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Bertelsmann AG, the German media conglomerate that owns Random House, Inc., announced today that it has bought out Time, Inc.'s interest in Bookspan, their book-club joint venture that includes Book-of-the-Month Club.
Eight authors, including two Americans, were shortlisted last week for the annual International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, a prize established twelve years ago to highlight the literary prominence of the Irish capital.
Titanic costars Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet will appear together again in a film adaption of Richard Yates's novel Revolutionary Road (Little, Brown, 1961). The movie, which is scheduled to begin filming this summer, will be directed by Sam Mendes, who won an Academy Award for his directorial debut, American Beauty (1999).
The Los Angeles Times announced yesterday that on April 15 it will no longer publish its Book Review as a stand-alone section; instead it will be combined with the opinion section (currently titled “Current”).
The Warner Books imprint of Hachette Book Group USA announced today that it will change its name to Grand Central Publishing. The imprint was formerly part of Time Warner Book Group, which was acquired last February for $537.5 million by the Hachette Livre division of the French conglomerate Lagardère.
John Calder, the namesake and owner of the British publisher Calder Publications, recently announced that he plans to retire and sell the rights to publish the company’s books, which include the British copyrights to many of Samuel Beckett’s novels.
The used book Web site AbeBooks recently launched a book recommendation system that draws titles from personal collections compiled on LibraryThing, a book cataloging Web site created by Tim Spalding in 2005. Whenever an AbeBooks user searches for one of the ten million books listed in the databases of both AbeBooks and LibraryThing, the new BookHints system will generate a list of three to six other books that the user might enjoy.
On March 13, a group of three poets won the $100,000 Microsoft "Ultimate Challenge" small business competition for their proposal of establishing a poetry café. The Mayhem Poets—Mason Granger, Kyle Sutton, and Scott Tarazevits, three friends who met at Rutgers University in New Jersey—entered the contest with an idea for a full-service restaurant that holds daily poetry workshops and nightly poetry performances.
On March 9, Linda Myers, the executive director of the Minneapolis-based nonprofit Loft Literary Center, announced that she will retire in October.
