Warner

Last week, Amazon New York publisher Larry Kirshbaum sat down for an interview with writer and former Random House editor Daniel Menaker at Stony Brook Southampton’s “Writers Speak Wednesday.” Here are the most interesting things he said.

“Despite the fact that Amazon is a very large company on the retail side, as you all know, we’re really a very small publisher. We’re a startup. We only have about 20, 25 people.… In a lot of ways, we are operating it as a small publishing house.

Friday marks the end of an era. Some, like Warner Bros. executive Dan Fellman, compare its finality to the breakup of the Beatles.

When Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2, the eighth and presumably final film based on the phenom that has sold 450 million books and close to a billion movie tickets, opens this week in theaters from Lahore to Los Angeles, it will be twilight in the Potterverse.