Ted Solotaroff, longtime book editor of such authors as Russell Banks, Sue Miller, Max Apple and Bobbie Ann Mason at Harper and founder of The New American Review–supported at first by NAL and later by both Simon & Schuster and Bantam–died Friday at home from complications of pneumonia. He was 80.NYT
Stock Market Remains Irrational on Amazon/Kindle
To reinforce our Amazon/Sony Kindle/Reader observations from last week, in Monday’s trading the stock market drove up Amazon’s share price based on a new analyst’s report from Citigroup that contains no actual new data of any kind! Yes, the same folks who are deep in hock to Saudi oil masters and others after their huge losses in the American credit market keep using the power of fantasy and multiplication to conclude that Kindle is just like the iPod!Seattle PI Blog
Spellberg Rationalizes Position
Since academics generally don’t stand for the repression of writing and inciting of violence, University of Texas at Austin professor Denise Spellberg writes to the WSJ to insist the paper’s op-ed last week “falsely asserts that I am the ‘instigator'” of the cancellation by Random House of Sherry Jones’s novel The Jewel of Medina. But her clarification makes her position pretty clear: “As an expert on Aisha’s life, I felt it was my professional responsibility to counter this novel’s fallacious representation of a very real woman’s life…. It was in that same professional capacity that I felt it my duty […]
Suskind Documents CIA Lie
Ron Suskind, author of THE WAY OF THE WORLD, includes former CIA head of the Near East division and deputy director of clandestine operations Rob Richer as one of his on-the-record sources for the assertion that the agency was ordered to fake a document to help support the Administration’s case for war in Iraq. As wagons were circled when the book was released, Richer said in a statement “I never received direction from George Tenet or anyone else in my chain of command to fabricate a document from Habbush as outlined in Mr. Suskind’s book.” But Suskind has now posted […]
Nielsen Wants ISBNs for Each eFormat
In their role as exclusive UK ISBN registrar, Nielsen Book has issued a statement indicating they will exclude from their database titles that use a single ISBN to represent all e-book forms of a particular. In other words they are rejecting that practice that is currently favored by most large publishers, requiring the assignment of a different ISBN to each different electronic edition of the same title. As quoted from the statement in the Bookseller, Nielsen notes that “we acknowledge that [publishers'[ e-book initiatives to date may not have required per-format identification…. We believe that hardwiring bibliographic and identification practice […]
Fewer Novels for France
The French publishing industry still releases the bulk of their fiction lists between mid-August and the end of October (“la rentrée littéraire”) but this year’s crop of 676 novels will be 7 percent smaller than last year’s batch of 727 titles, according to magazine Livres Hebdos. Part of it, however, is that “French publishers looking to spread their publishing output throughout the year.” The magazine’s Vincy Thomas says: “These books are fairly dark, very depressing – a bit like France. There is a ‘grande malaise’, a sort of depression, in France at the moment. This is not a joyful country; […]