Amazon's fourth quarter results have just come in $1 billion (£632,62m) short of analysts' expectations, but because of a 55% increase in operating income to $405m (£256m), shares rose 6%. Read more
The New Year has started with a mass of news from the ebook front, where things are really moving very fast. In the States ebook sales surged after Christmas. In the UK the figures show that more than one million ereaders and more than half a million tablet devices were received as gifts over Christmas, with Amazon and Apple the leading suppliers of e-readers and tablets respectively. Read more
Do you want to find out how to publish your work as an ebook? This is something you may be thinking about, in view of the rapid growth in ebook sales. Many authors are suffering from a big contraction in their earnings. Read more
Amazon Kindle sales in the US and UK last year were eight million, making it their biggest selling product ever. An article in the UK's Daily Mail put this down to 'spinsters' buying romance to read on their Kindles (and other e-readers) because they were too embarrassed to be seen reading romances in pubic in book form because of the covers. Read more
The excitement surrounding the arrival of the i-Pad in countries outside the US has caught the attention of the media, reinforcing the idea that a mass audience is waiting to buy one and start using it to read e-books. The arrival of the Kindle aroused similar expectations and many articles presaging the end of the printed book. Read more
This has been one of those weeks when there’s been so much happening that it’s difficult to cover it in a single column. Apple has broken the news of its iPad and, amidst the focus on that, Amazon has already started to fight back. This could be a turning-point and how publishing, books and authors come out of all this is hard to predict. Read more
Is it possible that the short story is at last getting a new lease of life? The form, long beloved of writers, seems to be reaching new audiences through the Internet and benefiting from new opportunities in the form of prizes. Read more
This was the week when, in the middle of an unsurprising Booker and an unremarkable Nobel Prize for Literature, Amazon launched its much-heralded Kindle 2 international edition. Read more
Since News Review last reported on e-books and e-book readers in the spring (News Review 2 March) what's happened to the 'big story' of the book world? Well, everyone's been pretty preoccupied with what else is going on right now, with all eyes on the developing recession and how this is affecting booksellers and publishers. Read more
It may seem like old news now, but News Review has been on holiday so it seems worth tracking back to Amazon's announcement of its new version of the Kindle (see News Review 2 February), which became available last week, only in the US, although wider release is expected to follow soon. Read more
‘When an editor works with an author, she cannot help seeing into the medicine cabinet of his soul. All the terrible emotions, the desire for vindications, the paranoia, and the projection are bottled in there, along with all the excesses of envy, desire for revenge, all the hypochondriacal responses, rituals, defenses, and the twin obsessions with sex and money.
World of Books Group, the UK's largest retailer of used books, has partnered with the Society of Authors to launch a new grant to support writers as they work on 'books of any genre that have the power to inspire progressive behaviour change.' Read more
For all the armchair puzzlers for whom sudokus and crosswords have palled over the long months of lockdown, a fiendish new literary conundrum is about to slide on to bookshelves - with a rather lucrative and unusual reward.
I have been a film-maker for more than 30 years and have acquired filing cabinets full of international research. In my second career as a thriller author, these gems have not been wasted. All my books are based upon my past investigative documentaries. Read more
An economist's attempt to explain behavior in publishing or any other domain typically begins with the cost-benefit principle: an action should be taken if and only if the benefits of taking it exceed the corresponding costs. Read more
Yesterday's webinar "Publishing Now '21: Looking Forward," hosted by Westchester Publishing Services and Publishers WeeklyInternational news website of book publishing and bookselling including business news, reviews, bestseller lists, commentaries http://www.publishersweekly.com/, attracted more than 500 viewers, as industry insiders discussed the state of the publishing industry, the ways in which it has been changed by the pandemic, and the outlook going forward. Read more
No one in the industry was surprised last week when HarperCollins emerged as the buyer for Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Books & Media, the sixth-largest trade publisher in the U.S. Read more
Independent publishers including Carcanet, Comma Press and Otter-Barry Books say Arts Council England's second round of grants from its Culture Recovery Fund are much needed as publishers negotiate a "tough" market. Read more
The Authors Guild is asking its membership and allies in the publishing industry to contact their senators to express support for the PRO Act, which has passed the House and is under discussion by the Senate. The act would enable freelance writers and authors to bargain collectively with businesses that hire them, something currently restricted by antitrust law. Read more
It's a venerable global cultural institution, dedicated to freedom of expression and set to celebrate its centenary this year. Yet the writers' association PENSupported by eminent writers, this is the English branch of International Pen, which has centres in nearly 100 countries. It fights for freedom of expression and against political censorship. It campaigns for writers harassed, imprisoned and sometimes murdered for their views. http://www.englishpen.org/ is displaying signs of tension over a declaration claiming the right of authors to imagination, allowing them to describe the world from the point of view of characters from other cultural backgrounds.
When Claudio Gatti published an investigation into Elena Ferrante's identity, a few years ago, he raised an outcry both in Italy and abroad. He had pried into the author's privacy, violated her right to remain anonymous. It was unfair, it was irrelevant, we didn't want to know. Read more