Independent Publishers Group has restructured its sales and marketing divisions, intending, the company said, to reflect "IPG's ongoing focus on providing broad sales and marketing resources and profitable partnerships with its client publishers."

As part of the restructuring, Mark Voigt has been promoted to executive v-p, sales. He joined the company in 1996, managed the special sales department and for the past 10 years has been national accounts manager. In his new position, he will continue to manage IPG's major trade account presence as well as coordinate IPG's sales efforts across all channels.

Michael Riley has been promoted to sales director, special markets. He was formerly manager of gift and special sales accounts and will manage IPG's gift and special sales channels, including an in-house special sales team of six and several commissioned-based gift rep groups.

Jeff Palicki has become director, trade sales: independents, libraries and wholesale accounts. For the past seven years, he has been trade sales manager.

Keen Communications has acquired publishing rights to the Unofficial Guide brand from Google and will make it Keen's fourth imprint. PGW will distribute the Unofficial Guides to the trade. Current Unofficial Guides remain available to the trade from Wiley until new editions are published by Keen. The move marks the return of the series to the original publisher, Menasha Ridge Press, an imprint of Keen, which during the last two decades packaged the series for Wiley, S&S and Macmillan.

The first titles Keen will publish with its new imprint are The Unofficial Guide to Walt Disney World 2014, The Unofficial Guide to Las Vegas 2014, The Unofficial Guide to Disneyland 2014, The Unofficial Guide to Walt Disney World with Kids 2014, Beyond Disney: The Unofficial Guide to Universal Orlando, SeaWorld & the Best of Central Florida and Mini Mickey: The Pocket-Sized Unofficial Guide to Walt Disney World.

Amazon officially launched its Kindle line on the Chinese mainland Friday, offering the Kindle Paperwhite for 849 yuan (about US$138), along with the Kindle Fire HD with 16 GB for 1,499 yuan and 32 GB for 1,799 yuan. The devices are now available on the Amazon China website, as well as the online store and outlets of Suning, one of China's major electronics retailers, ChinaNews.com reported.

Chinese publishing industry insiders predicted that with the introduction of Kindle products, "more Chinese will start paying for e-books," according to the People's Daily. "Although a large number of domestic readers are not used to paying for e-books, growing demand and the guidance of relevant policies and regulations will help foster the habit," said Yu Dianli, general manager of Commercial Press.

Marcus Bookstore, a "Fillmore District institution that's been in the same Victorian at 1712 Fillmore St. since 1960, must move out by June 18, following an April bankruptcy sale that saw the storied building sold for a fraction of what it is likely worth," the Examiner reported, noting that the only chance the "oldest black bookstore in the nation" has for survival is if "the new owners can be convinced--by the NAACP, by housing activists, by the neighborhood, and by the city--to sell to a neighborhood-based nonprofit that's offering them a modest profit on their deal, as well as the chance to be saviors to a pillar of black community in San Francisco."

"We're not asking for a handout," said Gregory Johnson. He runs the bookstore with his wife, Karen, who added: "It would be one thing if we didn't have the money. But we do. We have the money and the city behind us."

Westside Community Services has offered to pay the new owners $1.64 million for the building, but they are refusing to sell for less that $3.2 million, and asked a judge in April to order an eviction.

Officials from the Mayor's Office of Economic and Workforce Development "have been investigating alternative locations along Fillmore Street for the bookstore to rent and approaching property owners.... But it does not appear that the city can aid Westside in its efforts to buy the building and keep Marcus Books in its home before the June 18 eviction date," the Examiner wrote.

Unless their offer is accepted at the last minute. "Maybe," Johnson said, the current owners "might end up the heroes of the story."

Word Up Community Bookshop, which raised $60,000 through an IndieGoGo campaign late last year as part of its quest for a new space, signed a lease last Wednesday for a storefront at 2113 Amsterdam Avenue, at 165th Street in Manhattan, the New York Times reported.

"Stay tuned for the opening date, sometime this summer 2013," Word Up's website promises.

U.S. District Judge Richard Matsch has given the state of Colorado a June 28 deadline to answer the lawsuit filed last week on behalf of a group of booksellers (including Tattered Cover and Boulder Bookstore) and newsstands, as well as three marijuana-themed magazines, who "want a judge to strike a recently enacted law forcing pot magazines behind the counter at stores that allow minors," the Denver Post reported.

A lawyer representing the state requested the suit be dismissed because an emergency rule the executive branch issued Wednesday "strikes enforcement of the magazine restriction," but the judge "agreed that the emergency order doesn't moot the magazine provision," the Post wrote, noting that Matsch pointed out that a "marijuana regulation bill signed into law last month clearly states that pot magazines must be kept behind the counter.... The state's decision to abandon the magazine rule expires in 120 days, unless it's renewed in formal rule review hearings scheduled for August."

"Clearly, this is speech protected by the Constitution," said Tattered Cover's Joyce Meskis. "It has been sold, borrowed and read by people who have had rightful access to this material for years and years. To limit this speech now would be a travesty. On behalf of the readers we serve, we cannot permit this law to stand without inviting future legislatures to restrict the display of other kinds of books and magazines."

Chris Finan, president of the American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression, called the new law "clearly unconstitutional. It forces bookstore customers to ask permission to peruse magazines they have a First Amendment right to purchase."

Scottish author Iain Banks (The Wasp Factory; The Crow Road; Complicity), who had announced earlier this year that he had terminal gall bladder cancer, died yesterday, the Guardian reported. He was 59. His final novel, The Quarry, will be released by Redhook/Hachette on June 20.

Today would have been Maurice Sendak's 85th birthday. An impressive group of children's book creators gathered last week at the Walt Disney Family Museum in San Francisco to celebrate a special exhibition, "Maurice Sendak: 50 Years, 50 Works, 50 Reasons." The panelists affectionately called their discussion "Stealing from Sendak," and spoke of and showed visual examples of all the different ways in which they have been influenced by Sendak's work and life. Lisa Brown, for instance, spoke about cannibalism and Jews. L. to r.: Maria Van Lieshout, Lisa Brown, Ashley Wolff, Christy Hale, Jim Averbeck and moderator Julie Downing.

"We have a fabulous bookstore called BookCourt. I call it my book tax to buy a book there once every two weeks," said Brooklyn resident Leslie Koch, president of the Trust for Governors Island, in this week's "Sunday Routine" segment of the New York Times.

Prairie Lights "represents the very best of the increasingly rare independent, brick-and-mortar bookstores," Fortune magazine noted in its profile of the Iowa City bookseller, which "manages to thrive through the support of its loyal customer base that cannot imagine life without it."

Jan Weissmiller, co-owner of the business with Jane Mead, said, "The hardest part is how fast the business is changing. No one knows what will happen with e-books. Thirty-five percent of people have e-readers. Kids are being trained to read on them."

Asked about the future, he observed: "I'm 57 and I have to figure out what the future of the store will be.  It feels like an unstable time in bookselling but also an opportunity. Jane and I want to make changes that both stabilize the business and create continuity."

Chicago Skyscrapers: 1871-1934 by Thomas Leslie (University of Illinois Press).

This morning on Fox & Friends: Craig Carton, author of Loudmouth: Tales (and Fantasies) of Sports, Sex, and Salvation from Behind the Microphone (Simon & Schuster, $24.99, 9781451645705).

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Today on Ellen: Wendy Williams, author of Ask Wendy (Morrow, $25.99, 9780062268389).

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Today on NPR's Diane Rehm Show: Scott Haltzman, author of The Secrets of Surviving Infidelity (Johns Hopkins University Press, $19.95, 9781421409429).

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Tonight on the Colbert Report: Dan Savage, author of American Savage: Insights, Slights, and Fights on Faith, Sex, Love, and Politics (Dutton, $26.95, 9780525954101).

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Tomorrow morning on the Today Show: Lauren Sandler, author of One and Only: The Freedom of Having an Only Child, and the Joy of Being One (Simon & Schuster, $24.99, 9781451626957). She will also appear on NPR's Talk of the Nation.

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Tomorrow morning on CBS This Morning: Jeannette Walls, author of The Silver Star: A Novel (Scribner, $26, 9781451661507).

Also on CBS This Morning: Adam Johnson, author of The Orphan Master's Son (Random House Trade Paperbacks, $15, 9780812982626).

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Tomorrow on Current's Joy Behar: Steve Schirripa, author of Big Daddy's Rules: Raising Daughters Is Tougher Than I Look (Touchstone, $25, 9781476706344).

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Tomorrow on Katie: Bobby Flay, co-author of Bobby Flay's Barbecue Addiction (Clarkson Potter, $35, 9780307461391). He's also on tomorrow's Today Show.

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Tomorrow on NPR's Diane Rehm Show: Floyd Abrams, author of Friend of the Court: On the Front Lines with the First Amendment (Yale University Press, $32.50, 9780300190878).

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Today on Tavis Smiley: Tom Reiss, author of The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo (Broadway, $16, 9780307382474).

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Tomorrow on NPR's Marketplace: Lynda Obst, author of Sleepless in Hollywood: Tales from the New Abnormal in the Movie Business (Simon & Schuster, $26, 9781476727745). She will also appear on MSNBC's the Cycle.

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Tomorrow on ABC's World News Tonight: Rebecca Bailey, co-author of Safe Kids, Smart Parents: What Parents Need to Know to Keep Their Children Safe (Simon & Schuster, $15, 9781476700441).

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Tomorrow night on the Colbert Report: Daniel Bergner, author of What Do Women Want?: Adventures in the Science of Female Desire (Ecco, $25.99, 9780061906084).

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Tomorrow night on the Tonight Show: Jimmy Connors, author of The Outsider: A Memoir (Harper, $28.99, 9780061242991).

The Bridges of Madison County, a musical based on the bestselling novel by Robert James Waller that was previously adapted as a film, will open on Broadway next winter. The New York Times reported that preview performances are to begin January 13, 2014, at the Gerald Schoenfeld Theater and opening night is planned for late February.

The musical is being directed by Bartlett Sher (South Pacific, The Light in the Piazza), with music and lyrics Jason Robert Brown, who won a Tony for Parade, and a book by the Tony- and Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Marsha Norman.

Elena Shaddow and Steven Pasquale are playing the lead roles in the show's premiere this summer at the Williamstown Theater Festival, though no casting for the Broadway production has been announced yet, the Times wrote.

Kevin Barry won the €100,000 (about US$132,187) International Impac Dublin Literary Award for his debut novel City of Bohane. According to the judging panel, "Barry's Ireland of 2053 is a place you may not want to be alive in but you'll certainly relish reading about. This is not a future of shiny technology but one in which history turns in circles and quirks an eyebrow at the idea of 'progress.' "

The German Book Office in New York has chosen Wrecked by Charlotte Roche, translated by Tim Mohr (Black Cat/Grove, $15, 9780802121127) as its June Book of the Month.

This is what the GBO wrote about Wrecked:

"It's easier to give a blow job than to make coffee." That's what Elizabeth Kiehl, mother of seven-year-old Liza, thinks to herself, after a particularly lengthy and inventive bout of sex with her husband Georg, recounted in detail over the book's first 16 pages.

"Elizabeth goes to great efforts to pleasure her husband in the bedroom, and to be a thoughtful and caring mother. But her perfect mother and wife act hides a painful past and a tragic rift in her psyche--the result of a terrible car accident in which her brothers and mother were involved. As a result, Elizabeth's relationship with Georg is rather unusual: most husbands and wives wouldn't watch porn together, or go off on joint trips to a local brothel for threesomes with prostitutes while their daughter is at school. A raw, explicit novel from one of Europe's most controversial voices, Wrecked is literary erotica with a kick."

Roche was born in England in 1978 and raised in Germany, where she resides with her husband and daughter. She is a TV personality in Germany.

Tim Mohr is a translator of German literature and translated Roche's first novel, Wetlands, which has sold two million copies. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, the New York Times Book Review, the Daily Beast, New York magazine and other publications.

 In nine novels celebrating the isolation of Michigan's Upper Peninsula, Steve Hamilton's protagonist Alex McKnight has criss-crossed the Lake Superior shoreline from the Keweenaw Peninsula to the Soo Locks. When McKnight's marriage fell apart and a bust gone bad killed his partner and left a bullet in his chest, he took disability retirement from the Detroit police department and moved to a remote spot along Whitefish Bay, rebuilding a group of tourist cabins with the help of Vinnie Red Sky Leblanc, an Ojibwe casino dealer.

When the isolation and 10-month winters get to him, McKnight goes to the Glasgow Inn for a real brewed-in-Canada Molson and owner Jackie's home-made beef stew. Now and then, some local crime pulls him out of "retirement" to help out a friend or stranger in need. McKnight solves crimes by his tenacity and physical endurance; he follows his instincts when a crime scene detail looks wrong or someone's story doesn't seem to hold up.

In Let It Burn, however, McKnight is drawn back "below the bridge" to Detroit, revisiting the scene of his last big case. Twenty years after confessing to the brutal murder of a wealthy white woman in an abandoned railroad station, Darryl King is getting parole. Something about the easy confession seemed wrong to McKnight at the time, but the political pressure to put someone away led to a quick conviction. With King back on the streets, possibly looking to get even with the cop who put him away, McKnight is compelled to take another look at the case. He relishes the chance to follow his intuition, but more bodies pile up before he finally gets it right.

Hamilton's previous McKnight books were steeped in the lonely ethos of the "U.P.," but he may be even more successful in his rendering of today's broken Detroit as we follow the tenacious McKnight past boarded-up mansions, graffitied railroad bridges and trash-strewn yards. It doesn't make a pretty picture, but Let It Burn may be Hamilton's best novel yet.

During an interview with Darryl's mother in the last inhabited house on her formerly black middle-class block, she asks where McKnight lives. He answers, "I live in the Upper Peninsula. In Paradise." She replies, "That's a long way from Detroit." In what might be a fitting coda for this novel, he answers in turn, "You said it, ma'am." --Bruce Jacobs

Shelf Talker: Edgar Award-winning Hamilton's detective hero leaves his familiar Upper Peninsula cabin to re-investigate a murder he "solved" 20 years ago in what is now the shambles of Detroit.