Weekly Round-up: Publishing News Around The Internet

On Fridays for the duration of the summer, thanks to my new summer intern, Rebecca Shaw, a student at Bryn Mawr, we will post helpful literary news from around the net (with links!). Much of this is stuff we post on our Twitter feed.

The annual publishing conference BookExpo America (BEA) occurred from Monday May 23, 2011 to Thursday May 26, 2011. National Public Radio reports the success of digital products launched in the past couple years. Amazon’s Kindle and Barnes and Noble’s Nook were seen as prominent players in the e-market. However, publishers critiqued Apple’s iPad. Publishers noted that e-books are not available on iTunes and that while the Kindle and Nook are dedicated to reading, the I-Pad contains an abundance of additional applications.

Australian secondhand bookseller and left-wing activist, Bob Gould, died Sunday May 22. During his lifetime, Bob Gould opened twelve bookstores in Australia. He opened his first bookshop, the Third World Bookshop, in 1967. Police raided his store for selling books like Phillip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint. In addition to his bookshops, Gould was a founder of the anti-Vietnam War movement in Australia.

Fiction author Maureen Johnson auctioned off a full critique of an inspiring writer’s work to raise money for disaster relief after the Joplin, Missouri tornadoes on Monday, May 23. The proceeds of the auction will go to Shelterbox, an international charity that delivers emergency shelter and supplies to people affected by natural disasters.

The Audio Publisher’s Association held its 16th annual Audies Gala in New York City on Tuesday, May 24. Keith Richard’s autobiography, Life, won the Audiobook of the Year Award since it introduced audiences to the new audio-book format.

To commemorate the end of the Oprah Winfrey Show’s 25-year run, The Nielsen Company compiled a top ten list of books from Oprah Winfrey’s Book Club over the past decade. Eckhart Tolle’s A New Earth topped the list with 3.3 million copies sold.

The former CEO of the Time Warner Book Group, (TWBG) Larry Kirshbaum, was named publisher of the Amazon Publisher Group’s New York office. During Kirshbaum’s career at TWBG until 2005, he was regarded as an innovator and top marketer in genre fiction. As publisher of the Amazon Publisher’s Group, Kirshbaum plans to expand the Amazon Publisher Group by acquiring top quality books in both commercial and literary fiction as well as business and general non-fiction.

A Digital Entertainment survey reveals that one out of every three people who download e-books on digital readers do so illegally. The implications of this survey threaten future lawsuits, since publishing companies lose a substantial amount of revenue due to the e-book piracy. A Guardian article compares e-book piracy to the 2000 Napster lawsuit, in which music record labels lost millions of dollars. Publishers and authors will be forced to sue if people continue downloading books without paying for them.

Biographer James Dempsey discovered an unpublished E.E Cummings poem while working on a biography of publisher Scofield Thayer. He found the poem in papers relating to Thayer’s magazine, The Dial. Evidence suggests that this poem was sent around 1916, at the start of E.E Cummings career.