Nancy Pearl, the closest thing American libraries have to a celebrity, unleashed something of a shockwave through the book industry yesterday with the announcement that she is publishing a series of books with Amazon.

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Earlier this year, World Book Night launched in the UK with the aim of giving away one million books to light or non readers in a 24 hour period. It was a huge success and many other countries are expected to join in the fun in the coming years, starting with the USA on April 23, 2012.

The list of 30 books that will be offered on World Book Night USA has just been released. If you are a USA resident aged 16 or over and would like to give away books, go to http://www.us.worldbooknight.org and complete the form which asks, simply, which book you want to give away, where, to whom & why?

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Did you know...

1. Amazon's $34 billion annual revenues are larger than the GDPs of half the countries in the world.
2. Amazon's web sales are five times the combined web sales of Walmart, Target and Buy.com.
3. Amazon serves 137 million customers a week, 33% more than voted in the 2010 USA elections. That's 19.5 million customers daily - equal to the population of Beijing, or the number of Americans who live on less than $6000 a year.
4. The average amount brought in by one of Amazon's unique users is $189. That's almost five times as valuable as Ebay's average ($39).
5. Amazon owns 1/10th of North America's e-commerce pie.
6. If Amazon's active users were a country, their population would be twice that of Canada.
7. With 50,000 preorders, Kindle Fire is set to double the launch of the iPad.
8. Amazon's current cloud platform could store 82 books for each person on the earth.
9. Amazon's warehouse space has grown from a 400 square foot garage in 1995 to 25 million square feet - equivalent to more than 700 Madison Square Gardens.

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Congratulations to Alan Hollinghurst for his UK National Book Award win. The Stranger's Child, which was controversially omitted from this year's Man Booker shortlist, won him the Author of the Year Award at last Friday's Galaxy National Book Awards.

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Most book trailers are, frankly, dull but occasionally one comes along that breaks the mold such as this one for Machine Man by Australian author Max Barry:

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In a series of lectures, Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk ruminated on what goes on in the mind of a person reading a novel. His thoughts are summarized by Susan K. Perry, Ph.D. below.

Do these match your experiences? The point about finishing a (great) novel and feeling that it had been written just for me particularly struck home - it maybe irrational but it's so true!

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