Facebook

Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg’s book, Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead, has reached the No 1 spot on two influential best-seller lists, after having only been released on 11 March.

Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead hit the No 1 spot on the New York Times best-seller list for hardcover non-fiction for the first time this week, as well as for combined print and e-book non-fiction.

The best-selling horror author James Herbert, described as ‘one of the giants of popular fiction’, died yesterday aged 69. Mr Herbert, who wrote horror classic The Rats, died only a week after his 23rd novel, Ash, was published. He was prolific, releasing a new novel almost every year between 1974 and 1988, but said he remained ‘very insecure’ about his skills as a writer.

Last October, when superstorm Sandy ripped through Connecticut, it flooded Bank Square Books in Mystic. Owner Annie Philbrick recalls walking inside to the smell of the ocean and a soaking wet carpet.

She and her staff had moved everything as high as they could before the storm, but water and paper are a disastrous combination. With no power to turn on pumps or fans, Ms. Philbrick was in danger of losing her stock of more than 30,000 books.

Random House, Inc., announces major updates to its BookScout app in conjunction with Facebook’s improved timeline and About page. Launched in January, BookScout enables book lovers to share their favorite reads with friends and view personalized recommendations on Facebook. As part of Facebook’s announcements today, people can now choose to add their BookScout activity to their Books section on their timeline.  Based on feedback and early testing, BookScout  development updates also include tablet optimization and enhanced social sharing functionality. The new tablet version allows users to access the app on-the-go from their favorite tablet, while new social capabilities such as What’s Popular Among Your Friends and Share To My Timeline, provide more opportunities to connect and engage with BookScout users and friends across Facebook.

At the beginning of March, author Jamie McGuire posted a panicked and upset message to her blog and Facebook page. In it, she explained to her readers that Amazon had sent out an email to everyone who had bought the self-published Kindle version of her book, Beautiful Disaster, telling them that there was a problem and that buyers could request a refund and then re-buy the book if they wished.

Fellow author Sara Fawkes received the email herself and posted it on her blog:

Entertainment Promotions, known for its thick coupon book, abruptly closed its doors after 50 years Tuesday, laying off 667 employees, including 225 at its Troy headquarters.

The Chapter 7 bankruptcy filing also surprised its customers across the country, which include many schools that sell the books for fund-raisers.

Despite the closing, as of Tuesday afternoon, Entertainment Promotions' website was still taking orders for books. The company's Facebook and Twitter pages were still posting offers for the books on Tuesday morning.

For book lovers, turning the final page of a thrilling read can be a bittersweet experience. Now bookshops are capitalising on readers' appetite for extra pages to boost their fight back against the online retailers threatening their future, by signing up big name authors to pen bonus material exclusively for their customers. Fans of Chocolat author Joanne Harris who buy her follow-up novel, Peaches For Monsieur Le Curé, from Waterstone's will find it includes an extra chapter not available to those who snap up their copy at a reduced rate …

She is the undisputed queen of 'mummy porn' - her erotic tales of romance and bondage having both titillated and inspired millions of housewives across the world. And now Fifty Shades of Grey author E L James is to release a new book called 'Inner Goddess'. But fans dying to once again dive into her steamy world of sexual desire are this time going to have to do it themselves... because this one is a DIY guide on how to write.

I’ve been seeing lots of articles about social reading and how it’s the wave of the future for e-book discovery. CBC News had a lengthy article on the topic, and Digital Book World weighed in on it yesterday. (Incidentally, enough with the Fifty Shades references, OK guys?)

While social discovery makes for fascinating news articles, and sites like Goodreads are certainly in that space, I decided to go to the source—readers—and ask them for their opinion. You know what will make self-described introverts put down their books and speak up?

In 2006, after a career as an editor and writer for publications such as Outside, GQ and The New York Times Magazine, John Tayman's new book, The Colony, was doing well, and Scribner urged him to start thinking about a second book. Three things gave him pause. First: "I had just finished a long slog on a single book and was not so eager to jump into something of that size immediately."

Secondly: "I could see and recognize significant changes afoot as the industry moved from analog to digital."