Category: publishing

“Discovery Communications sued Amazon.com yesterday, accusing the e-commerce giant of infringing its patent for electronic book technology with the Kindle reader.”

Crown Publishing Group will release the volume, tentatively titled Decision Points, in 2010. “Instead of recounting his life story, [Bush will] write about a dozen personal and professional choices, including giving up drinking and picking Dick Cheney as his vice president.”

“The Globe and Mail leads the pack of finalists with 13 nominations in the running for the 2008 National Newspaper Awards, to be announced May 22 in Montreal. The Toronto Star has 10 nominations, followed by Montreal’s La Presse [the only francophone nominee] with eight. The Ottawa Citizen, Calgary Herald and Hamilton Spectator each collected four.”

“He beat Flaubert, Stendhal, Baudelaire, de Beauvoir, Camus and Celine, and lost only to Proust. William Faulkner was the second most-cited author in a French magazine’s poll asking French writers to name their favourite books… Guardian columnist Agnes Poirier says ‘we love Faulkner because we consider him a revolutionary novelist – he experiments with narration like no other’.”

“London indie Crockatt & Powell is switching the majority of books in its Fulham Road branch to remaindered stock.” An owner attributed the move to the credit crunch and increased competition.

“Aiming to outdo Amazon.com and recapture the crown for the most digital titles in an e-book library, Sony is announcing Thursday a deal with Google to make a half million copyright-free books available for its Reader device, a rival to the Amazon Kindle.”

“Glaswegian author James Kelman is the UK’s contender in this year’s race for the Man Booker international prize, a clash of the world’s literary titans that pits such giants as the Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa against Australia’s Booker prize-winning Peter Carey and the Nobel laureate VS Naipaul. … Well-known names on the shortlist include Canadian short story writer Alice Munro and American authors EL Doctorow and Joyce Carol Oates.”

“The threat of demolition hangs over one former family home, there is a proposal to divert the flow of a river in the grounds of another, his great-grandfather’s rectory at Drumcliffe is long gone and the Yeats Society has repeatedly complained about the lack of signposts and plaques to pinpoint other locations immortalised by the man who penned the slogan ‘land of heart’s desire’ about the Co Sligo landscape.”

“The New Yorker led the pack of nominees for the 2009 National Magazine Awards, garnering 10 nominations in categories including General Excellence, Reporting and Feature Writing.” GQ received eight nods, New York six, Esquire and National Geographic five each. “Ironically, Best Life, recently shuttered by Rodale, was nominated for an award for best magazine section.”

“Could a vintage, dog-eared copy of ‘The Cat in the Hat’ or ‘Where the Wild Things Are’ be hazardous to your children? Probably not, according to the nation’s premier medical sleuths, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But a new federal law banning more than minute levels of lead in most products intended for children 12 or younger — and a federal agency’s interpretation of the law — prompted at least two libraries last month to pull children’s books printed before 1986 from their shelves.”