Forbes

James Patterson released 14 blockbuster novels last year while writing hardly a word. Whether you consider it genius or fakery, his writing franchise has made him a bogglingly wealthy man. Patterson has taken top spot in the just-released Forbes fiction rich list, with an estimated income of $US94 million ($NZ118 million) last year. He outstrips the number-two ranked Stephen King, who settled for making ends meet on a mere $US39 million ($NZ48 million).

The biggest news hitting the library world last week was the book Fifty Shades of Grey being pulled from a Florida county library system for being too pornographic. It must have been big news, because even the New York Times covered it.

The only response from the ALA I saw was a tweet from the OIF announcing the action, but I’m sure they’re preparing a public condemnation of the Florida librarians who made the decision.

Then again, maybe they won’t.

Many see a battle between Amazon and Apple looming in the future. ut I think the retailer’s main competitors will be men in shorts: logistics companies like UPS and FedEx.

Amazon is at a crossroads. The company garners billions a year in revenue from selling e-books, household items and vacuuming up rising retailers like Zappos. Retailing, though, can be a difficult single-digit margin business.

As a result, Amazon has invested heavily in its back-end systems to cut operational costs. It even leverages these capabilities for revenue. This month, it bought Kiva Systems, which makes robots for warehouses, for $775 million.

Amid the press of daily news, it sometimes helps to step back a bit to examine the larger Internet trends driving a lot of what we see crossing the tickers and newswires. At the AlwaysOn Venture Summit today in Half Moon Bay, AlwaysOn Founder and Editor Tony Perkins is outlining the big trends he sees with Kelly Porter, managing director of Woodside Capital. Here are the big ones they’re watching: Big Data + Cloud: More data has been created in the last three years than the previous 40,000. And with services such as Amazon Web Services, using that data is

We are always just “that close” to putting paper publishing out of its misery and tossing words like “binding” into the same nostalgia heap where “film” and “camera ready graphics” live. Yet the success of books like "Reamde" tells a different story.  Their defiance of digital bliss has little or nothing to do with what’s more efficient or sustainable or convenient.

The launch of iCloud this week introduced a new phase of cloud computing: the battle for dominance of the consumer cloud. iCloud is a comprehensive service that puts most (eventually all?) of your data in a personal cloud that syncs across your desktop and mobile devices and archives in the cloud. In best Apple fashion, it requires (or allows) almost no set-up.

Forbes.com recently named Canon U.S.A., Inc., a leading digital imaging company, one of the "10 Companies That Are Genuinely Green."

Book Business and Publishing Executive magazines have announced the 2010 inductees into the Publishing Executive Hall of Fame, the industry's most prestigious awards recognition for excellence in book and magazine publishing production and manufacturing.

Check out the video highlights from the 2010 Publishing Business Conference & Expo, featuring comments from conference chairs Chris Foster, President & COO, GIE Media; Samir Husni, aka "Mr. Magazine" and founder and director of the Magazine Innovation Center; and Clint Greenleaf, president and CEO, Greenleaf Book Group, as well as from other attendees.

Little, Brown and Company, a division of Hachette Book Group, announced that #1 bestselling author James Patterson's thriller WORST CASE will be released as an e-book with enriched content on April 3, 2010. The first such release by this author launches fans of "America's #1 storyteller" (Forbes) into a newly enhanced reading experience.