Category: publishing

“Google will be adding millions of digital titles for sale on any device with Internet access: smart phones, tablets, netbooks, desktops, and every digital reading device except Kindle, which for now at least continues to operate on a closed proprietary system.” While Google will sell directly to consumers, the company will also serve as “an e-book supplier and infrastructure back office” to independent booksellers.

Selected by the editors at an independent publisher in Paris from among 80 submissions (so far), 16 manuscripts are posted on the publisher’s website; “co-editors” invest €11 in whichever titles they choose. Once a manuscript has 2,000 co-editors, the publisher then prints copies of the book for sale in bookstores and online; each co-editor receives a free copy and, depending on sales, a return on the original investment of up to €88.

“A Cambridge graduate referred to as the ‘tome raider’ who stole antique books worth £40,000 from a world-famous library was jailed for three-and-a-half years today. William Jacques, who stole £1m of rare books in the late 1990s, drew up a ‘thief’s shopping list’ as he continued his life of crime.”

“Kafka died in 1924 and, if his last wishes had been followed, novels such as The Trial and The Castle would never have seen the light of day.”

“The company has revealed that it has been selling 143 e-books for every 100 hardcover books over the course of the second quarter of 2010. The outpacing of digital books versus hardbacks is also accelerating, as during the last month alone, Amazon.com has sold 180 Kindle e-books for every 100 hardcovers.”

“Franz Kafka wanted all his manuscripts to be burned after his death, but his friend Max Brod disregarded the request, seeding a complex legal battle over thousands of manuscripts that has the literary world agog. That legal tussle takes a new twist today as four safety deposit boxes in a Zurich bank containing the manuscripts are opened.”

“Monday was a day for the history books – if those will even exist in the future. Amazon.com, one of the nation’s largest booksellers, announced Monday that for the last three months, sales of books for its e-reader, the Kindle, outnumbered sales of hardcover books.”

“One of Britain’s leading historians, Orlando Figes, is to pay damages and costs to two rivals who launched a libel case after a row erupted over fake reviews posted on the Amazon website.”

Alan Shadrake, a 75-year-old British journalist, was on the island to promote his latest book, Once A Jolly Hangman: Singapore Justice In The Dock, when he was arrested Sunday on charges of criminal defamation.

“Farrar, Straus and Giroux has decided to let readers peek behind the scenes at one of the most delicate parts of the publishing business: the writing of books, as they happen. … A new website (and also monthly newsletter) is called, with editorial exactitude, FSG Work in Progress.”