India's OMICS Publishing Group threatens scholarly critic with $1 billion lawsuit, jail time (Boing Boing) OMICS Publishing Group, an Indian scholarly publisher has threatened to sue one of its critics, Metadata librarian Jeffrey Beall, for $1 billion, and has threatened him with prison time over posts he made to his prominent Scholarly Open Access site. Changes at The New York Times Book Review (New York Observer) The New York Times Book Review is modernizing under the editorship of Pamela Paul, who was appointed to the position in early April. The Astoria Bookshop to Open This August on 31st Street (We Heart Astoria) I’ll just let that title sink in...

By Moe Zilla The New York Times ran a fascinating profile of David Blum, the editor of Amazon’s “Kindle Singles” store. But along the way, they also took a look at the whole phenomenon of Singles—and what it means for the future of books. Amazon has sold nearly 5 million Kindle singles over the last 27 months, according to the article about Blum, who tells the newspaper that “Every day I become more obsessed with how brilliant the concept is…” But it’s got me wondering just how popular the Kindle Singles really are… Blum tells the newspaper he’s now receiving more than 1,000 unsolicited manuscripts each month,...

The New York Times has a fascinating preview up of a forthcoming tell-all from Jason Merkoski, formerly of Amazon and one of the developers of the first Kindle. Merkoski has a lot to say about both the benefits (a complete library; accessible using your phone) and drawbacks (sadness for paper fetishists) of the revolution he helped to spawn. I may change my mind once I've read a bit of the book, but the impression I got from his interview surprised me. Merkoski is ever-practical. "We can lament the older experience of reading, because that’s what we were raised with," he says. "But there’s...

My mom is a pack rat, which as everyone knows can be frustrating for friends and family trying to help bring order to accumulation. The upside of pack rattery is there are always gems scattered among the detritus of domesticity, and so it was last week, when I discovered at her house a box full of old newspapers originally saved for their historic headlines. There, in yellow newsprint, was the moon landing, Nixon's and Agnew's resignations and the 1972 Arab-Israeli war. And Senator Robert F. Kennedy's assassination: Two papers from June 6, 1968—one, the morning New York Times, with a headline proclaiming...

Book retailer Barnes & Noble has reportedly reduced the amount of titles it stocks by Simon & Schuster authors and lowered the number of S&S books on display as it continues to be embroiled in a debate with the publisher. Neither the chain nor Simon & Schuster would specify exactly what is being negotiated, but sources cited  by The New York Times told the newspaper that Barnes & Noble wanted more funds for displaying S&S titles in coveted spots in the store and to pay lower costs for the books themselves. The bookstore chain also wants more money for events promoting Simon...

The New York Times ran an interesting and fairly informative feature story on March 7; it covers the digital publishing industry's current digital resale controversy, which was sparked largely by the work of John Ossenmacher, the founder and CEO of ReDigi — a company that refers to itself as 'The World's First Pre-Owned Digital Marketplace.' The story includes a brief quote from Free Ride author Robert Levine; the quote probably does a better job than anything I've read before of explaining why digital resales will almost certainly lead to a fair amount of market insanity. As the article's author, David Streitfeld, writes: [caption id="attachment_81113" align="alignright"...

For years now, whenever reports from Mexico have popped up in American news outlets, the stories have almost always revolved around the seemingly endless homicides that are taking place in the northern reaches of the country, where many of Mexico's infamous drug cartels are based. But an op-ed about one aspect of the Mexican cultural landscape that appeared in the New York Times recently has been earning attention for a very different, if still inexcusable, state of affairs: Much of the country, it seems, has effectively stopped reading. As the article's author, David Toscana, explains... The proportion of the Mexican population that is...

I've always been a sucker for stories about the history of American pop culture. So when TeleRead founder David Rothman sent me an email last weekend with a subject line that read, "This Was the First Word Processor Ever Used By a Novelist. It Weighed 200 Pounds and Had to Be Brought in Though the Window," I bit. Truth be told, I don't know the first thing about the history of typewriters or word processors—or pencils or papyrus or stone tablets, for that matter. Matthew Kirschenbaum, however—an author and associate professor of English at the University of Maryland—has spent years researching the literary...

  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...

To most readers, it probably seems unthinkable that Barnes & Noble and its Nook Media division might not be around at this time next year. But after B&N announced its embarrassingly low holiday season sales figures yesterday (scroll down to read the press release), that's essentially what every media outlet covering the news seemed to be suggesting. After thumbing through a few of the stories and considering the facts myself, I've got to say that my own personal faith in the company's future isn't exactly booming—quite the opposite, in fact. If you're not current on the story yourself, here's the nut graf...

By Brian Howard | for Book Business On Friday afternoon, The New York Times' Nick Bilton posted an item on the paper's Bits blog entitled "Apple Now Owns The Page Turn," citing U.S. Patent D670,713. Incredulous, Bilton wrote: This design patent, titled, “Display screen or portion thereof with animated graphical user interface,” gives Apple the exclusive rights to the page turn in an e-reader application. Yes, that’s right. Apple now owns the page turn. You know, as when you turn a page with your hand. An “interface” that has been around for hundreds of years in physical form. I swear I’ve seen similar animation in Disney or Warner...

Could serialized fiction finally force the e-book to evolve? Various ventures are trying to satisfy a common complaint about e-books: that they are simply black-and-white digital reproductions of long-form print books, flat and unoriginal in their design and concept. One variation, what publishers call enhanced e-books, with audio and video elements woven throughout the text, has largely fallen flat with readers. But serialized fiction, where episodes are delivered to readers in scheduled installments much like episodes in a television series, has been the subject of an unusual amount of experimentation in publishing in recent months. Read Full Article ... Source: New York Times...