Every day Poets & Writers Magazine scans the headlines—from publishing reports to academic announcements to literary dispatches—for all the news that creative writers need to know. Here are today's stories:

HarperCollins announced the creation of HarperCollins Digital, a new division that will use digital strategies "to provide what authors need today to reach book consumers online" (Publishers Weekly [2]).

Bloomsbury USA drew criticism for the second time this year for featuring a white model on the cover of a book featuring a black character (Salon [3]).

A flim about Allen Ginsberg's Howl premieres at the Sundance Film Festival in Utah this week (Guardian [4]).

Amazon introduced a plan to offer increased royalties to authors and publishers for discount books sold on Kindle (Reuters [5]).

Book View Cafe, a digital publishing collective for professional authors, announced a partnership with the digital publisher Smashwords [6] to "distribute their out-of-print, reverted rights, and unpublished works as e-books."

The twelfth annual Gathering of Fisher Poets takes place over the next month in the Oregon coastal towns of Astoria and Newport (OregonLive [7]). 

The black-clad figure who has toasted the grave of Edgar Allen Poe every year since 1949 did not show up this year on Poe's birthday (New York Times [8]). 

Vintage [9] launched an online reading group in partnership with the social networking provider Webjam. Booktrust launched its first reading and writing project for people in their sixties (Booktrade [10]).

A fifty-three-year-old bookstore in Vancouver closed it doors yesterday because of the economic recession (National Post [11]).