Dallas

Dallas-based startup BookShout, which aims to promote social reading and aid book discovery, has raised $6 million in a Series B funding round, the company announced Thursday. But the company is, at least temporarily, no longer permitting users to import their Kindle and Nook books onto the platform — the feature that it showed off as the main perk of its platform at the Frankfurt Book Fair last fall.

That hasn’t stopped Ambassador Enterprises, a Fort Wayne, Ind.-based venture firm, from investing again. “By serving authors and publishers in a process-oriented

Maybe you’ve noticed that there seem to be a lot of Barnes & Noble superstores closing lately? Not just stores in remote locations (like, say, this one in upstate New York), but in some of the nation’s largest metropolitan shopping areas, such as Los Angeles, San Francisco, Philadelphia, Washington, DC, Seattle, Chicago, two stores in Dallas, another in Austin, and Manhattan. And that’s just in the last 30 days or so.

What had been a slow shrinkage as leases ran out turned into an avalanche after Thanksgiving.

Amazon.com is in advanced negotiations to buy the mobile chip business of Texas Instruments, according to Israeli newspaper Calcalist, which would put the online retail giant on the path to becoming a manufacturer of smartphone and tablet processors.

However, the report generated a healthy dose of skepticism among users of Stocktwits.

The American Heart Association and Wiley-Blackwell announced plans for a new, open-access journal, Journal of the American Heart Association: Cardiovascular and Cerebrovascular Disease.

Celebrating the joy of shared reading

As the world turns, so does the book manufacturing industry. International affairs brought both pessimism and hope to an industry still in the throes of a sputtering global economy. On the upside: a new Harry Potter title and Hillary Clinton's memoirs have legions of readers shelling out cash at bookstores nationwide. Indeed, the Association of American Publishers, Washington, reports U.S. book sales rose 5.5% in 2002, to $27 billion—proving once again that, no matter how bad things seem, you can't keep a good book down. Or a good book manufacturer. Despite competitive market conditions, high unemployment, war in the Middle East, a dearth of