Category: publishing

“MPs are ready to haul Amazon back to parliament to answer new questions about its tax status in Britain after a Guardian investigation … found Amazon pushing definitions close to breaking point; and tax authorities unable, or unwilling, to prevent the imposition of aggressive tax avoidance structures.”

Northville, Michigan’s “assistant superintendent for instructional services Robert Behnke wrote a letter to the community regarding the school’s decision, stating that the committee worried that removing the book would constitute as censorship.”

“The total revenue generated by e-book sales in the U.S. in 2012 was $3.04 billion, a 44.2% increase over the year before. … And the increase in e-book sales did not take a bite out of print books – at least, not in the aggregate. Print sales were $12 billion in 2012; they were $12 billion in 2011, too.”

“[Inspired by Claire Messud’s recent outburst,] we surveyed a group of novelists – Donald Antrim, Margaret Atwood, Jonathan Franzen, Rivka Galchen, and Tessa Hadley – asking them how often the question of likeability has been posed about their characters … and why this persists as a criteria for so many readers.”

“Employees at two huge distribution warehouses, in Bad Hersfeld and Leipzig, launched the one-day strike, the giant services sector union Ver.di said. Ver.di is demanding that Amazon’s 9,000 workers in Germany be paid according to a wage deal in place for the retail and mail-order industries.”

Science fiction tends to locate itself in one or the other; Atwood, looking back to the 19th century, talks about why.

“The relevance of these gloriously inflated book boxes is being questioned in an age that looks to the Internet for its intellectual resources.”

“While most Americans have never seen Ernest Hemingway’s home in Cuba where he wrote some of his most famous books, a set of 2,000 recently digitized records delivered to the United States will give scholars and the public a fuller view of the Nobel Prize-winning novelist’s life.”

“After dropping the price of their Nook Simple Touch (I’m pretty sure it’s called the Nouk Simple Touch across the pond) from £79 to £29, Barnes & Noble has seen ‘unprecedented demand’ for the ereader and, as a result, they’re sold out in ‘almost all retail locations.'”

“A book that commands this much anticipation comes with a heavy amount of foreshadowing — including, in this case, a social-media tease surrounding the title, arcane mathematical symbolism around the publication date and a virtual lockdown of its international translators.”