National Bookings The Library of Congress says they drew about 90,000 people on Saturday for the fifth annual National Book Festival on the Mall in Washington, DC. Among the more popular signings, they report in a press release, were Neil Gaiman, who signed 500 books, and Sue Monk Kidd, who signed 350 books. David McCullough signed over 700 books and posed with a “life-size Book Worm” to celebrate his winning of the Reading Advocacy Award presented by Half Price Books. Coverage in the NYT focuses on which authors attended a White House breakfast and which ones declined for political reasons. […]

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Oprah’s Back to the Present As you’ve surely heard, a summer of Faulkner was enough to drive Oprah back to contemporary books and live authors she can bring on her show. James Frey’s “gut-wrenching” memoir A MILLION LITTLE PIECES is her new selection, with Anchor reaping the benefits of the 600,000-copy printing of the tie-in edition. (The hardcover came from the Broadway Doubleday group, through the Nan A. Talese imprint, though Frey followed editor Sean McDonald to Riverhead for his next book.) The writers’ group that sent Oprah an “open letter” earlier this year asking her to renew her evangelism […]

Random Goes Direct Random House has quietly and recently launched a program that makes the company’s complete in print/in stock catalog of books — comprising over 20,000 titles — available for sale directly to readers through their web site. Spokesman Stuart Applebaum tells Lunch, “Our direct-to-consumer sales initiative through the Random House, Inc. website is a work-in-progress intentionally supplemental to our booksellers, about which we will have more to say in the future.” As Applebaum signals, the shopping cart feature is only obvious through the primary “Random House, Inc.” web site. Visitors to sub-sites for the individual publishing groups only […]

Google Gets Sued The Authors Guild has joined with individual authors Herbert Mitgang, Betty Miles and Daniel Hoffman (poet laureate of the US in 1973-74) to file suit against Google in a Manhattan Federal court yesterday over their Google Print for Libraries program. The parties seek class action status and allege in their complaint that Google “is engaging in massive copyright infringement at the expense of the rights of individual writers,” for “its own commercial use and the use of others.” Google has claimed its program constitutes protected “fair use” and replied yesterday, “We regret that this group has chosen […]

BAM Will File Late Books-A-Million announced after the close of the market yesterday that they will miss the required Federal filing date for their quarterly 10-Q report for the period ending July 30. They say it is “a result of management’s ongoing evaluation of the Company’s internal control over financial reporting for the second quarter. During the course of its evaluation, management identified material weaknesses as defined by Audit Standard No. 2 adopted by the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board. Management is working expeditiously to finalize its evaluation of internal control over financial reporting in order to file the Form […]