Donna Tartt

It is one of the cruel truisms of the book business that publishers rarely have much insight into how their products are actually used. This is not for lack of curiosity on a publisher's part but because of the structure of the industry:  books are almost never sold directly to end-users. They are sold to libraries and the wholesalers that service libraries; they are sold to your local bookshop; and they are sold to online vendors; but rarely is a book sold directly by a publisher to the person who reads it.

Last year, the release of the Hollywood adaptation of Gillian Flynn's 2012 novel "Gone Girl" propelled the book onto best-seller lists in several countries around the world. Millions of people bought it, but how many of them actually read it from cover to cover? The Toronto-based e-reading platform Kobo, which delivers digital books to 23 million people in 190 countries and is a competitor to Amazon Kindle, recently released statistics for 2014 that showed the best-selling books in the company's major markets and how frequently readers finished the titles they bought.

Hachette Book Group's e-book sales declined as a proportion of its overall business in the first half of 2014, and the impact of the Amazon/Hachette Book Group dispute may have contributed, Dominique D'Hinnin, co-managing partner of Lagardere SCA, has said. In the US, net sales of e-books were down to 29% of trade net sales as against 34% at end-June 2013 in what the company called a "zero growth digital market". 

Hachette Titles Hold Strong on Ebook Best-Seller List Amid Trade Dispute With Amazon (Digital Book World) As the trade dispute between Amazon and Hachette grinds on, there are at least three authors who have less cause than others for grievance: James Patterson, Donna Tartt and David Baldacci. *** Facebook Will Curb Automatic Posts from Apps […]

The post Morning Roundup: Hachette titles strong on eBook bestseller lists. What motivates reviewers? appeared first on TeleRead: News and views on e-books, libraries, publishing and related topics.

Donna Tartt has won the Pulitzer award for fiction for her third novel The Goldfinch, which judges described as a book which "stimulates the mind and touches the heart".

Relating the life of a 13-year-old boy who survives an accident that kills his mother, The Goldfinch was chosen as the winner of America's most prestigious literary award ahead of Philipp Meyer's The Son, and Bob Shacochis's The Woman Who Lost Her Soul. It is, said judges Art Winslow, Ron Charles and Sabina Murray, "a beautifully written coming-of-age novel with exquisitely drawn characters".

Publishers from Bloomsbury, Faber, Penguin Press, and more choose their books of the year, and the ones that got away.

The book that made my year: Many years ago, I was sitting in Blake's bar in Enniskillen with John McGahern and he recommended an American novel from the 60s, written by John Williams: a book called Stoner. I thought it was astonishing, and I passed it to vintage, who brought it out in 2003 with John's introduction.

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