The New York Times

Sourcebooks and Wattpad Team Up
September 5, 2013

A new partnership between Naperville, Ill.-based published Sourcebooks and Toronto-based writing community Wattpad will result in published print and ebooks and will bring Sourcebooks and its authors closer to the growing workshopping platform.

First, Sourcebooks will edit and and distribute several select Wattpad manuscripts under its young adult imprint, Sourcebooks Fire. The titles will be made available in print and ebook formats and distributed to physical and online bookstores around the world.

Paperback Books Turned the Publishing World Upside Down
August 21, 2013

Half a century before e-books turned publishing upside down, a different format threatened to destroy the industry. Here's a little perspective: In 1939, gas cost 10 cents a gallon at the pump. A movie ticket set you back 20 cents. John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, the year's bestselling hardcover book, was $2.75. For a nation suffering 20 percent unemployment, books were an impossible expense. But in just one day, Robert de Graff changed that. On June 19, 1939, the tall, dynamic entrepreneur took out a bold, full-page

Feud Between Barnes & Noble and Simon & Schuster Is Finally Over
August 21, 2013

Barnes & Noble and Simon & Schuster have finally reached an agreement after months of squabbling over book pricing and other matters, reports to Publishers Weekly, noting that "the issue was causing a noticeable cutback in the number of [Simon & Schuster] titles the bookseller had on its shelves." Publishers Weekly first reported in January that Barnes & Noble has reduced its order of Simon & Schuster titles over "perceived lack of support" from the publishing company. In March, a senior executive familiar with the negotiations

What's Fair Use When Algorithms Are the Content Creators?
August 9, 2013

When the news hit that a photographer was suing BuzzFeed for $3.6 million for reusing one of his images, some on the internet reacted with fear and horror. Because many of those people - and websites - are notoriously loose with reusing images, and they like to hide behind the blithe view that it's all "fair use."

These debates about the bounds of fair use will always be important, but they obscure a very unfair dynamic that is squeezing artists - and turning the web into a battleground between humans and machines

Amazon.com, Inc. : Kindle Worlds Expands--Amazon Publishing Announces New License for the Works of Kurt Vonnegut, Including Slaughterhouse-Five and Cat's Cradle
August 1, 2013

Today, Amazon Publishing announced that it has secured a new Kindle Worlds license from RosettaBooks for the books of Kurt Vonnegut. Writers will soon be able to create and sell stories inspired by the iconic books of Kurt Vonnegut with Kindle Worlds' self-service submission platform. The submission platform for works under this license is expected to open in August. Kindle Worlds is the first commercial publishing platform that enables any writer to write stories based on a range of original works and characters and earn royalties for doing so.

Reza Aslan Is Publishing World's Newest Star, Thanks to Fox News
July 31, 2013

It's a marketing triumph no book publicist or agent could have dreamt up: appear on Fox News, patiently endure a markedly confrontational line of questioning about one's religious affiliation, and wait for the whole thing to go viral.

But it's precisely what has happened for Reza Aslan, an Iranian-American scholar of religion, who appeared on a weekly Fox News webcast on Friday to promote Zealot, his controversial new biography of Jesus, only to be asked-repeatedly, for several minutes-why he, a Muslim, would be writing about Jesus.

Unanimous Entertainment to produce adaptation of Women’s Prize for Fiction (formally The Orange prize) winner MAY WE BE FORGIVEN by A.M. Homes.
July 19, 2013

Chris Coen’s Unanimous Entertainment has secured the rights to MAY WE BE FORGIVEN by A.M. Homes.  Originally published to widespread acclaim by Viking in the U.S. and Granta Books in England this past October, the book recently won the high-profile Women’s Prize for Fiction inLondon. Rights to the novel have been sold in eleven other countries to date.

Amazon's Monopoly is not Predatory
July 12, 2013

As I survey the responses to and discussions of the recent decision in the Apple e-book antitrust trial, I’m disheartened by how many people seem to be buying into the publishers’ and Apple’s narrative of Amazon as the evil predatory-pricing monopolist. You see it in comments and articles here and there, that take for granted Amazon has been selling all its e-books at a loss, not just a small handful.

Even Adam Engst of TidBITS has been taken in:
Initially the U.S. Department of Justice filed this lawsuit against

The National Book Foundation Elects Three New Board Members
July 10, 2013

New York, NY (July 9, 2013) – The National Book Foundation, presenter of the National Book Awards, has elected three new members to its Board of Directors: Annette Gordon-Reed, Winner of the National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize; Anthony Marx, President and CEO of The New York Public Library; and Deborah Needleman, Editor-in-Chief of T: The New York Times Style Magazine.

The addition of these new board members builds on recent steps the National Book Foundation has been taking to broaden the reach of the National Book Awards. These steps included adding a “long-list,” expanding the pool of potential judges, and announcing the finalists on MSNBC’s Morning Joe.