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Sony announced the latest in its series of attempts to shake Amazon’s dominance of the e-book market today, saying it will scrap its proprietary e-book format in favor of the ePub standard. Unlike Amazon’s Kindle format, the ePub standard—developed by an industry group that includes HarperCollins and Random House—allows e-books to be accessed and shared across a broad variety of devices.
As the extended deadline for the Google book settlement approaches, industry professionals still disagree about how the massive book-scanning project will affect authors. After one of the country’s largest agencies issued a memo last week advising its clients to opt out of the deal, the Authors Guild, which supports the settlement, released a rebuttal on Monday. The Guild will host an open conference call tomorrow afternoon to address what it calls “a series of erroneous conclusions” drawn by the agency.
In a bid to position itself alongside social networking phenomena like Facebook and Twitter, online publishing service Scribd unveiled a host of new social features yesterday. Users can now create personal reading lists, connect with those who share similar interests, and subscribe to instant updates from favorite authors, publishers, and even other readers.
Theatre producer and former professor Rocco Landesman was confirmed by the Senate on Friday as the new chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts. Also confirmed by the Senate last week was former congressman Jim Leach, tapped to head up the National Endowment for the Humanities. Both men are expected to be sworn in within a few days.
Flooding provoked three days ago by sudden rains in Louisville, Kentucky, has caused an estimated $5 million in damage to the main branch of the Louisville Free Public Library. The building—said to be the worst-hit in the city—will be closed to the public until at least Labor Day, with restoration work continuing throughout the remainder of the year.
Hoping to ramp up competition in the e-book arena, Sony announced the launch of a new—and less expensive—line of digital readers on Tuesday evening. The Reader Pocket Edition and Reader Touch Edition, priced at $199 and $299 respectively, will hit stores later this month. The company also said that its online store will knock two dollars off the cost of new and bestselling e-books, matching the $9.99 price Amazon set for Kindle titles in 2007.
Critic Geeta Sharma-Jensen penned her final column as books editor of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel on Saturday after announcing last week that she has accepted a voluntary buyout offer from the newspaper’s publisher. Similar deals—part of a cost-cutting plan to address flagging ad revenue—have been accepted by thirty-six other employees at the paper, including four arts and entertainment writers.
PEN American Center, the U.S. division of the world’s oldest literary and human rights organization, yesterday announced the appointment of Steven L. Isenberg as executive director. Isenberg, a professor, lawyer, and former publisher, will replace Michael Roberts, who stepped down in June after eleven years in the position.
Another wave of layoffs hit Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (HMH) last week, with the publisher confirming plans to eliminate sixty-five jobs at its offices in Boston and Orlando. The decision follows a deal signed in July with global outsourcing firm Cognizant Technology Solutions, which will see a portion of HMH’s information technology services transferred overseas.
Citing a rocky advertising market, Reed Business Information announced plans yesterday to sell off nearly fifty of its U.S. trade publications, including Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, and School Library Journal. The news followed a second-quarter report showing that profits at RBI’s parent company dropped 48 percent during the first half of 2009.
Yet another contender entered the rapidly crowding e-book market yesterday when electronics giant Samsung announced the South Korean debut of its first e-book reader, the SNE-50K. The six-and-a-half-ounce device, which will retail for the equivalent of about $270, is not expected to reach the American market until 2010.
The fifteen-year battle for control over the estate of Jack Kerouac reached a turning point on Friday when a Florida judge ruled that the signature on his mother’s will is a forgery. Gabrielle Kerouac purportedly left her son’s assets—including letters, notebooks, and unpublished manuscripts—to his third wife, Stella Sampas Kerouac, in 1973. That bequest has been the subject of a long-running dispute between the Sampas family, which still controls the estate, and Kerouac’s surviving blood-relatives.
On the heels of a similar project launched by Cambridge University Press, the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, last week announced plans to make rare and out-of-copyright books from its library system available through BookSurge, Amazon’s print-on-demand division. The program’s initial offering encompasses more than four hundred thousand titles in languages ranging from Acoli to Zulu.
Two sites of literary history met very different fates last week. In London, the former home of Romantic poet John Keats was reopened to the public after a £500,000 (approximately $820,475) restoration. Meanwhile, in Cleveland, the house where Langston Hughes lived as a teenager was sold in a foreclosure auction for $16,667.
New York University announced this month that it has appointed Orange Prize-winner Zadie Smith as a full professor in its creative writing program. Smith, who currently teaches at Columbia University, will begin her tenure in September 2010.
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt announced yesterday that Bruce Nichols has been appointed senior vice president and publisher of adult trade and reference, filling a position left vacant since Rebecca Saletan resigned last December.
Cambridge University Press (CUP) has kicked off a new print-on-demand project to make rare and out-of-print books available worldwide. The Cambridge Library Collection, which launched on Monday, uses digital scanning technology to reissue works readers would otherwise have to travel to far-flung libraries to consult.
In a statement released yesterday afternoon, Barnes & Noble announced the launch of the Barnes & Noble eBookstore, which it says will stock every available e-book from every publisher, as well as e-book originals. The 700,000 titles currently on offer are compatible with the iPhone, iPod Touch, BlackBerry, and most personal computers, but will notably not work with the Amazon Kindle or the Sony Reader.
Amazon provoked a minor media furor late last week when it tried to quietly remove pirated e-books from hundreds of its Kindle devices. The titles in question: George Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm. On Thursday, customers who had purchased certain editions of the dystopian classics found that the e-books had vanished and their money had been refunded.
Author Thomas Nesbit announced this week that he will donate half the earnings from his e-book Deep Fried to the nonprofit 826 National, which runs literacy centers for school-aged children in seven American cities. This is the first such pledge to the organization by a debut novelist.
With support for small publishers continuing to dwindle amid the uncertain economic climate, Archipelago Books has put out a call for donations to help it stay afloat. The award-winning New York City-based press, which specializes in literary translations, says shrinking finances have forced it to lay off staff and delay the release of upcoming titles.
The summer issue of the Strand will feature the first chapter in what is to be a five-part serialization of a previously unpublished novel by Graham Greene. The Empty Chair, a murder mystery the author began—and then evidently abandoned—when he was just twenty-two, was discovered last year by a French researcher in the Greene archives at the University of Texas in Austin.
A Cornish beach thought to have been the inspiration behind Virginia Woolf’s 1927 novel To the Lighthouse sold at auction yesterday for £80,000 (about $130,000). The seventy-six acres of Upton Towans beach in Gwithian went to an unnamed buyer from London, who trumped competing bids from as far afield as Russia and the United States.
Cultural theorist Joshua Glenn and journalist Rob Walker last week kicked off an experiment that will test the literary significance of otherwise useless objects. As curators of the "Significant Objects" project, the duo are pairing writers with knickknacks picked up for a pittance at thrift stores and flea markets, and asking the scribes to feature the objects in short works of fiction.
Another reason to buy it for the articles: Playboy has scored the first serial rights to an unfinished novel by Vladimir Nabokov. The magazine’s December issue will feature a five-thousand-word excerpt from The Original of Laura, which was left in fragmentary form when the author died in 1977.
