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Don't cry for Nicholas Sparks. The author of 16 New York Times best-sellers, including such tear-jerkers-turned-movie hits as The Notebook and Dear John, is expanding into TV.

Sparks, 46, has put shows into development at three cable networks through Nicholas Sparks Productions, the shingle he started in April with his longtime literary agent Theresa Park. (UTA’s Elise Henderson joined in July as head of TV.)

Sparks and Park will act as executive producers on all three projects. UTA and attorney Scott Schwimer represent Sparks and his Nicholas Sparks Productions shingle.

41% Percentage of items purchased worldwide over the Internet in the past three months that were books, making books the most popular online purchase. In the United States alone, books were the second-most popular purchase (38 percent) behind clothing, accessories and shoes (41 percent). Source: Nielsen Global Online Survey, January 2008 5 Number of Top 10 best-selling novels in Japan in 2007 that originated as cell-phone novels and were later republished in book form. Usually love stories written in short, text-message-like sentences, cell-phone novels are originally composed and shared with fans via cell phones. The top three best-selling novels were written by first-time, cell-phone

If distribution means getting books into the hands of sellers, circulators or readers, then a true profile of the distribution business would cast a wide net, beginning at the binding line and continuing through to the ‘long tail’ of online portals, used bookstores and curbside pushcarts. However, if distribution, from the publisher’s view, means getting books to generate sales revenue, we can overlook all of the aftermarket, recirculation and reselling channels and focus solely on reaching stores, libraries, online and catalog warehouses and—increasingly, thanks to the Internet—direct marketing from the publisher to the consumer. In the article “Deconstructing Distribution,” in Book Business’

Nine hundred billion dollars. That’s the estimated buying power expected of the Latino market within the next five years. Today its buying power is $500 billion here in the United States, and it is considered the 12th largest economy in the world. Information like this can be found on www.SpanishBookMarket.com—a Web site built and maintained by Mark Wesley of Rosa + Wesley, a development firm specializing in graphic design, book production and Spanish translation located in Wheaton, Ill. For those in any business, such numbers are enough to make one’s head spin. Yet some in book publishing are just now waking to this

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