Author Chuck Palahniuk survives freak car accident
Mar 26 2012: Last Friday, Chuck Palahniuk was hit by a semi trailer while sitting in his car parked in a driveway off Washington state highway. Both car and trailer were written off but the drivers were uninjured, except for Palahniuk who reported a stiff...
11lbs of marijuana intercepted on its way to fictitious St Martin's Press employee
Mar 21 2012: Someone mailed more than eleven pounds of marijuana to the offices of St. Martin's Press at the Flatiron Building in Manhattan today. Bound for an apparently fictitious employee named Karen Wright, the shipments had a potential street value of...
UK Publishers Association calls for abolition of 20% VAT on e-books to align with print
Mar 21 2012: The Publishers Association in the UK is calling for the government to abolish the 20% VAT rate on e-books, putting pressure on chancellor of the exchequer George Osborne ahead of the Budget today to match the zero-rating on print books for digital...
Hunger Games presells over 1 million tickets ahead of Friday opening
Mar 19 2012: The Hunger Games movie, the first in a planned trilogy based on the book trilogy of the same name by author Suzanne Collins, has already presold 1 million tickets ahead of its opening this...
French graphic mag artist Jean Giraud, known as Moebius, dies at 73
Mar 10 2012: Jean Giraud, one of France's leading comics artists, has died in Paris at the age of 73 after a long illness. He drew for more than 50 years, under various names, but was most widely known as...
Mar 09 2012: The 2012 National Book Critics Circle Award winners have been announced: Binocular Vision by Edith Pearlman (fiction), Liberty's Exiles by Maya Jasanoff (nonfiction), George F. Kennan by John Lewis Gaddis (biography), and The Memory Palace by Mira Bartok...
Mar 08 2012: The Orange Prize longlist has been announced. The 20-title list includes The Sealed Letter by Emma Donoghue,
Half Blood Blues by Esi Edugyan, The Forgotten Waltz by Anne Enright (Jonathan Cape), Gillespie and I by Jane Harris, The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern, The Song of Achilles by...
US Justice Dept. may sue Apple and five major publishers
Mar 08 2012: The Wall Street Journal reports that the Justice Department has warned Apple and Penguin, Hachette Book Group, Macmillan, HarperCollins and Simon & Schuster that it plans to sue them for allegedly colluding to raise the price of electronic books by adopting the agency pricing model. The DoJ has...
French project intends to fund digitization of half a million out of print books from 20th century
Mar 06 2012: A plan to digitize half a million "unavailable" books from the 20th century is drawing fire from authors - 900 of whom have signed a petition saying the scheme is an abuse of their intellectual property rights. Authors have the option to opt out of the program within six months.
Mar 02 2012: The Utah House of Representatives passed legislation yesterday by a 69-0 vote "that would require remote retailers with nexus in Utah via distribution centers or subsidiaries to collect and remit sales tax for purchases made by state residents." The bill now moves to the...
Google ebooks dumps some bookstore affiliates after freezing program for new booksellers
Feb 24 2012: After a two-week pause in adding new members, on Thursday evening Google e-mailed a number of affiliates that sell Google eBooks, including independent booksellers, and announced that they are being dropped from the program.
Update: 2/29/2012: Google announced that it would be...
Feb 23 2012: Little, Brown has world English rights to the first novel for adults by JK Rowling, the company announced Thursday morning. All details, including title, publication date and topic will be announced later this year.
In the release, Rowling says, "Although I’ve enjoyed writing it every...
Stranger than fiction, blending tragedy and farce, How to Create the Perfect Wife is an engrossing tale of the radicalism, and deep contradictions, at the heart of the Enlightenment.
Z, the novel about the life of Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald is at points charming and; like another reviewer, I kept thinking of the movie, "Midnight...
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Although heavy on the scientific details, which slowed down the story for me (OK, I admit, I was one of those liberal arts majors who skipped out on...
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Loved this book. Magical, quirky, enchanting I could go on. All books do not have to be literary fiction, sometimes it is just so comforting to read...
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U.S. ebook sales up in 2012, but rate of growth is slowing(May 16 2013) In 2012, trade book sales (i.e. non academic book sales) rose 6.9%, to $15.049 billion, and e-book sales continued to grow, although the rate of growth...
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