The New York Times

Several predictions have stated that 2012 will be “The Year of the Indie Author”. After all, 2011 saw some awfully big moments. John Locke became the first indie to break the Kindle million-seller mark. Amanda Hocking, Queen of the indie vampire books, signed a ginormous contract with St. Martins Press. And The New York Times deigned to include indies on their best seller list, where every week at least one title - often more - are contained.

Sourcebooks launches today an Agile Publishing Model (APM) that will allow for the rapid and interactive development of books, ebooks, videos, and other materials by its authors, where the content evolves through a partnership between the author and their community. This framework allows for a more iterative publishing process -- making content available faster, getting real-time customer feedback, and shaping the final product based on the collaboration between the author and reader.

At the end of last year, Longreads, one of the curators of lengthy, magazine-y stories that has sprung up to help fans of long-form journalism find great stuff online, released a list highlighting the top ten longreads of 2011.

The list included such savor-worthy pieces as Maria Bustillos' examination of David Foster Wallace's private self-help library, for The Awl; Jeff Wise's investigation into the crash of Air France 447, for Popular Mechanics; and Amy Harmon's exploration of adult autism, for The New York Times. The list was, in other words, fantastic.

+29,029 ft.: If all the copies of "Steve Jobs," Walter Isaacson's biography of the late Apple CEO, were stacked, the pile would be taller than Mt. Everest.

This is the last in a series of posts over this week that looks at the most significant developments of this year in the sectors that we cover, from publishing to mobile to advertising. Of the seven years I’ve been writing about our namesake topic here at paidContent, 2011 is the hands-down winner when it comes people paying for digital content. The numbers aren’t all in yet and some of it will be hard to quantify given the lack of complete transparency but it’s clear that more people are willing to pay for digital access to

$9.99 is often treated as a magic price—the cost of a New York Times bestseller on Kindle back in the good old days, before big-six publishers adopted agency pricing models and ended Amazon’s discounting of their books. However, for a variety of reasons, few readers ever had the chance to buy those $9.99 e-books—in large part because e-readers themselves were so expensive. From yesterday’s Wall Street Journal : When Amazon.com Inc. introduced its first Kindle e-reader back in November 2007, the $9.99 digital best seller was a key selling point. Today, the price of a

Peter Meyers, author of “Kindle Fire: The Missing Manual,” said the Fire’s not made for Apple’s customers. My article in The New York Times on Monday citing high levels of dissatisfaction with Amazon’s new tablet generated a torrential response, much of it from people who said they loved their Kindle Fires. The wilder commentators suggested that the whole article somehow came from Apple, which, in their view, was trying to get people to hock grandma’s jewels to buy $500 iPads. None of those conspiracy theorists explained why so many original users of the Fire put mixed to negative reviews

Buying books on Amazon is better for authors, better for the economy, and better for you. The independent bookstore is not the last stronghold of literary culture you think it is Jupiterimages/Thinkstock. Amazon just did a boneheaded thing, and it deserves all the scorn you want to heap on it. Last week, the company offered people cash in exchange for going into retail stores and scanning items using the company’s Price Check smartphone app. If you scanned a product and then purchased it from Amazon rather than the shop you were standing in, Amazon would give you a 5

Guinness World Records 2012 for the eReader releases with the same intriguing, informative and inspiring collection of superlatives found in the latest Guinness World Records 2012 book now in an easily searchable and portable format.

Happy Thanksgiving, Book Business readers!

May we recommend you check out (but don't gore yourself on)the year's 100 notable tomes in fiction, poetry and nonfiction as selected by the New York Times between drumsticks, football games and "quality time" with extended family. Remember, it's about portion control, people.