Scribner

The classic Joy of Cooking transformed American cooking when it was originally published in 1931. Now, JOY is once again revolutionizing the kitchen-this time as a cooking app for iPad®. The new app is a gorgeous-to-behold digital package with all of the recipes, history, charm, and advice cooks have come to love in the book.

Ernest Hemingway's collected works will be made available in e-book for the first time in a global project by Simon & Schuster.
 
Twenty-eight titles will feature in The Hemingway Collection, to be published in digital in the UK on 22nd May in a "fresh and modern" style. Designer Tom Poland was commissioned to create "bold, clean, bright images" that "stand apart from the classic designs previously seen on bookshelves and illuminate screens with the same vigour as Hemingway's work."
 

George Packer’s recent article in The New Yorker about the ever-increasing presence of Amazon is simply the latest in a long line of wake-up calls — or calls-to-arms — to the traditional book publishing industry. Amazon’s ability to sell directly to consumers, as well as use consumer insights to predict future purchases, continues to challenge the ways in which publishers think of their business models. In fact, publishers will likely have to change from a business-to-business model to a business-to-consumer model in order to evolve as brands and compete effectively in the marketplace.

The National Book Foundation presents the 2013 National Book Award Finalists in the categories of Fiction, Nonfiction, Poetry and Young People's Literature.

The shortlist for the Man Booker Prize for Fiction, the most prestigious literary award in Britain, was announced on Tuesday morning. The six finalists are: "We Need New Names," by NoViolet Bulawayo (Little, Brown/Chatto); "The Luminaries," by Eleanor Catton (Little, Brown/Granta); "Harvest," by Jim Crace (Nan A. Talese/Picador); "The Lowland," by Jhumpa Lahiri (Knopf/Bloomsbury); "A Tale for the Time Being," by Ruth Ozeki (Viking/Canongate); "The Testament of Mary," by Colm Toibin (Scribner/Penguin)

After 35 years of writing novels—not just novels, mind you: bestsellers—Susan Isaacs has a very clear understanding of how the book publishing industry works. Her take on the business from the perspective of a prolific author (13 novels and one book of nonfiction) offers unique insight into how and why things are changing.

Isaacs loves to tell the story of how her first book came to be published in the late 1970s. A former editor of Seventeen magazine and a freelance political speechwriter, she was home with young children and living in Long Island. "I wrote a mystery. It was the usual [situation of] reading too many mysteries and then saying, 'I think I can do this.'" A school acquaintance of her husband's was managing editor of Simon & Schuster and offered to read the book. He liked it, and told Isaacs, "You don't expect friends to write a good book!"

In 2006, after a career as an editor and writer for publications such as Outside, GQ and The New York Times Magazine, John Tayman's new book, The Colony, was doing well, and Scribner urged him to start thinking about a second book. Three things gave him pause. First: "I had just finished a long slog on a single book and was not so eager to jump into something of that size immediately."

Secondly: "I could see and recognize significant changes afoot as the industry moved from analog to digital."

Right before everyone ran off for the holidays, we asked the Book Business staff and contributors one question: What was the best book you read in 2012. It didn't need to have been published in 2012, just one that they read in the calendar year. These are the results:

This weekly feature examines certain ebooks’ paths to bestseller-dom, and highlights bestselling titles that are selling more copies in digital than in print. Slammed by Colleen Hoover Hoover’s first book, Slammed, is self-published and hits the NYT ebook fiction bestseller list this week at #13. The young adult romance tells the story of an 18-year-old girl, Layken, whose family has to move across the country after her father’s death. When Layken meets her new neighbor, Will, romance and challenges ensue. Hoover tells me, “I hadn’t written anything in the past ten years until December [2011], when I got the idea for

In an interview in The Paris Review in 1958 Ernest Hemingway made an admission that has inspired frustrated novelists ever since: The final words of “A Farewell to Arms,” his wartime masterpiece, were rewritten “39 times before I was satisfied.”

Those endings have become part of literary lore, but they have never been published together in their entirety, according to his longtime publisher, Scribner.