Publishers Weekly

Amid the Arctic flatness of the Minnesota prairie on a bleak December afternoon, author Amanda Hocking's new brick house seems a snug nest of Midwestern warmth.
 
About 100 miles south of Minneapolis, Austin is most famous as the birthplace of Spam, the canned meat product.

Hocking's mother herds a gaggle of pint-sized, present-laden relatives out the door. Hocking's roommate, Eric Goldman, cleans up, stuffing crumpled wrapping paper into a garbage can. The canine lord of the manor, a regal miniature schnauzer named Elroy, dominates the foyer, resplendent in a Christmas get-up.

Publishing, that cheeky teaser of mind, body, and soul, enjoys the same level of excitement and drama as other fields, if not more. As with every industry out there, it plays host to a crazy ensemble cast of heroes, villains, threats, challenges, underdogs, and other archetypes. Then conflict happens — or at least publishers come across a conflict that needs addressing. What follows are just some of the few exciting adventures that go down in the publishing world.

This has been a tumultuous year for the book business, a time of profound change in the way books are distributed and read. It is no exaggeration to say that the widespread acceptance of digital devices and a simultaneous contraction of shelf-space in stores qualify as a historic shift. The demise of Borders, the country's second-largest book chain as recently as a year ago, was largely offset by the sale of millions of e-readers and electronic books on a vast scale…

Here’s an interesting press release.  Once again, small, innovative companies are challenging the dominance of the big publishers:

Pear Jam Books celebrates its worldwide launch on 14th December 2011 at Auckland’s planetarium, with authors and illustrators mingling with stars including Oscar nominee Keisha Castle-Hughes. A new publishing company aims to take on traditional publishers to [...]

My latest Publishers Weekly column is "Copyrights vs. Human Rights." In honor of Human Rights Day on Dec 10, I've written a piece on publishing's shameful support of SOPA, a law that will punish the online services that are so key to coordinating and...

That’s the title of an article in  Publishers Weekly: And then there was one. After Penguin announced this week that it was pulling its frontlist e-book titles from libraries and disabling all Kindle library lends, Random House remains the only “Big Six” publisher to embrace library sales of e-book editions. But with the e-book market [...]

According to Gourmand-Magazine, more than one-third of yearly cookbook sales takes place in November and December.

With the rising popularity of e-book readers like Amazon’s Kindle and tablets like the iPad, pundits, publishers and foodie readers alike have all but declared the print form dead, proclaiming that the future of cookbooks  belongs to the digital format.

On the official morning of its release, Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs is #1 on the Kindle bestseller list, #1 in Apple’s iBookstore and #2 on the Nook bestseller list. It is not yet showing up on the Kobo or Google (NSDQ: GOOG) bestseller lists, possibly since those sites don’t offer pre-orders. Pre-orders for e-books (and other products) give retailers a way to capitalize on pre-release hype and lock in orders early.

Amazon.com has taught readers that they do not need bookstores. Now it is encouraging writers to cast aside their publishers. Amazon will publish 122 books this fall in an array of genres, in both physical and e-book form. It is a striking acceleration of the retailer’s fledging publishing program that will place Amazon squarely in competition with the New York houses that are also its most prominent suppliers.

Thomas Nelson announces the creation of the company's first enhanced e-book, which released on Aug. 25.