Bars Writers From a Literary Celebration, Continuing a Crackdown How Bookstores Can Survive in a Post-Borders World Amazon says Harry Potter will be available on the Kindle The CWA Gold Dagger Longlist Kobo removes store from Apple iOS app Self Publishing: Friend or Foe?…
As the dust settles on the Borders bankruptcy case and the liquidators begin to get rid of thousands of employees and even more thousands of books, what are we to make of this saga? – Borders was “done away by dot-com,” says a dentist cited…
Borders may own some stock in the ofttimes darling dark horse of the eBook world, but Kobo is very interested in separating themselves from the sinking Borders brand. That’s not exactly a shocking revelation, we know. It was more or less a partnership that never…
