Entertainment Weekly features the author as its cover story, as anticipation builds for her latest release. Borders’ director of children’s merchandising Diane Mangan says, ”I kept saying that there will never be another book in my career like Harry Potter 7. Who would have thought a year later we’d be talking like this again?” EW notes: “Despite wincing over the occasional Amazon.com one-star review, Meyer can’t help but pore over the message boards. She loves her fans and wants to know how they’re responding to her work. ”Sometimes the feedback is helpful,” she says. ‘I want to be a better […]
News
Mayer's New Book Says CIA Engaged In Torture
Jane Mayer’s book THE DARK SIDE: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals–publishing next week from Doubleday but obtained by the NYT–says that “Red Cross investigators concluded last year in a secret report that the Central Intelligence Agency’s interrogation methods for high-level Qaeda prisoners constituted torture and could make the Bush administration officials who approved them guilty of war crimes.” Mayer “acknowledges that Red Cross investigators based their account largely on interviews with the prisoners. But she writes that several C.I.A. officers she spoke with confirmed parts of the Red Cross […]
USA Today's Q2 Bestsellers
Randy Pausch’s LAST LECTURE was No. 1 and Eckhart Tolle stayed at No. 2–but Stephenie Meyer took four of the next five slots, and BREAKING DAWN, the fourth in the Twilight series, doesn’t land until August 2. (A Twilight film is set for December.)USAT
Weltbild: Clarified In Translation
More information on the potential sale of Germany’s Weltbild, which a colleague there calls “the biggest fish to come on to the market” in some time, with sales of approximately 2 billion euros a year, and a market value estimated at about 1 billion euros a year. Holtzbrinck is already a 50-percent owner of Weltbild’s publishing company Droemer and is thought to be interested primarily in that piece of the empire. Separately, Weltbild is a 50-percent partner with Hugendubel in a holding company that operates multiple bookstore chains, including Hugendubel, Weltbild plus and Jokers, and most recently, they took over […]
Carnegie Mellon's Entertainment Technology Center Starts Lulu.com "Imprint"
The university has announced ECW Press, an academic imprint designed to experiment with “flexibility in publishing without the limitations encountered by traditional publishing.” They note in the release that “all ETC Press publications will be released under a Creative Commons license, and will also have associated websites to encourage and enable a community of collaborative authorship and discussion.” Lulu.com is their technology partner, providing print-on-demand along with downloads. The press can be found at http://etc.cmu.edu/etcpress/Release
Zell Aide on Book Pages
“Heard a conversation about how Book reporting doesn’t generate revenue and may have to go away. WAIT! Maybe Book reviews and coverage are one of those things that don’t generate revenue right now, BUT–are trademarks for newspapers and elicit high passion from readers. At XM, we had Opera channels. Low listenership…HIGH passion…AND–it was one of those things that even if people didn’t listen or even like Opera, it was one of those things you had to have for completeness. Maybe Book sections in newspapers are just dated. Not the idea…but the look and feel. Maybe they’re modeled after a book […]