• Ali Smith has won the for fiction (originally known as the Orange Broadband Prize).
• Go Set a Watchman is the for HarperCollins. They won’t say how many copies have been ordered, but sales have been brisk ever since it was listed at Amazon. While we’re here, some of are (prior to the launch—coincidentally, of course) up for auction.
• Writing from eight heavyweights. Worth a glance.
• Ursula K. Le Guin begins with “Amazon and I are not at war.” Yet she titles it “Up the Amazon with the BS Machine.” We sorta think she wants to go to war. Or rather we might sorta think so, if we could decipher her essay.
• The Authors Guild appears to be altering course. For one thing, they’ve with Author Solutions.
• A new literary super-agency, , has been formed by several high-fallutin’ agents. Just like Crosby, Stills & Nash, except, you know, books and stuff.
• Advertise with Amazon: a step-by-step .
• James Patterson is launching a under Little, Brown. Patterson will personally write some of the books and will oversee the acquisition of others. Sounds to us like the studio system, which Patterson has employed most of his career.
• Indie bookstores are , but is it a trend, or just a blip in the graph? While we’re at it, there’s an app, called , that can help you “browse Amazon, buy independent.” It only works on Chrome.
• is Comma Press’s new platform for self-published short stories, poems, and other works. We think they should have named it differently, to avoid confusion with , the literary magazine of Schoolcraft College.
• In the “My oh my, where is our country headed?” department, for reading an Allen Ginsberg poem to his class.
• A first edition of The Hobbit for £137,000. (Yes, we rummaged through our old books too; no such luck.)
• Amazon has released an update of the in America.
• 700 for Kindle, iPad, and other devices.
• How books make it onto the . This explains everything. And another video: about a book that can be into a tree!
• In case you haven’t found it yet, Instagram’s .
• A is knocking at our door. We don’t yet know how useful it will be, but we’re inviting it in for tea.
• In the “Yikes!” department, if you’re the president of a large public library, and something valuable gets misfiled, you could .
• Finally, California libraries give to the homeless. Read this one in a quiet place.
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