As Kobo continues to expand its reach around the world, they have now found a UK retailer to sell its ereader and ebook offerings: WHSmith announced Wednesday they have teamed up with Kobo as the “perfect partner” for ebooks. They will sell the Wi-Fi ereader for £89.99 (and the Kobo Touch for £109.99) and offer the more than 2.2 million ebooks for sale from Kobo’s catalog. Previously WHSmith’s ebookstore was powered by Overdrive. WHSmith also reported their annual earnings for the year ending August 31 Wednesday, with overall sales down 3 percent to £1.273b on a 5 percent rise in […]
Do You Know Where Your Authors Are?
While most of the book world remains focused on what’s happening in Frankfurt, a select group of authors, performers, thinkers and others are gathering outside of Santa Fe, NM for the second-annual Amazon Campfire, where the theme is “storytelling.” Convened by Jeff Bezos and a small group of Amazon executives (including Audible.com founder Don Katz), the informal three-day idea-fest will feature discussions in morning and activities or free time in the afternoons. Among those said to be enrolled–with all guests traveling and staying at Amazon’s expense–are Armistead Maupin, Michael Chabon, Margaret Atwood, Alice Walker, Neil Gaiman, and Khaled Hosseini (plus […]
Updates: An Extra National Book Awards Finalist; More on Amazon’s 47North
It turns out that Wednesday’s announcement of the National Book Awards was not entirely error-free, as in the early afternoon a sixth nominee in the Young People’s Literature category – CHIME by Fanny Billingsley, published by Dial – was added to the list. “We made a mistake, there was a miscommunication,” executive director of the National Book Foundation Harold Augebraum told the LA Times. “We could have taken one of the books away to keep it five, but we decided that it was better to add a sixth one as an exception, because they’re all good books.” Updating news from […]
National Book Award Nominees; New Literature Prize Proposed In UK
The National Book Award nominees were announced on Oregon Public Broadcasting’s Think Out Loud program. The winners will be named on November 16. Fiction Andrew Krivak, THE SOJOURN (Bellevue Literary Press) Tea Obreht, THE TIGER’S WIFE (Random House) Julie Otsuka, THE BUDDHA IN THE ATTIC (Knopf) Edith Pearlman, BINOCULAR VISION (Lookout Books) Jesmyn Ward, SALVAGE THE BONES (Bloomsbury) Non-Fiction Deborah Baker, THE CONVERT: A Tale of Exile and Extremism (Graywolf) Mary Gabriel, LOVE AND CAPITAL: Karl & Jenny Marx and the Birth of a Revolution (Little, Brown) Stephen Greenblatt, THE SWERVE: How the World Became Modern (Norton) Manning Marable, MALCOLM […]
Irony, Iceland and Insight from Execs Opens Frankfurt Book Fair
Ironies abound if you know where to look here in Frankfurt, where the annual Book Fair is unfolding in its usual fashion. There is the host city itself, the the banking center of Germany, which has sprouted dozens of modern skyscrapers in the past decade as the Euro zone has boomed, feeling less brash and more uncertain than ever as the world waits to see if Germany will take some of the past decade’s earnings and plow it back into supporting the economic union that made it possible. Then there is this year’s guest of honor, Iceland. They signed on […]
Pan Macmillan’s Digital Imprint, Now Called Bello, Kicks Off With Curtis Brown UK Backlist
Pan Macmillan’s previously announced digital imprint devoted to backlist titles which they suggested would debut at Frankfurt has been renamed Macmillan Bello (supposedly for “hidden talent discovered and admired”) and acquired a marquee partner: Curtis Brown UK. The program will launch in November with 120 ebooks drawn exclusively from the agency’s backlist, with a further 400 titles to follow later next year. The launch list includes novels from Gerald Durrell, Vita Sackville-West; Francis Durbridge, D J Taylor, and Eva Ibbotson. “At Curtis Brown UK we have been researching the best ways to revive our authors’ out-of-print books, and were hugely impressed […]