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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.
