It was a week of comings and goings at the London Book Fair 2016. For one thing — and no one minded — the clouds and rain early in the week departed in time for the highlight days of the show. But talk of another leaving gave many publishers pause: In...
The US Congress writes the copyright laws of the land, and the interpretation is left to the courts. “Fair use” is a potential defense where copyright infringement is charged, and a judge must measure four explicit factors when assessing possible harm. Fair use gets...
The world of e-books is like the American west – full of wide open spaces and populated with pioneers. Names like Open Road, Diversion and Brown Girls Books dot the map. Open Road Integrated Media, established in 2009, releases about 200 e-books a month, focusing on...
An epic tale? Well, hardly – but the rise and fall of the e-book may the year’s most critical story for trade book publishers. What lies behind the decline in e-book sales is hardly mysterious – one of the big 5 publishers has flatly pointed to “new retail sales...
What’s surprising about public libraries today is that they are more about offering access than acting as archives. In the US, too, the public library is increasingly a community’s home away from home. Ahead of the biannual Public Library Association Conference,...
In New York at the Digital Book World Conference, the Four Horsemen rode onto the center stage. But predictions of imminent apocalypse were likely overstated. One path to short-term salvation for the book business may be the pot of gold at the end of the Apple e-books...
If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again. The 2014 deal for Hachette to purchase Perseus eventually fell apart, but the parties announced this week they’re ready for “take two” on the deal. On Tuesday, Hachette – the publisher of novelists Donna Tartt and...
This week, President Obama nominated Carla Hayden to become the 14th Librarian of Congress. The selection follows the January retirement of James Billington, a Reagan appointee who came to office in 1987. Hayden will replace David Mao, who currently serves as the...
Ernest Hemingway spent many years in Cuba and was living there when he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954. He told a Cuban television reporter at the time that he was proud to be the first cubano sato to be a Nobel laureate. Hemingway of course knew some...
When is a book not a book? This week, that riddle has two possible answers. A book is not a book when it’s an e-book, of course. When the Hachette Book Group reported their fourth quarter results this week, e-book sales fell year over year, and now make up 22 percent...
