New York

Matt Steinmetz is the publisher and brand director of Publishing Executive.

The Department of Education is about to approve a $30 million contract with Amazon to create an ebook marketplace for New York City's 1,800 public schools. The Amazon deal will be one of the D.O.E.'s most expensive contracts and one of the city's few significant deals with a leading technology company. The contract will also create the department's first unified ebook marketplace.

It's often that a venerable New York institution gets crushed under the thumb of Manhattan real estate development. But its far less frequent that they rise like a phoenix from the ashes of their last incarnation in grand style, in an even more desirable neighborhood, all while retaining the essentials elements of its original charm. Rizzoli Bookstore is about to do just that.

The 50-year-old New York bookseller specializes in art and illustrated titles, and shuttered its flagship location on 57th Street last April after its lease expired and building owners decided to tear down the building.

In 1957, when she was 31 years old, Harper Lee submitted her first attempt at a novel to the publisher J.B. Lippincott. Titled 'Go Set a Watchman,' it was set in the '50s and opened with a woman named Jean Louise Finch returning home to Alabama. Ms. Lee's editor found the story lacking but, seizing on flashback scenes, suggested that she write instead about her protagonist as a young girl. The result was a Pulitzer Prize-winning classic: 'To Kill a Mockingbird.'


An appeals court in New York on Tuesday upheld a 2013 verdict that Apple organized an illegal conspiracy with five book publishers to raise the price of ebooks, noting that so-called horizontal price-fixing is "the supreme evil of antitrust."

The ruling ends a long-running legal fight between Apple and the U.S. Justice Department, and paves the way for Apple AAPL 0.58% to start issuing payouts to consumers in a related class-action settlement.

Another spring book season has come to pass, and with it another set of factual mini-scandals. Earlier this month, the New York Post found major inaccuracies in Primates of Park Avenue, Wednesday Martin's "study" of Upper East Siders and their wife bonuses, prompting Simon & Schuster to slap a quick disclaimer onto its best-seller. A Salon.com writer found that a key statistic in David Brooks's The Road to Character was badly mangled and wrongly sourced. (Random House will correct it in future editions.)

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