In their traditional look ahead at top summer books, the WSJ recommends these titles: NonfictionThe Food of a Younger Land, by Mark KurlanskyAmerican Heroes, by Edmund MorganYoung Woman and the Sea, by Glenn StoutThe Snakehead, by Patrick Radden KeefeThe Secret Life of Marilyn Monroe, by J. Randy Taraborrelli FictionThe Girl Who Played with Fire, by Stieg LarssonSouth of Broad, by Pat ConroyThe Secret Speech, by Tom Rob SmithThe Angel’s Game, by Carlos Ruiz ZafonMy Father’s Tears, by John UpdikeRavens, by George Dawes GreenLet the Great World Spin, by Colum McCannDo No Deny Me, by Jean ThompsonA Happy Marriage, by Rafael […]
The CEO Whisperer
Unfortunately Tina Brown’s questions were as wispy as her voice at the CEOs panel at BEA on Thursday, with Brown suffering from laryngitis that led her to eventually leave the stage as her husband Harry Evans took her place. Evans produced a brief spark when he came on by declaring “the publishers seem to me to be extremely weak about Google” and asking about the pending legal settlement. Macmillan’s John Sargent underscored that “you shouldn’t focus on Google as the danger point; the danger is what Google enables in making a copy and giving it to libraries,” whose mission to […]
More on Crichton's Unfinished Novel
Thursday night HarperCollins convened a small tribute to the late Michael Crichton, attended by many family members and friends (including former Harper ceo Jane Friedman). Crichton’s longtime agent Lynn Nesbit recalled with emotion how he said to her, “Let’s grow up in the business together, and we did.” She noted, “It’s a happy event because he did leave so much behind.” And she promised there was more Crichton to come, since “he laid out the whole concept of the next book.: Harper publisher Jonathan Burnham confirmed afterwards that Crichton left behind approximately 90 manuscript pages of a novel-in-progress, along with […]
Amazon to Integrate BookTour.com–Which Will Promote Physical Stores
While interviewing Softbanks’s Eric Hipeau for a BEA panel today, author, magazine editor and founder of BookTour.com Chris Anderson let slip that soon his company’s author tour information will be integrated into Amazon. The etailer took a minority stake in BookTour, reported in April (though at the time it wasn’t clear if there were other investors; Anderson was the only funder.) Amazon is due to start integrating BookTour’s information about author appearances across the country soon, starting with relevant data for Amazon’s “Author Pages” feature. Anderson and BookTour ceo Kevin Smokler made it clear that Amazon will not edit or […]
More Day One Highlights: Giving It Away, Musical Keynote
Late Thursday morning, Simba’s Michael Norris introduced “Giving it Away: When Free eBooks Make Sense And When They Don’t” by citing, as all ebook-related panels seem to these days, with some statistics. According to a survey Simba recently published about ebook buying and reading habits, 8% of the US adult population bought at least one book in 2008 – but 15% of them said they had read an ebook. Discrepancies between what people buy and read are common, but for the purposes of this panel, it was a natural segue to talk of whether giving books away for free online […]
People: Krieger to Retire
Associate publisher of Simon & Schuster Children’s Aladdin imprint Ellen Krieger will retire at the end of June after fifteen years at the company. While at S&S, she oversaw the merging of Pocket’s middle grade and teen imprints into the Children’s division’s Aladdin and Pulse imprints and launched Aladdin Mix. She comments: “It’s hard to imagine a more satisfying last chapter of my publishing career than my fifteen years at Simon & Schuster, shepherding Aladdin…through a number of exciting incarnations. I’m not sure what the next chapter will be; right now, I’m looking forward to not setting an alarm, and […]