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:
Import fees will still apply, but Amazon has finally made its Kindle reading device available to customers in Canada (Press Release).
Citing a budgetary deficit, officials in Colton, California, have closed all three of the city’s public libraries and laid off nearly sixty employees (Contra Costa Times).
Calling the matchup an unfair fight, a Google Books engineer backed down yesterday from a television debate against a lawyer from the Open Book Alliance (TechCrunch).
Meanwhile, the Writers Union of Canada has become the first group among those newly covered by the Google Book Search settlement to reject the revised deal (Bookseller).
Jack Fogg, previously a senior editor at Hodder & Stoughton, has been appointed editorial director of Random House imprint Century (Press Release).
Window Media—the country’s largest publisher of newspapers for the gay and lesbian community—has closed its offices and will file for bankruptcy (Associated Press).
After rating more than seven thousand public libraries, Library Journal has released this year’s second list of “America’s Star Libraries.”
Self-publishing platform Smashwords has signed a deal with “device-agnostic” e-book distributor Shortcovers (BNET).
Penguin’s authors have sounded off about the books they’re giving—and hoping to receive—over the holidays (and no, they aren’t all Penguin titles).
