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One of the big stories out of BookExpo America, the annual book publishing event held this past weekend at the Jacob Javits Convention Center in New York City, was Google's discussions with publishers about its plans for a new e-book program.
Alex Clark, the first female editor of Granta, has left the magazine after only eight months in the position. In a statement released yesterday, the London-based quarterly announced that American editor John Freeman will immediately take the helm as acting editor.
President Barack Obama and first lady Michelle Obama will serve as honorary chairs of the National Book Festival on September 26, continuing the annual event launched by former first lady Laura Bush in 2001.
A collaborative book-writing project launched in April by independent press Perseus Books will come to fruition this weekend at BookExpo America in New York City.
Ruth Padel, the poet chosen ten days ago to become the first female professor of poetry at Oxford University, resigned yesterday after admitting she alerted newspaper reporters to sexual harassment allegations against poet Derek Walcott, who subsequently dropped out of the race for the post.
Officials at Louisiana State University (LSU) say funding cuts under consideration by the state legislature could threaten the survival of the Southern Review and LSU Press. The revered literary journal and the state’s only university-supported publishing house were among those singled out in the university's preliminary budget reduction proposal.
Contemporary literature lovers invaded ten beer-soaked bars scattered throughout Manhattan’s Lower East Side and East Village as part of the second annual Lit Crawl NYC—a two-hour bar hop serving up an eclectic taste of the New York City literary scene.
Two months after the National Federation of the Blind and eight other disability groups wrote a strongly worded letter to Random House asking the publisher to reconsider its decision to deactivate the Amazon Kindle 2's text-to-speech function for its e-book titles, Random House last week went ahead with its plan to disable the software, provoking a sharp rebuke from the coalition.
There was a slight decline in traditional book production last year, but the number of print-on-demand books more than doubled, reported Bowker, the agency that publishes the Books In Print database and assigns ISBNs.
The Virginia Quarterly Review won the 2009 Utne Independent Press Award in the category of general excellence, the Utne Reader announced. The editors cited the quarterly journal's focus on long-form narrative journalism: "No one is doing it with more heart or soul."
