I guess I'd forgotten. Now that all the the publishing players have settled, abandoning agency pricing and returning to the wholesale slums, the DOJ/e-book antitrust case, which popped up again in everyone's news feeds this week, feels a little anticlimactic. The DOJ, perhaps simply because it's what it found, or perhaps because there's no one left to pick on, is framing the last defendant standing, Apple, as the "ringmaster" in the price-fixing suit, according the New York Times. With the case set to go to trial June 3 in New York (and what a fine note on which to end BEA), I find myself wondering: At...

I hope you'll pardon me as I jog my ocean air- and sun-addled brain back into something resembling normal functioning with a story from my just-ended honeymoon. On Saturday, my newly minted wife and I got back from Tulum, Mexico, where we spent a week on the beach relaxing and—if we're being completely honest—recovering from the exhausting, months-long process of planning and throwing, as a friend described it, the biggest party we'll ever throw. In anticipation of this rare week-long block of reading time (electricity is limited in Tulum and, as a result, so, gloriously, are televisions), I'd loaded up my Nook...

It's hard to believe it's already/only been three years since Apple introduced its category defining iPad. On the one hand, it seems like only yesterday. On the other hand, for those of us with tablet computers of one stripe or another, it's hard to imagine life before our new constant companions—in the same way those of us who came up before the Internet can barely remember the days before Pine. There was a great piece on Ars Technica about two weeks ago in which its editors reflected on the device, their initial impressions and its impact on their lives since. I recall my own...

While it’s odd to think of an organization backed by the  Penguin, Hachette and Simon & Schuster as a startup, Bookish, the new book-recommendation and -discovery site is essentially that. After two years in development under three CEOs, Bookish is now a reality, a place where users can get recommendations—based on titles or groups of titles they know they already like—and then, importantly, purchase them. Like the Random House project BookScout, the idea, on one level, is to facilitate discovery across the industry, for the good of the industry. And while users can discover just about any book, the books they can purchase...

*This article originally appeared on the website of Book Business, a TeleRead sister publication. While predicting doom for Nook, as Book Business columnist Michael Weinstein put it, has become the favored pastime of the book and tech press of late, it’s hard not to read the news of B&N Chairman Leonard S. Riggio’s bid to purchase the chain’s retail stores and take them private—leaving the company’s foundering Nook Media division to fend for itself—as the beginning of the end for the little e-reader that could. (Or maybe it’s the end of the end for the little e-reader that couldn’t quite.) It’s not without a little sadness...

  By Brian Howard Last week, following a soft-launch the week prior, Random House marched out BookScout, a Facebook app designed to link readers with books they'll like but might not have discovered on their own. The recommendation engine draws on a user's "likes"—both on one's Facebook timeline and then directly through the app. Intriguingly, BookScout is not purely a Random House recommendation engine—it'll tip readers to any book in print, regardless of whether it was published by its own imprint Knopf, Big Six rival HarperCollins, indie McSweeney's or even Amazon Publishing. Though the app's early reviews have been mixed (I've found its recommendations to...

  By Brian Howard and James Sturdivant I own a Nook Simple Touch. Maybe it's because I root for underdogs or maybe it's because I chafe at platform lock-in and proprietary file formats, but I've been quite happy with life on the B&N ebook platform. Then, on Friday, Amazon announced its Stephen King Kindle Single exclusive, "Guns." In the short essay, King, whose book Rage had been linked to several instances of school violence, weighs in on the gun control issue. (King penned Rage as a high schooler. The book was published under his Richard Bachman pseudonym and has since been taken out of print  at the author's request.) I forked over the 99...

  By Brian Howard It’s official. The old trope “There’s no such thing as bad press” can be retired. For good. Witness the campaign against Randall Sullivan’s Michael Jackson bio Untouchable: The Strange Life and Tragic Death of Michael Jackson. As reported in The New York Times, Sullivan’s book focuses on the superstar’s last years and, despite being characterized as a generally sympathetic look at Jackson, has come under siege by a group of fans who take issue with some of the book’s statements. And so they launched a flotilla of mostly anonymous one-star reviews seemingly aimed at not just discrediting the book, but killing it. As the barriers to publication...

By Brian Howard Book Business, one of TeleRead's sister publications, spent the last two days soaking up the publishing wisdom on display at the Digital Book World conference at the Hilton New York. You can check their Twitter feed, @bookbusinessmag, for the full play by play. Below are some highlights. * * * [caption id="attachment_77159" align="alignleft" width="146"] Asra Rasheed[/caption] » Following the Children's Content in Context breakout session on Wednesday, we got to exchange a few quick words about our mutual love of the Android platform with none other than LeVar Burton, who was at the session to support Reading Rainbow CEO Asra Rasheed . "I'm a nerd," explained Burton during the session, with regard to...

By Brian Howard “I won’t be talking much about the future, and I won’t use the word ‘publishing’ very often.” A funny way to begin a talk called “A Futuristic View of the Publishing Industry,” but Publishing Technology COO Randy Petway’s take on the topic at yesterday’s Publishing Technology Executive Exchange at the wine cellar of Del Frisco’s on the Avenue of the Americas in New York City was apt indeed, focused as he was on the way consumers discover and purchase content. [caption id="attachment_75602" align="alignright" width="150"] Randy Petway[/caption] That bit of semantic gymnastics on Petway’s part had to do with what he described as the difference...

  By Brian Howard | for Book Business Ah, two can play this game! There's a lot of noise in the news feed today about Barnes & Noble's earnings report (share price down, but down significantly less compared to last year; retail sales flat; Nook sales up). But what's "interesting" (read: annoying, for journalists anyway) is that B&N is playing the same game Amazon plays with Kindle sales: Nook sales "doubled" over Black Friday weekend. But how many units does that represent? B&N's not telling. * * *      ...

By Brian Howard | for Book Business New Study: Is Increased iPad Adoption a Death Knell for Print? Hardly, says Michael Norris of Simba's new report. Simba Information’s new report out this week is titled “The iPad and Its Owner 2013.” But given its findings—including that 1 in 5 U.S. adults owns an iPad, along with projections that within five years tablet owners will outnumber print book buyers—it might have been called “The Rise of the Machines.” The media and publishing market intelligence company has been following trade e-book publishing through its nationally representative surveys since 2009, adding and removing reading devices from...