In another publisher experiment making material available at no cost on the Internet, Random House began offering the entire text of Beautiful Children, Charles Bock's debut novel, for free online as of 12:01 this morning until midnight on Friday, Leap Day. Readers will be able to share, e-mail or print the text, which is available as a PDF download at beautifulchildren.net/read. In cooperation with Random, Amazon.com, B&N.com, Powells.com and Northshire.com are making the file available to their customers.
Beautiful Children, which first appeared in primitive print form at the end of January, concerns the effect of the disappearance of a 12-year-old boy in Las Vegas on his parents and others.
Incidentally last week, Random House Audio announced that it will no longer require that retailers use digital right management (DRM) when selling audiobooks via digital download. The company decided, it said, "that this move will allow for healthy competition among retailers targeting the iPod consumer, without posing any substantive increase in risk of piracy." Still Random can use DRM for authors who want it.
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Author Nora Roberts, and her husband, Bruce Wilder, who runs Turn the Page Bookstore Cafe, plan to rebuild the hotel in Boonsboro, Md., that they were renovating and that burned to the ground last week, the Herald-Mail reported. They are also seeking to give aid to families whose apartments were destroyed or damaged in the blaze.
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End of a gritty era: the New Yorker helps Farrar, Straus & Giroux pack for the move from its storied, spartan offices on Union Square in New York City to 18 W. 18th St., in Macmillan Publishers space above the Books of Wonder bookstore.
As far back as we remember, FSG owners reveled in a kind of reverse-snobbism about their digs--and were probably saddened when Union Square and the area around it spruced up.
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After a three-year run, the curtains are closing on the Quill Book Awards, founded by Reed Business in an attempt to create an Oscars-style awards for the book world--with all its attendant media attention, TV coverage and trade magazine advertising. Last Thursday, parent company Reed Elsevier put Reed Business up for sale.
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Reporting on location from the Rosetta Stone Bookstore, Carbondale,
Ill., which sells new, used and rare books, WSIL-TV covered the imminent closing of the 15-year-old bookshop.
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What is the novel 1984 about?
- A) Destruction of the human race by nuclear war
- B) Dictatorship in which every citizen was watched in order to stamp out all individuality
- C) Invasion and ultimate takeover of Earth by creatures from outer space
- D) Man who went back in time and changed history
If
B was your response, congratulations (and you can keep your bookselling
job). You rank among the 52% of high school students who answered that
question correctly for a study released by the American Enterprise
Institute. According to USA Today,
the report noted that students "still lack important historical and
cultural underpinnings of 'a complete education.' And, its authors
fear, the nation's current focus on improving basic reading and math
skills in elementary school might only make matters worse, giving short
shrift to the humanities--even if children can read and do math. . . .
In all, students earned a C in history and an F in literature."
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Christopher T. Smith has been named director of sales of Spring Arbor Distributors, the Christian distributor arm of Ingram Book Group. Before joining Ingram last year as sales manager, Smith was a national director of sales at Sony BMG Music Entertainment and executive director of special markets and new media for Word Entertainment.