Publishers Weekly

After nearly a year of selling ebooks free of DRM copy protection, Macmillan subsidiary Tor Books UK said that it has seen no increase in piracy on any of its properties. The company's editorial director elaborated in an extensive reflection on the decision earlier this week, writing, "The move has been a hugely positive one for us, [...] we’re still pleased that we took this step."

Husna Haq of The Christian Science Monitor tracked sales for the 2013 winners just two weeks after the Pulitzer Prize was announced. The result? Money has not fallen from the sky. Well, not yet.

The second week tends to yield high sales for Pulitzer Prize winners, which is why I assume The Christian Science Monitor is tracking these numbers so soon. The real question is how many months the books can keep up the hype, enthusiasm, and good press that arrives with the award.

James Patterson is in no need of a bailout. The author of bestsellers including “Along Came a Spider” and “Suzanne’s Diary for Nicholas” currently occupies spots on four different New York Times bestseller lists with three discrete books. (Those would be “Alex Cross, Run”; “Now You See Her,” written with Michael Ledwidge; and “I, Michael Bennett,” written with Ledwidge also.)

Despite his success in a strain of genre fiction not often recommended in classrooms, Patterson has become, suddenly, the closest thing the publishing industry has to an ambassador. The multimillion-seller author placed an ad last weekend in the New York

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.

Brook Colangelo has already made his digital mark. As the former CIO of the Executive Office of the President (EOP) for the Obama administration, he pursued open source website-development projects for the WhiteHouse.gov site, ushered in mobile devices while ushering out desktop computers with floppy discs, and embarked on such crowdsourcing experiments as We the People. Colangelo, 35, also shook up the culture in another way: He leveraged the benefits of an Agile methodology to make sure these innovations happened fast. That adds up to some serious CIO street cred…

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…

Maybe you’ve noticed that there seem to be a lot of Barnes & Noble superstores closing lately? Not just stores in remote locations (like, say, this one in upstate New York), but in some of the nation’s largest metropolitan shopping areas, such as Los Angeles, San Francisco, Philadelphia, Washington, DC, Seattle, Chicago, two stores in Dallas, another in Austin, and Manhattan. And that’s just in the last 30 days or so.

What had been a slow shrinkage as leases ran out turned into an avalanche after Thanksgiving.

Growing up doesn't really end at age 20, so why should young adult fiction stop there? The New Adult genre, a growing subset of young adult lit, aims to give voice to the post-high school experience and its implied transition to independent living: college, moving away from home, traveling, starting first jobs and even sex. The content may be darker and more mature than what is traditionally found in YA, and the protagonists range from late teens to early 20s, but the stories offer many of the same kind of identity challenges and coming of age narratives as their YA brethren.

[Press Release] Effective December 31, 2012, Brad Flora will be resigning from his position as the head of the Small Publishers Association of North America (SPAN). Brian Jud will be stepping into the responsibilities and leadership as SPAN's Executive Director, effective January 1st, 2013. The current membership benefits will continue. The SPANnet online community and the premium educational content at SPANpro.org will develop and grow. The existing educational programs will be expanded to include more book-marketing webinars, articles, conferences and blogs.

Lynn Rosen reconnects with author Beth Kephart to follow up on the success of her latest book, the YA novel Small Damages.