Spring Design has sued Barnes & Noble, alleging that B&N's Nook e-reader copies features of an e-book that Spring Design developed and showed to B&N, Venture Beat reported. The suit cites in particular the dual screens both e-readers have--one black-and-white for reading books and the other in color for shopping for books.
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Book View Press, which was launched by
Book View Café, a group of 27 authors who include Ursula Le Guin, is publishing its first book,
Rocket Boy and the Geek Girls, a sci-fi anthology title, the
Bookseller reported. Like all Book View Press titles, the debut book will be published only in e-book format. The Press will publish titles only by Cafe members.
"The e-publishing infrastructure is now firmly in place," said project manager Sarah Zettel. "BVC authors have both content and the experience to take full advantage of it."
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Book apps now top
game apps as the most popular category downloaded to iPhones. Flurry,
an analytics firm, has published "a report which shows that games were
the number one category of apps downloaded on the iPhone every month
from August 2008 until August 2009," the Telegraph
reported. "However, in the last four months, book apps have exceeded
the popularity of games apps--with one out of every five new apps
launching in October having been a book. In September, games apps were
overtaken by book apps for the first time."
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Book trailer of the day: Hard Work: A Life On and Off the Court by Roy Williams with Tim Crothers (Algonquin).
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A different kind of annual best books list: from the U.K., Bookmunch offers the first 10 of the 50 books "you'll want to read in 2010."
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"With a bustling tech space and more book stores per capita
than any other city nationwide, Seattle has become known as both a geek
town and a book town," wrote Monica Guzman on the Seattle Post Intelligencer's Big Blog, where she offered reasons "why tech can save Seattle's book stores."
In the wake of this weekend's announcement that Bailey Coy Books will close (Shelf Awareness,
November 2, 2009), Guzman suggested that "while local support can help
the indie bookstores, it can't save them. Seattleites love both
literature and technology. As far as they're concerned, e-readers like
the Kindle give them both. Unless indie book stores up their tech
appeal, more of them will fall, along with Seattle's treasured No. 1
bookstore-per-capita ranking."
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Obituary note: Robert Dike Blair, a former bookseller, died last Saturday. He worked for the Doubleday Book Shop chain and became manager of the Detroit store until 1949, when he founded the Vermont Book Shop in Middlebury, Vt. Under the Vermont Books imprint, he became a publisher, too, and wrote Books and Bedlam. One longtime customer, Robert Frost, said that Blair could read his mind and knew just what book he had come for.
A board member of the American Booksellers Association, Blair sold Vermont Book Shop in 1993 to Laura and John Scott. It is now owned by Becky and Chris Dayton.
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Effective today, Lisa Gallagher, formerly senior v-p and publisher of William Morrow, has joined Sanford J. Greenburger Associates as a literary agent.
Gallagher plans to concentrate on author advocacy and active publisher partnerships, saying, "I want to apply my extensive marketing experience to help bring writers and their work to the widest possible audience across various media and formats."
Before joining Morrow in 2000, Gallagher moved to New York to open the U.S. office of Bloomsbury Publishing, where she had worked in London for several years.
She may be reached at
lgallagher@sjga.com and 212-206-5667.
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Effective December 1, Madeline McIntosh is returning to Random House in the new position of president, sales, operations and digital. She will also join the Random House international executive board.
For the past year, McIntosh has been Amazon.com's director of Kindle content acquisition for Europe and has been living in Luxembourg. Before that, she worked at Random House and Bantam Doubleday Dell for 14 years, most recently as publisher of the Audio Publishing Division and earlier in various sales positions, including senior v-p, director, adult sales.
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Angie Lee has been promoted to v-p of marketing at Harper. She joined the company in 2005 as a senior marketing director for Collins and since February has been working on various titles at HarperCollins. Earlier she was a marketing director at Teach for America and worked at News America Marketing.