Husna Haq

The literary community seems divided on Amazon’s Kindle Worlds, a new platform that will allow fans to publish their fan fiction through the book giant.

Fan fiction has always been controversial, largely because fans are writing stories about characters that many see as the intellectual property of their creators: the original authors. In some cases, as with J.K. Rowling's "Harry Potter" books, the characters are in fact copyrighted.

Husna Haq of The Christian Science Monitor tracked sales for the 2013 winners just two weeks after the Pulitzer Prize was announced. The result? Money has not fallen from the sky. Well, not yet.

The second week tends to yield high sales for Pulitzer Prize winners, which is why I assume The Christian Science Monitor is tracking these numbers so soon. The real question is how many months the books can keep up the hype, enthusiasm, and good press that arrives with the award.

Despite its almost mythical dominance in book retailing, Amazon has struggled mightily to crack the publishing business. While it sells millions of copies of other publishers’ books, Amazon can’t quite seem to get its own books off the ground and onto the bestseller charts, according to a recent Wall Street Journal piece that examined the online retailer’s publishing woes.

Case in point: Penny Marshall’s memoir, “My Mother Was Nuts.”

Barnes & Noble announced today that it would cut the prices on both the Nook Tablet and the Nook Color e-reader. Beginning this week, the 16GB Nook Tablet will sell for $199, down from $249; the 8GB model, meanwhile, goes from $199 to $179. As for the Nook Color, which has always straddled the middle ground between tablet and plain old e-reader, expect to pay $149.

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