Magic wand and e-reader in hand, Harry Potter returned to the spotlight on the publishing industry stage this week. Pottermore, the official digital home of the seven-novel series from J.K. Rowling launched this week. In the days ahead, when talk turns to evil-doing,...
There will always be books, if only because Hollywood would die without them as sources for scripts. As The Hunger Games takes aim this weekend at movie audiences, agents and producers who are doing lunch in Lalaland should know that paranormal romances and dystopic...
The skies in Philadelphia are clear, but inside the Pennsylvania Convention Center, more than 8000 public librarians have gathered under cloudy and foggy conditions to ponder the challenge of e-book pricing and availability. Reporting from the bi-annual Public Library...
Digital changes everything – and disrupting business models is only part of it. Relationships among partners likewise are undergoing radical transformation. In the quiet halls of public libraries, the rising volume of buzz you hear is what to do about those...
Once upon a time, Christopher Columbus got credit for discovering the New World. These days, the Italian navigator is lucky to avoid blame for all the ills that have befallen two continents over the last five centuries. In other words, discovery isn’t what it used to...
The arrival in January of Apple’s new iBooks Author tool for developing and publishing digital literature may signal a new phase of e-book development that’s good news for tablets, and maybe not such great news for e-ink readers. At least, that’s the view of a PW...
Organized by the iconoclastic technology publishing house O’Reilly Media, the annual “Tools of Change” conference has offered a staging for what PW’s Andrew Albanese calls, “a classic clash of traditional publishing institutions and new technology.” Albanese tells...
Every spring and fall season, Publishers Weekly selects a dozen or so authors with promising debuts in fiction. It’s a rather coveted distinction—any new author, especially in fiction, fears being lost in the onslaught of the season’s titles, so to get singled out in...
They sell books, don’t they? This week, Amazon and Barnes & Noble make news over which books they sell – and which ones they won’t. And a new entry in the fantasy genre, Rose Fox tells us, finds Hurricane Katrina unleashing magical forces as well as...
Returning from ALA’s midwinter meeting, which included the annual presentations of the Caldecott and Newbery prizes, PW’s Features Editor Andrew Albanese notes the number of issues facing libraries these days —from budget stress and complex technology, to copyright...
