Product Launches

Hold the phone: Amazon wants to burrow even deeper into your life.

The retailer is expected to introduce a smartphone on Wednesday at an event in Seattle, a long-rumored project that aims to close any remaining gap between the impulse to buy and the completed act.

Amazon has spent the last several years furiously investing billions of dollars on multiple fronts: constructing warehouses all over the country to deliver goods as fast as possible, building devices as varied as tablets and set-top boxes, and creating and licensing entertainment to stock those devices.

In our latest community poll, we asked you to share your annual book buying budget. Ready to crunch some numbers? As with all self-report surveys, the data is only as accurate as the respondents are truthful and knowledgeable. We have no way to confirm the amount of money participants actually spend, and it's reasonable to guess that some of the clustering around round-number responses (25, 50, 100, etc.) might be due to participants who do not track their spending closely making guesstimates about their totals instead.

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.

Amazon.com is holding an event in Seattle later this month where it could reveal its long-awaited smartphone, possibly with a 3D interface.

The e-commerce giant is inviting press and customers to an event June 18 in its hometown of Seattle for a "new device unveiling." In a video on its site, actors are seen surprisingly reacting to something held off-screen in their hands.

The BookExpo America event is the largest North American publishing industry conference, and it has grown to include a wide variety of incorporated events that address nearly every aspect of the book industry.

The internet is seething over Amazon's reported hardball tactics in negotiations with Hachette. Newspapers and blogs are filled with heated opinion pieces, decrying Amazon's domination of the book business. Actual facts are thinner on the ground, however, and if history is any guide, we haven't heard the full story. Here's how it started.

Maya Angelou, who died Wednesday at the age of 86, was known for many things throughout her life: her wisdom, her acting, her indefatigable civil rights activism. But more than anything else, Angelou was famous for her writing. Both a prolific poet and memorist, Angelou penned more than two dozens books and collections throughout her life (including two cookbooks).

NEW YORK (AP) - Three years ago, guest speaker Mindy Kaling joked that publishing's annual national convention, BookExpo America, resembled "a high school reunion where all the jocks were killed in a plane crash, and all the minorities, too."

Little seems to have changed.

From Wednesday to Saturday, tens of thousands of publishers, authors, agents and librarians will meet at the Jacob K. Javits Center in New York for a convention predominantly organized by whites, spotlighting books predominantly written, edited and published by whites.

BookExpo America, which starts on Wednesday morning at the Javits Center in Manhattan, is taking a page from other entertainment conventions as it seeks to promote itself as more welcoming and fun, and less inclined to look inward.

It will be business as usual, in one sense, with the standard lineup of publishers and distinguished authors promoting books for the fall. It also opens under a cloud of concerns - one about Amazon.com, the giant online bookseller, which is battling over pricing with a leading publisher

TORONTO -- Torstar Corp., owner of the Toronto Star and other newspapers, is selling the Harlequin book publishing company for $455 million to global media company News Corp. and it will be run as a division of HarperCollins Publishers.

Torstar (TSX:TS.B) says the sale will strengthen its financial position and a portion of the net proceeds will be used for debt reduction.

Harlequin, known for its romance books, has been part of Torstar for 39 years.