• What Kind of Bean is this Chihuahua? by Tara Jansen-Meyer (Mirror) - 30%
• Collectible Spoons of the Third Reich by James A Yannes (Trafford) - 11%
• Afterthoughts of a Worm Hunter by David Crompton (Glenstrae)
• Governing Lethal Behavior in Autonomous Robots by Ronald C Arkin (CRC Press)
• The Changing World of Inflammatory Bowel Disease by Ellen Scherl and Marla Dubinsky (SLACK Inc).

While he predicted there will be fewer bookstores in the future, he said bookstores will never go away, agreeing with "interviewer" David Young of Hachette Book Group that bookstores are where bestsellers are made, particularly for books that are put in the front of the store.

[A]ccording to at least three people with knowledge of the discussions, who spoke anonymously because of the confidentiality of the talks, Apple inserted provisions requiring publishers to discount e-book prices on best sellers -- so that $12.99-to-$14.99 range was merely a ceiling; prices for some titles could be lower, even as low as Amazon's $9.99. Essentially, Apple wants the flexibility to offer lower prices for the hottest books, those on one of the New York Times best-seller lists, which are heavily discounted in bookstores and on rival retail sites. So, for example, a book that started at $14.99 would drop to $12.99 or less once it hit the best-seller lists.

Moreover, for books where publishers offer comparable hardcover editions at a price below the typical $26, Apple wanted e-book prices to reflect the cheaper hardcover prices. These books might be priced much lower than $12.99, even if they did not hit the best-seller list.

In a telephone interview, Mr. Winkelman, who co-owns Tecolote Books with Mr. Simon, said that the company would retain its current editorial leadership, with Elaine Szewczyk as editor and Eric Liebetrau as managing editor. Mr. Winkelman said that Mr. Simon was "an inveterate and unquenchable and voracious reader" who was a longtime subscriber to Kirkus, which was founded in 1933. "The idea that Kirkus was leaving was a real shame for him," Mr. Winkelman said.

In a statement, Mr. Simon said: "With the growth of e-books and e-reading devices, no one can really see the future of publishing. But turmoil like this creates opportunities. At a time when even the definition of a book is changing, my love of books makes me want to be part of the solution for the book publishing industry."

There also are details of: his WWII soldiering in Normandy and interrogation of Nazi prisoners; his love affair with Eugene O'Neill's daughter Oona, and the crushing disappointment of losing her to Charlie Chaplin while Salinger fought in Europe; Salinger's habit of locking himself away in his New Hampshire cinderblock bunker for weeks at a time to write; his penchant for taking a week to craft a single sentence; the damage his silences caused his family; the futile efforts of friends to re-introduce him to the world; Salinger's protectiveness towards his work; his refusal to sell anything to Hollywood, turning down 8-figure offers and first-class filmmakers like Billy Wilder and Steven Spielberg; his determination to maintain total control over his prose (so that when a New Yorker editor once added a comma, Salinger never spoke to him again).

Even more intriguing, Salerno's documentary also reports on what J.D. Salinger literary works might be in the famed secret vault, where 45 years of unpublished writings are rumored to be kept.

Salinger died of natural causes at his home on Wednesday, the author's son said in a statement from Salinger's longtime literary representative, Harold Ober Agency. He had lived for decades in self-imposed isolation in the small, remote house in Cornish, N.H.

"The Catcher in the Rye," with its immortal teenage protagonist, the twisted, rebellious Holden Caulfield, came out in 1951, a time of anxious, Cold War conformity and the dawn of modern adolescence. The Book-of-the-Month Club, which made "Catcher" a featured selection, advised that for "anyone who has ever brought up a son" the novel will be "a source of wonder and delight -- and concern."

Enraged by all the "phonies" who make "me so depressed I go crazy," Holden soon became American literature's most famous anti-hero since Huckleberry Finn. The novel's sales are astonishing -- more than 60 million copies worldwide -- and its impact incalculable. Decades after publication, the book remains a defining expression of that most American of dreams: to never grow up.

The Kindle Development Kit (KDK) will be available in limited beta form next month and the new software and other content from the initiative is expected to be in the Kindle Store later this year, Amazon said in a statement.

Examples of what kind of content people can expect for their Kindles include travel books with real-time weather updates and current events, cookbooks that recommend menus for people with allergies or different kinds of parties, and the inclusion of word games and puzzles for the Kindle.

The KDK gives software developers access to programming interfaces, sample code, tools and documentation to build content for Kindle's high-resolution electronic paper and to use its 3G capability and other functions.

Starting on June 30, Amazon says that for each Kindle book sold, authors and publishers who select the new 70 percent royalty option will receive 70 percent of the list price, minus delivery costs. This new option will be in addition to and will not replace the existing DTP standard royalty option, which is set at a 65-35 split, with 65 percent going to Amazon.

Amazon didn't have any comment about whether the new pricing was a response to Apple's royalty program for its App Store, which offers thousands of e-books as self-contained apps along with e-reader apps from Amazon (Kindle Reader, Stanza), Barnes & Noble, and other e-book stores. But it did say that delivery costs will be based on file size and pricing will be 15 cents per megabyte.

"At today's median DTP file size of 368KB, delivery costs would be less than $0.06 per unit sold," the news release notes. "This new program can thus enable authors and publishers to make more money on every sale. For example, on an $8.99 book an author would make $3.15 with the standard option, and $6.25 with the new 70 percent option."

Mr. Segal was unusual among American popular novelists and American scholars: he was both. In addition to Love Story, the heart-tugging tale of a Harvard scion and his love affair with a Radcliffe scholarship student who dies shortly after their marriage, Mr. Segal wrote several other novels, including Oliver's Story, a sequel to Love Story; The Class, which traces the fates of five members of the Harvard class of 1958; and Doctors, a melodrama about childhood friends who go through medical school together.

After Yellow Submarine, he wrote screenplays for, among other films, Love Story, the 1970 version of the novel that starred Ryan O'Neal and Ali MacGraw, and A Change of Seasons (1980), about a marriage gone awry, with Anthony Hopkins, Shirley MacLaine and Bo Derek.

The Twijote project, as it is known, aims to publish the 470-odd pages of the first volume of Don Quixote's adventures using just the 140-character blocks of text allowed by Twitter. It has set itself strict rules, of the honourable but potentially foolish kind that Don Quixote and his creator, Miguel de Cervantes, might have approved of.

The 8,200-odd tweets needed to get to the end of the first volume must come from one-off visitors to the Twijote site. They are given the next block of 140 characters of text to put on Twitter. "We reckon it will take about a year, if people stick with it," said Pablo Lopez, a web designer from the north-western Spanish city of Vigo who thought up the project. "The idea is to show that culture can exist in social media - that it is not just a place for nerds and freaks," he said.

Twijote has no sponsors and no ambition to make money. "It is something we put up to see what would happen," said Lopez, who pulled in web designers from his company to help. "I had the idea one day and came into the office and persuaded people it was worth doing."

The ramifications of the amended settlement for any one author and any one book are exceptionally complex. We've talked to our members, authors like yourself. The ones who got the notice found it incomprehensible and just shook their heads in confusion. Go to the settlement website's poorly implemented database and see for yourself how tricky this is -- has your book been scanned? Is it commercially available? Should you opt out? If you do nothing, you're automatically included in the settlement. If you opt out, Google doesn't even guarantee that it won't steal your work in the future.

It isn't fair. There are millions of book authors in this country who could be locked into an agreement they don't understand and didn't ask for. The Authors Guild represents only a tiny fraction of published writers, yet the new regulatory board set up in the proposed settlement will override individual book contracts -- not to mention common law and even the Constitutional protection of copyright. Mary Beth Peters, Register of Copyrights, testified before the House Judiciary Committee that the settlement would "turn copyright on its head." Nothing in the revised U.S.settlement changes that.

In an email to colleagues today, Kirkus Reviews managing editor and nonfiction editor Eric Liebetrau said the publication, which last month was said to be closing with staff leaving by the end of 2009, is working toward an arrangement with an acquiring company to continue publication. Liebetrau said details will be forthcoming in the next two to three weeks, but asked publishers to "please begin sending galleys to the appropriate editors immediately. We will publish a second issue in January, and then reassess the situation and hopefully continue publication in February and beyond."

"I think [the BBC] has changed," said Baroness James, who was one of its governors between 1988 and 1993. "And sometimes it seems like a very large and unwieldy ship that's been floating there since 1920 taking on more and more and more cargo, building more decks to accommodate it, recruiting more officers - all very comfortably cabined, usually at salaries far greater than their predecessors enjoyed -- and with a crew somewhat discontented and some a little mutinous, the ship rather sinking close to the Plimsoll line and the customers feeling they paid too much for the journey and not quite sure where they're going, or indeed, who is the captain."

After conceding that although her view was perhaps "a little unfair", she said it was how many people saw the BBC, and she then slammed a couple more torpedoes into the tubes as she raised the subject of corporation remuneration.

"It is extraordinary that 375 [BBC managers] earn over 100,000 [pounds] and 37-plus more than the prime minister," she said. "An organisation that has 37 of its managers earning more than the prime minister ought to ask itself 'Is this justified?' "

In early November, Borders (BGP) announced that it would close 200 of its 330 Waldenbooks stores by early January, cutting 1,500 jobs in the process. But with the new year approaching fast, the bookstore chain is changing its tune ever so slightly, and now plans to spare about 20 stores originally slated for the chopping block.

In Pennsylvania's Lehigh Valley, Palmer Park Mall manager Beth Samuelson told The Express-Times that store employees removed closing signs last week, and on Monday, corporate offices verified the decision to keep the store open. "It was a total surprise. All the signs saying: 'Store closing: Everything must go' all came down."

I am not going to rehearse any arguments pro and anti the "Google settlement." You decided to deal with the devil, as it were, and have presented your arguments for doing so. I wish I could accept them. I can't. There are principles involved, above all the whole concept of copyright; and these you have seen fit to abandon to a corporation, on their terms, without a struggle.

So, after being a loyal if invisible member for so long, I am resigning from the Guild. I am, however, retaining membership in the National Writers Union and the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, both of which opposed the "Google settlement." They don't have your clout, but their judgment, I think, is sounder, and their courage greater.

Mian Mian, a 39-year-old author from Shanghai whose realistic descriptions of life with drugs and among prostitutes, gangsters and failed artists, has attracted a large following of young readers, is suing Google for alleged copyright infringement. Sun Jingwei, her lawyer, told the Financial Times that the Haidian People's Court in Beijing would start hearings on December 29.

The case, the first brought against Google by a Chinese writer, underlines the risks that remain to Google's plan to build a digital library which could lay the groundwork for an "iTunes of books" and potentially transform the publishing industry.

*****

Mian Mian filed her complaint on October 23. The author demands that Google apologises for scanning part of her works, deletes the scanned content from its digital library and pays her Rmb60,000 ($8,800) in compensation, Mr Sun said. He added that the plaintiff had collected evidence of scans of Mian Mian's novels that could be found online although a complete scan of one of her books had been removed in mid-November.

[Admininstrator] MCR said it was at "advanced stages" of negotiations with a number of parties about purchasing certain stores or assets. But it added that unless a business took Borders over as a going concern, "regrettably all stores will formally cease trading the evening of the 22 December 2009". The final day of employment for the 1,150 Borders staff will be Christmas Eve.

Phil Duffy, partner at MCR, said: "Staff consultation will continue throughout this week and a further update will be given for each store at the end of the week.We have reassured staff that they will be paid for all of their work during the administration."

The newly formed company, e5 Global Media LLC, announced earlier today it has agreed to purchase eight brands belonging to Nielsen Business Media. Pluribus Capital Management and Guggenheim Partners formed e5 jointly.

The brands being acquired are AdweekMedia (which includes Adweek, Mediaweek and Brandweek), The Hollywood Reporter, Billboard, Backstage, The Clio Awards and Film Journal International. E5 Global Media will also acquire the Film Expo business, which includes ShoWest, ShowEast, Cinema Expo International and CineAsia trade shows. The parties declined to identify a purchase price, which other media reports have put at $70 million.

"We decided this was a great time to buy media assets," said Jimmy Finkelstein, chairman e5 Global Media. "We're going to create great businesses in print, online, on mobile, [and] in events, and we think it's the right time to do it."

Pluribus Capital Management is led by Finkelstein, ex-Hearst International president and CEO George Green and Matthew Doull, who will all be putting their own money into the company. The deal is expected to close Dec. 31, 2009. The new company expects to name a new CEO by February.

Christie's, which is auctioning a stained and frayed copy in New York, said the book could set a record price for American literature. Poe wrote the poems, inspired by the work of Byron, as he tried to launch his literary career after moving from his childhood home in Virginia to Boston, the city of his birth. He had at the time been trying to distance himself from his foster father, John Allan, in Richmond, Virginia, with whom he had a difficult relationship.

The book was published in complete obscurity, paid for entirely by the author and printed by a man who normally produced flyers and labels. When he later re-published the poems under his own name, Poe apologised for their quality and said they had never been intended for publication. A copy of the original book did not surface until more than 25 years after it was published, prompting some poetry experts at the time to claim it had never existed.

Danny, he said, was certain to have been left "with a lifetime's worth of emotional scars" after his experiences at the Overlook, where his father was possessed by the hotel, tried to kill him and his mother and eventually died.

How Danny deals with both his nightmarish experiences and the clairvoyance, or "shining", which saved him, might make "a damn fine sequel", King said, according to local Toronto news website the Torontoist. His vision of the book -- tentatively called Doctor Sleep -- sees Danny now aged 40, working at a hospice for the terminally ill in upstate New York. He is apparently an orderly at the hospice, but his real work is to help make death a little easier for the dying patients with his psychic powers -- while making a little money on the side by betting on the horses.

"It's a blow," said Lorraine Shanley, a partner in the consulting firm Market Partners International Inc., who earlier this week watched former Alaska governor and Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin promote her book on Ms. Winfrey's show.

"Oprah Winfrey has supported many authors, and her book club has had a huge impact on America's reading habits," added Ms. Shanley. "She made Faulkner a best seller again. She also promoted an eclectic group of authors and created publishing successes for many commercial writers."

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Over the years, the book club has helped to bring the works of well-known writers such as Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison and Cormac McCarthy to even broader audiences. The show has also introduced writers such as Edwidge Danticat to millions of readers.

"Other than a book being turned into a popular movie nothing brings readers to a book like Oprah," said Dawn Davis, editorial director of the Amistad imprint of News Corp.'s HarperCollins Publishers. (News Corp. also owns The Wall Street Journal.) "She brings a variety of readers to a variety of books. Her impact is immeasurable."