Finance

The Wall Street Journal’s bombshell (well, for the publishing industry) of a story this morning that the Justice Department is negotiating with Apple and five of the six major book publishers over an anti-trust case involving e-books seems like a stunning case of wrong-headedness. The government appears to have convinced itself (or have been convinced...

On a late February Friday, I saw this tweet from Andrew Ross Sorkin about a book his wife—a literary agent—had worked on that he tagged with the high-concept pitch of Too Big to Fail meets Devil Wears Prada. The premise seemed too good to ignore. Following Sorkin’s link, I discovered The Darlings by Cristina Alger,...

Alan Cross is a “professional music geek.” He’s also an author and sees the effect of the internet now reaching books they way it gnawed away at music. There are, of course, big differences between the technical barriers to music production and the distribution barriers to writing. Cross points out that Garage Band is more...

The New York Times has a terrible habit of putting the book publishing industry upon a pedestal. Book writing has always been an essential—even a crucial—career milestone at the Times that it must warp the paper’s perceptions of the book business. Today’s story about the flawlessly orchestrated sale of Amanda Knox’s memoir is a perfect...

There were two announcements this weekend that may freak people out over the future of books. The first was a prominent and innovative independent bookseller announcing that she had put her store up for sale with a broker who might look for someone to take over. As with the sale of the popular store in...