The Wall Street Journal

Byliner's recent struggles have been well documented this summer with executives jumping ship, stalled author payments, and rumors of imminent closure. Those struggles may have come to an end for the ereading startup, which sold long-form journalism and short fiction pieces, with its recent acquisition by Vook.

In the New York Times coverage, for example, the fact that hundreds of indie publishers were part of the deal doesn’t show up until — well, it doesn’t really show up at all. The fact that Perseus even had a “distribution arm” doesn’t appear until paragraph seven, but you’d have to know what “distribution arm” meant to really get it, and even then it only merits half a sentence: “Under the terms of the deal, Hachette would keep the Perseus publishing business,

Can you believe those...those...those...sons of bitches at Amazon? After launching almost 20 years ago and making virtually every book-new, used, dead-tree, electronic, audio, and I'm guessing any day now, olfactory-available to everyone in America at good-to-great prices, the company's true character now stands revealed. It's not pretty, folks. Despite a huge market share, Amazon apparentlystill wants books, especially the e-books that everyone agrees are the future of the medium, to be cheaper than what publishers and big-name authors want you to pay for them.

At a luncheon today at Book Expo America, the publishing trade fair that opened yesterday at the Javits Center, the American Booksellers Association honored James Patterson as its Indie Champion Award Winner. The one-man best-seller factory might have been an unlikely candidate for the honor a couple of years ago, but this year Patterson pledged to give $1 million to independent bookstores nationwide. And lately he's become increasingly exercised about the biggest topic at the convention: the dispute between Amazon and Hachette (the conglomerate that happens to publish Patterson

News Corp.'s net income fell in its fiscal third quarter, but its results beat Wall Street expectations due to better book publishing thanks to thriving sales of the "Divergent" series, which was launched as a movie in March. The lift from books underlined News Corp.'s announcement last week that it would purchase romance fiction publisher Harlequin Enterprises for $415 million from Canada's Torstar Corp.

Chief Executive Robert Thomson told analysts on a conference call that there's "no doubt that book publishing is transitioning successfully to digital" and said Harlequin's

Amazon's long-awaited smartphone is apparently right around the corner, and today images of what looks to be an early prototype have been leaked by BGR. Unfortunately the pictured device is surrounded by a protective, screwed-on case that conceals the phone's true physical design. BGR claims the phone's screen measures 4.7 inches, which would make it noticeably smaller than the latest flagships from Samsung and HTC. It's also said to be a 720p display, which falls a bit short of the now-standard 1080p resolution found on the Galaxy S5 and HTC One. 

The publishing industry is not one of the overachievers in terms of its use of big data. And since my book on big data-Big Data @ Work-is out, I thought it might be fun to speculate on what big data will do to the business of publishing books. The goal of any publisher is to get its content bought and read. In the past, publishers could know only if their books and magazines were bought, and knowing even that was problematic.

Apple (AAPL) pulled no punches in the 65-page brief it filed Tuesday, asking a higher court to overturn the controversial results of last year's e-book antitrust trial and placing blame for the outcome squarely on the shoulders of the judge who heard the case. In Apple's view, U.S. District Judge Denise Cote was not only wrong about the law when she ruled that the company orchestrated a conspiracy with publishers to fix the price of e-books, she was wrong about the facts as well.

In a move highlighting the increasing role that user-generated content plays in the news business, News Corporation, owner of The Wall Street Journal, announced on Friday that it had bought Storyful, a company that calls itself a "social news" agency.

Storyful, a self-described "social news" agency, sifts online content and sends authenticated reports and videos to its clients.

Storyful monitors websites like Instagram and YouTube for compelling news and video, has its journalists confirm the material's authenticity, and distributes it to clients in newsrooms around the world.

The New York Public Library, responding to outcry over its plans to demolish century-old book stacks, will this fall unveil a new design that preserves a significant portion of them, its president, Anthony Marx, said Tuesday. The library disclosed its plans in response to questions from The Wall Street Journal about alternatives it had considered to the $300 million renovation, which has sparked two lawsuits brought by scholars and preservationists, including a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, aiming to block the stacks' destruction.