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As Amazon touts its Kindle 2 - founder Jeff Bezos even made an appearance on The Daily Show earlier this week - and Apple is poised to dive headfirst into the e-reader business, Vaneta Rogers of newsarama.com wonders if the new format spells doom for the comics industry.
Read more here.
As other publishing houses post record losses, consolidate and lay off employees, Harlequin - the king (or is it queen?) of romance - has something to brag about. Revenues at the romance imprint of Torstar rose 2.2% while operating profit rose from 11.2% in 2008, Publisher's Weekly reports.
And get this: sales were strong in the dreaded fourth quarter, in which revenue jumped 19%.
I guess there's something to be said for pure escapism.
Read more here.
Irish-born Joseph O'Neill has won this year's PEN/Faulkner award for his novel Netherland, a novel set in post 9/11 New York that has drawn plenty of comparisons to The Great Gatsby. Even more shocking, there is apparently quite a bit of cricket - the game, not the insect - in the book, and yet Americans are apparently reading it anyway. Imagine.
O'Neill gets prestige - and $15,000.
The four finalists: Richard Price and Lush Life (I would've given it to you, Richard); Sarah Shun-Lien Bynam and Ms. Hempel Chronicles; Susan Choi and A Person of Interest; Ron Rash and Serena.
Read more about O'Neill - and the prize - here.
BBC Audiobooks is releasing the unabridged audiobook of Vikas Swarup's Q&A - from which the multi-Oscar winning film Slumdog Millionaire was adapted - on March 24, to coincide with the release of the DVD version of the film.
The book, read by Christopher Simpson, will cost $29.95 for nine CDS or $25.95 for digital download.
The abridged version is available now, but who wants to listen to abridged audiobooks? I will never understand it. It's like those old time Reader's Digest novelizations. What's the point?
``The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson. It starts slowly as you work your way through the Swedish geography and then turns into a ripping good yarn. Also, Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers is incredibly interesting and makes me think I've done everything I possibly could do wrong as a parent.''
CHRIS BOHJALIAN, author of Skeletons at the Feast
Variety reports that Valerie Plame's book Fair Game will be making its way to the screen with director Doug Liman (Mr. and Mrs. Smith, an entirely different sort of spy movie) and Naomi Watts playing CIA agent Valerie Plame. But the big question is: Will double Oscar winner Sean Penn sign on to play Ambassador Joseph Wilson?
Variety says Penn is in negotiations, but nothing is set in stone yet.
Boy, does Starbucks love the inspirational memoirs. Its latest choice for sale in its stores is Happens Every Day: An All-Too-True Story by Isabel Gillies, which hits shelves March 24. The memoir by Gillies - who has a recurring minor role on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit - is about her marriage breaking up.
Love is hard and marriage harder, but it's got to be a relief to have your book displayed prominently in more than 7,000 Starbucks stores. Must soothe the heart at least a little...
There is life - good life! - after the Bush administration. Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has agreed to a three-book deal with Crown Publishing, the Associated Press reports.
First up: a memoir about her time in the White House, which is due out in 2011. Then she'll write a family memoir, currently scheduled to hit shelves in 2012. Rice grew up in Birmingham, Alabama, and went on to become provost at Stanford University. A young adult version of the family memoir will also be released in 2012.
Read more here.
The Atlanta Journal Constitution reports novelist and famous-for-the-fatwa-against-him Salman Rushdie told an Atlanta audience Sunday night that the Oscar-winning film Slumdog Millionaire "piled impossibility upon impossibility."
At an appearance at Emory University, the former Mr. Padma Lakshmi cited in particular the young brothers ending up at the Taj Majal, which lies about 1,000 miles from the previous scene.
And, the AJC writes, Rushdie also got in a shot at two other films adapted from fiction: The Reader ("a leaden, lifeless movie killed by respectability") and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button ("It doesn't finally have anything to say.")
Correct me if I'm wrong here, but wasn't his last novel, The Enchantress of Florence, not exactly rooted in hard, cold reality? So it's OK for books to dabble in the fantastic, but not films?
