Product Launches

Banned and challenged books get a lot of press during Banned Books Week, but I think it's important to discuss issues like censorship year round and not just for one week at the end of September. Since most challenges involve material read in schools or marketed to young adults and librarians who serve teen patrons are often at the center of these issues, I thought an overview of books that were challenged in 2013 would be of interest to Hub readers. Of course, this isn't meant to be an exhaustive list,

The moment of receiving your first book jacket is one that every author remembers. I was so excited when I got mine - a jacket, for a book, written by me, that was going to be published - it took me a while to realise it wasn't quite right. When the time came for the smaller, mass market paperback edition of the book concerned (a memoir about my golfing adolescence, called Nice Jumper) and my agent and I suggested a change of image, my publishers were only too happy to work towards something that suited everyone.

It is the time of year when we are awash in “Best of” lists, and many worthy publications have put forth their recommendations for the best books of the year that is about to pass us by. A friend of mine professed herself overwhelmed by the lists, and asked me if I would curate them for her.  Here, for Julie and for the rest of you, is my “best of the best,” a list of books I think you should find a time and a place for in your busy schedule.

Although it's too early to say if book consumers have come out in force this holiday season, and my personal situations no clear indicator, we can take a look at recent purchasing trends to see if publishers and booksellers will have something to celebrate this holiday season.

Mumbai has hosted two literary festivals recently and the number of these kinds of events has risen rapidly over the past few years.

It is being put down to the rise in the number of Indian authors writing in English.

Yogita Limaye reports on the boom in the country's publishing industry.

The nonprofit arm of publishing giant Pearson Inc. agreed Thursday to pay $7.7 million to settle an investigation into whether it improperly sent government employees on international junkets.

The London-based company didn't admit wrongdoing in the settlement with the New York state Attorney General's office. The bulk of the settlement, $7.5 million, will go toward 100Kin10, an organization that is trying to place 100,000 highly-qualified math and science teachers in classrooms across America by 2021.

Columbia, MD-December 11, 2013-Cenveo Publisher Services, a leading content and print solutions company, welcomes Gregg Sullivan as vice president of sales and marketing for content solutions.  Gregg is responsible for developing new customer relationships and for the refinement of processes and solutions that support customer projects. He will oversee a team of sales executives in North America as well as Europe. Prior to joining Cenveo Publisher Services, Gregg spent more than 3.5 years with SPi Global as SVP of content solutions.

A federal judge in New York threw out claims by independent bookstores that Amazon and the big publishing houses conspired to create a monopoly by using technical measures to ensure that ebooks bought on Amazon could only be read on Kindle devices and apps.

In a ruling published on Monday, US District Judge Jed Rakoff rejected the notion that Amazon's "device specific DRM" (digital rights management) provided any benefit to the publishers and described the bookstores' claim as "threadbare."

With 24,686 votes, And the Mountains Echoed by Khaled Hosseini has won the Best Fiction award at the Goodreads Choice Awards. We've linked to samples of all the winners below. All these authors were nominated and picked by Goodreads users. Did your favorite writer make the list?

Fresh from selling film rights to Scott Rudin and signing a $2m publishing deal in the US, the novelist Garth Risk Hallberg has struck a "substantial" six-figure deal with Jonathan Cape in the UK for his 900-page debut novel, City on Fire.

As the scramble for rights continues around the world, publishers are lining up to salute a book which his lucky UK editor described as "the best American novel I've ever read on submission". But the 34-year-old Hallberg is no literary ingenue.