Jump to navigation Skip to content
After more than four decades in business, one of Britain’s most intrepid independent publishers is closing its doors. Marion Boyars, which counts Georges Bataille, Ken Kesey, Hubert Selby Jr., and Nobel Prize-winner Kenzaburo Oe among its authors, announced yesterday that it will begin winding down operations after the release of its fall catalogue.
The first book and only novel by memoirist Augusten Burroughs is coming to television. Screenwriter Bryan Fuller (Heroes) and director Bryan Singer (The Usual Suspects) are partnering to adapt Sellevision (St. Martin’s, 2000), which focuses on four characters linked by a fictional home shopping channel, as an hour-long comedy-drama series for NBC.
More than six weeks after it remotely erased unlicensed copies of George Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm from an undisclosed number of Kindle devices, Amazon is still trying to make amends. Last Thursday the company sent an e-mail to affected customers offering to either replace the deleted e-books or provide restitution in the form of a gift certificate or check for thirty dollars.
A court in New York City is considering whether the U.S. publication of Fredrik Colting’s 60 Years Later: Coming Through the Rye, originally billed as an “unauthorized sequel” to The Catcher in the Rye, could cause irreparable harm to author J. D. Salinger. During oral arguments at the U.S. Second Circuit Court of Appeals on Thursday, two members of the three-judge panel questioned whether a lower court had collected enough evidence before issuing a preliminary injunction against Colting in July.
Online publishing platform Smashwords has signed a distribution deal with Barnes & Noble. The e-book publisher announced last Friday that titles from its new “Premium Catalog” would be made available through the Barnes & Noble eBookstore as well as through digital retailer Fictionwise, which was acquired by the bookseller in March.
The ePub format continues to gain traction as an e-book standard. Last week, Google Books announced that it now has more than a million public domain titles available as free ePub downloads. The format, developed two years ago by the International Digital Publishing Forum, makes e-books accessible across a wide array of devices and platforms.
Legend Press imprint Paperbooks is pursuing an unusual scheme to “promote novel writing” in the U.K. this fall, publishing a half-finished book and inviting readers to complete the story. Only the first ten thousand words of A Novel Ending by author Gary Davison will be written; the remaining pages will be left blank. The publisher is asking aspiring authors—one of whom will score a contract with Paperbooks—to fill in and submit their own endings.
With so many good books being published every month, some literary titles worth exploring can get lost in the stacks. Page One offers the first lines of a dozen recently released books, including Victor LaValle's Big Machine and Dan Chaon's Await Your Reply, as the starting point for a closer look at these new and noteworthy titles.
Small Press Points highlights the happenings of the small press players. This issue features Wolverine Farm Publishing in Fort Collins, Colorado.
BookCrossing, the online community whose members tag, release, and then track books in 160 countries, recently joined Better World Books, a socially conscious Indiana-based retailer, in a partnership that highlights the literary, social, and environmental missions of both sites.
