Atlantic

 On Sept. 24, Jhumpa Lahiri's new Booker Prize-nominated novel, "The Lowland," will be released on this side of the Atlantic by Knopf in what promises to be a highlight of this most literary season. And yet surveying recent offerings in the bookstores, one can't help but notice a strange echo reverberating behind the esteemed author. Even the world of publishing, it seems, is not immune to the whims of fashion. 

"No one wants to be derivative in book-titling," said Ms. Sohn, an occasional Times contributor whose novel was released in paperback this past summer.

“Over the years I’ve often quoted David H. Rothman of Alexandria, Va., a pioneer in the entire field of electronic reading devices,” writes James Fallows, a national correspondent for The Atlantic, in an article about U.S. infrastructure that was published earlier this morning on The Atlantic‘s website. “[Rothman] was talking about his “Teleread” proposal many, many years [before] [...]

The post TeleRead founder David Rothman in The Atlantic appeared first on TeleRead: News and views on e-books, libraries, publishing and related topics.

Anti-trust investigations in both the US and the EU into the pricing and distribution models for eBooks have cast a number of issues firmly into the spotlight. At a broader legal level, the discussion centres around whether an agency distribution model (which leaves control over retail pricing in the hands of the publisher) or a traditional wholesale distribution model (which gives retailers the power to set final prices to consumers) is the most appropriate for the distribution of electronic titles. Within that broader framework sits the anti-trust case that has been pursued on both sides of the Atlantic.

I hadn’t been aware of this until just today, probably because it happened on the other side of the Atlantic, but in recent weeks there’s been a bit of a furor over Amazon UK listing several e-books for only 20 pence each. It turns out, though, that this isn’t Amazon’s “fault”—Amazon is only pricematching Sony. [...]

In his blogpost The Incredible Resilience of Publishing Fantasy , author Michael Levin responds to a piece in the Atlantic by former Random House editor Peter Osnos. Osnos makes the case that books will survive, while Levin makes the point Osnos avoids saying: trade publishers might not, having "lost the two things that made their business model work: the hammerlocks on distribution and marketing that the Internet has utterly destroyed." Levin's correct, but I also agree with Osnos that trade publishers are resilient and adaptive.

From the press release: A new New York Times bestseller has captivated BooksOnBoard audiences on both sides of the Atlantic this week: Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel. Historical fiction is one of those genres that doesnt often make its presence known on our top ten lists, remarked Nathan Johnson, BooksOnBoards Director of Operations. [...]