Kate Summerscale’s The Suspicions Of Mr Whicher: Or The Murder At Road Hill House won the UK’s £30,000 Samuel Johnson prize for nonfiction. The chair of judges Rosie Boycott declared it a “page-turning yarn” and said “Summerscale has brilliantly merged scrupulous archival research with vivid storytelling that reads with the pace of a Victorian thriller. The book is a rare work of non-fiction that mimics the suspense genre and leaves one gripped until the final paragraph.” Walker is the US publisher for the book.BBC
O'Reilly Will Sell Their Own Kindle Files, Thank You
Why give all the control to Amazon? O’Reilly is selling e-books from their own web site that are bundled to include three different formats together in one package (epub, PDF, and Kindle-compatible Mobipocket). The sales page includes a green-colored tease: “Save a Tree – Go Digital.” The program launches with “30 popular” O’Reilly titles. They are also making available a few titles–Devices of the Soul; Wikipedia Reader’s Guide: The Missing Manual; and Facebook: The Missing Manual–directly through Amazon in Kindle format. The O’Reilly e-price for two of those books is well above Amazon’s standard ceiling of $9.99 for Kindle editions, […]
F+W: "Publications" Out; "Media" In
F+W Publications has officially announced a name change to F+W Media, which “better reflects the company’s mission to deliver to passionate consumers the content, community, and data they desire–regardless of platform.” In other words, they are shifting “from a print focus to a web-enabled digital business.” To that end, F+W is building websites based around communities of enthusiasts and categories of interest that no longer focus on a single magazine or book title, having already launched MyCraftivity.com. And they aspire to make Everything.com, based on the Everything Series of books, a reference site they hope will rival such sites as […]
Borland Promoted
At Atria, Peter Borland has been promoted to editorial director. The entire department will report to Borland except for Emily Bestler and the members of the executive editorial director’s office. Borland and Bestler will both report to publisher Judith Curr. Curr writes: “Peter joined Atria in 2004 as senior editor and since then has distinguished himself both as an excellent acquiring editor and a thoughtful, conscientious manager. He has long served as a resource and sounding board for his colleagues in day-to-day business matters and his new title will allow him to take on a more formal role shaping our […]
More Changes
As previewed earlier this month, we’re rolling out more changes in how Lunch news is presented and available to you, by e-mail and throughout the day. For a long time we’ve presented news at PublishersMarketplace in a variety of ways, including “headline clips” and some individually posted items on the home page–but that process will now be more consistent, constant, and easy-to-track. The site version of Publishers Lunch Deluxe is basically turning into a 24/7 newsblog. All news items will post there first as they are ready; each item now has an individual permalink, two types of tags for searching, […]
Borders Live with Audio Downloads
The promised inclusion of downloadable audiobooks at Borders’ web site has gone live, with “an initial 15,000 titles” on offer. The company says that over a third of those titles are available in (DRM-free) MP3 files. Starting today and running through Saturday, you can download a free audio version of Jon Krakauer’s INTO THE WILD, and an additional 15 titles from top authors (including the topical TWILIGHT by Stephenie Meyer) will sold at the promotional discount price of $9.95 through July 22. As noted previously, Borders has partnered with OverDrive for both the inventory and the underlying technology for the […]