People Magazine

New York, NY (June 6, 2013)—Veteran children’s book editor Phoebe Yeh will join Random House Children’s Books as Vice President, Publisher, Crown Books for Young Readers, effective June 21, it was announced today by Barbara Marcus, the company’s President and Publisher. Yeh will leave her current post at HarperCollins Children’s Books, where she has worked…

The number of parties has dwindled and there are fewer blockbuster celebrity authors, but the actual business of book publishing looks a little brighter this year.

Book Expo America, which kicks off at the Javits Convention Center today, is designed to bring independent booksellers together so that publishers can hype books they think will be big sellers in the coming months.

Yesterday, the Alfred A. Knopf imprint announced “Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy,” the third book in British writer Helen Fielding’s mega-selling series about the travails of a single woman. The first two books became international sensations in the 1990s

Leading independent eBook publisher RosettaBooks today announced that it has been named publisher for AARP’s original eBooks. The 37-million-member nonprofit organization is an advocate for Americans 50+ on crucial issues such as healthcare

People have been brewing coffee for more than 500 years. Today, you can go into most homes or businesses and find people brewing with a new process barely resembling that used even a generation ago. Thanks to Keurig, people are using K-cups to brew coffee one cup at a time. Of what other industry does that remind you? Perhaps publishing? Until recently, publishers have been producing and selling books with only minor changes since Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press in 1450. Keurig did not invent coffee, but sought a new way to deliver it. They created a new category by doing something that was unique. Perhaps if publishers do the same thing we can change our moniker from the book-publishing industry to the book-selling industry.

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.

On January 29, Amazon Technologies Inc. received a patent pertaining to the "secondary market for digital objects." According to the patent abstract, the technology will enable Amazon customers to transfer -- and presumably sell -- e-books, MP3s, and other digital files to other customers. And, Apple too has filed for patents on the transfer of owned digital items.

The whole issue of used digital goods is a big one, with far-reaching implications for media in general, but music and publishing in particular.

While several companies have entered the fray…

 The Internet may be disrupting much of the book industry, but for short-story writers it has been a good thing.

Story collections, an often underappreciated literary cousin of novels, are experiencing a resurgence, driven by a proliferation of digital options that offer not only new creative opportunities but exposure and revenue as well.

Already, 2013 has yielded an unusually rich crop of short-story collections, including George Saunders’s “Tenth of December,” which arrived in January with a media splash normally reserved for Hollywood movies and moved quickly onto the best-seller lists.

The next library in San Antonio, Texas, may not have any paper books for its patrons.

Nelson Wolff, a judge in Bexar County, Texas, where San Antonio is located, and Sergio Rodriguez, commissioner for the county's first precinct, have proposed a plan to create a library called BiblioTech that offers electronic media exclusively.

Though there are bookless academic libraries, at the University of Texas at San Antonio for example, Wolff said in a phone interview that he believes that BiblioTech will be first public library without paper books.

The biggest threat to selling digital intellectual property continues to be the looming threat of online piracy. RosettaBooks, the leading independent eBook publisher, has teamed with Digimarc Guardian(SM) in a case study on preventing piracy to be presented at the 2013 Digital Book World Convention + Expo.

In 1999, a young writer named Jenny Offill published a debut novel called “Last Things,” about a young child being home-schooled by a mother who is slowly going insane. The New York Times called the book, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, “remarkable,” and The Los Angeles Times made Ms. Offill a finalist for its award to new writers.

Then Ms. Offill essentially retreated for 13 years.