The New Yorker

"A lot of readers have the perception that when something arrives as a book, it's gone through a more rigorous fact-checking process than a magazine or a newspaper or a website, and that's simply not that case," Silverman said. He attributes this in part to the physical nature of a book: Its ink and weight imbue it with a sense of significance unlike that of other mediums.

Fact-checking dates back to the founding of Time in 1923, and has a strong tradition at places like Mother Jones and The New Yorker. But it's becoming less and less common

NEW YORK (AP) - Three years ago, guest speaker Mindy Kaling joked that publishing's annual national convention, BookExpo America, resembled "a high school reunion where all the jocks were killed in a plane crash, and all the minorities, too."

Little seems to have changed.

From Wednesday to Saturday, tens of thousands of publishers, authors, agents and librarians will meet at the Jacob K. Javits Center in New York for a convention predominantly organized by whites, spotlighting books predominantly written, edited and published by whites.

George Packer’s recent article in The New Yorker about the ever-increasing presence of Amazon is simply the latest in a long line of wake-up calls — or calls-to-arms — to the traditional book publishing industry. Amazon’s ability to sell directly to consumers, as well as use consumer insights to predict future purchases, continues to challenge the ways in which publishers think of their business models. In fact, publishers will likely have to change from a business-to-business model to a business-to-consumer model in order to evolve as brands and compete effectively in the marketplace.

George Packer’s epic 12,000-word piece on Amazon and the publishing industry in the current issue of The New Yorker is full of memorable reported bits—the culture clash between Amazon’s editorial staffers and its programmers, insider accounts of the company’s hiring process, the story of an Amazon employee who was handed a printout of a Slate article about Amazon’s stingy philanthropy with the words “Fix This” scrawled at the top in Bezos’s hand. But for a wide-ranging survey of the new publishing landscape, its cast of characters is a notably familiar one.

J.D. Salinger may not be done publishing after all, according to claims in a new film and book set for release next week. Salinger, who died in 2010 at the age of 91, has been known for a distinguished but scant literary oeuvre that was capped by the enormous success of his 1951 novel, The Catcher in the Rye. But a forthcoming documentary and related book, both titled, Salinger, include detailed assertions that Salinger instructed his estate to publish at least five additional books — some of them entirely new, some extending past work

Chris Coen’s Unanimous Entertainment has secured the rights to MAY WE BE FORGIVEN by A.M. Homes.  Originally published to widespread acclaim by Viking in the U.S. and Granta Books in England this past October, the book recently won the high-profile Women’s Prize for Fiction inLondon. Rights to the novel have been sold in eleven other countries to date.

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

New York, NY, May 8, 2013 – From May 29-30, 2013, the best minds in digital publishing will convene in the Javits Center in New York City for the highly-anticipated, perennially sold-out at IDPF Digital Book 2013 conference (http://idpf.org/db13). This year’s theme, Advancing Publishing in a Digital World, has already drawn an enormous crowd, with seats expected to sell out soon.

Some featured speakers and session insights include:

• Otis Chandler, Co-founder and CEO of Goodreads will share an update and tackle questions from the crowd, including: what’s next for Goodreads now that it’s owned by Amazon? What does the recent sale mean for the 17 million members, 530 million books and 23 million reviews?

• Malcolm Gladwell, bestselling author and staff writer for The New Yorker will speculate on the digital future with Brad Stone, Bloomberg Businessweek writer and author of the upcoming The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

In the latest fracas over literary sexism, Claire Messud objected to a comment an interviewer made about whether she would want to be friends with the main character of her new novel, The Woman Upstairs.

The interviewer asks: "I wouldn’t want to be friends with Nora, would you? Her outlook is almost unbearably grim.”

And Messud answers:

“For heaven’s sake, what kind of question is that? Would you want to be friends with Humbert Humbert? Would you want to be friends with Mickey Sabbath? Saleem Sinai? Hamlet? Krapp? Oedipus? Oscar Wao? …

VIDA, an organization for women in the literary arts, conducts “The Count,” an annual survey of publications that contain book reviews, and compares the number of male vs. female reviewers, as well as the number of books by men vs. books by women that were reviewed. The results are surprising.