Books

Last year, the release of the Hollywood adaptation of Gillian Flynn's 2012 novel "Gone Girl" propelled the book onto best-seller lists in several countries around the world. Millions of people bought it, but how many of them actually read it from cover to cover? The Toronto-based e-reading platform Kobo, which delivers digital books to 23 million people in 190 countries and is a competitor to Amazon Kindle, recently released statistics for 2014 that showed the best-selling books in the company's major markets and how frequently readers finished the titles they bought.

Maya Angelou, who died Wednesday at the age of 86, was known for many things throughout her life: her wisdom, her acting, her indefatigable civil rights activism. But more than anything else, Angelou was famous for her writing. Both a prolific poet and memorist, Angelou penned more than two dozens books and collections throughout her life (including two cookbooks).

Samantha Smith will join Scholastic UK on May 20th as Fiction Publisher. Samantha is currently Editorial Director at Little Brown, where she has worked with authors including P.C. and Kristin Cast, Chris Colfer and Stephenie Meyer.  She will report to Hilary Murray Hill, MD of Scholastic Children’s Books, who has overall responsibility for Scholastic’s trade publishing in the UK.  

Hilary commented, ‘‘Samantha’s appointment will enhance our exceptional editorial team and take the Scholastic fiction list forward in new directions.  I am absolutely delighted that we will be working together”. Samantha said, ''I'm thrilled to be joining Scholastic. It's a house with a brilliant publishing history, one that I very much grew up with, but that remains a vibrant and dynamic part of children's publishing today and is incredibly well-placed to meet the challenges of the market going forward. I'm looking forward to working with the in-house team and their outstanding authors.”

From the EBSCO Announcement: Gateway to America: The People, Places, and Organizations of 19th Century New York and Revolutionary War Era Orderly Books archive databases from the New-York Historical Society, are now available from EBSCO Publishing (EBSCO). [Clip] Gateway to America: The People, Places, and Organizations of 19th-Century New York is a diverse collection of [...]

The secret to publishing a runaway best seller is out, and you won’t need to read a book or watch a DVD to get in on it. “The Secret,” a self-help book by Rhonda Byrne, is perhaps the most controversial chart-topper since Dan Brown’s “The Da Vinci Code.” By now you’ve probably heard its premise—that your own thoughts hold the key to a happy, healthy and successful life. Positive thinking attracts positive results, preaches Byrne and a team of “teachers” featured throughout the book. They call it the law of attraction. Your business didn’t fail because you missed a quota or hired the

Dwight Baker, president of Grand Rapids, Mich.-based Baker Publishing Group—the third-largest publisher in the Evangelical Christian publishing market—arrived in his position from a different starting point than most publishing company presidents, and he’s using that fresh perspective to put his own personal spin on religious publishing. His approach seems to be working. The company’s annual sales in 2006 surpassed $50 million, four of its publishing divisions saw double-digit growth, and it has a current New York Times Best Seller on the market with 1.4 million copies sold. The family business was founded in 1939 by Dwight’s grandfather, Herman Baker. When Dwight was a teenager, he