By Jake Adelstein TOKYO: The Japanese mafia, better known as the yakuza, has been the subject of fan magazines for decades. These magazines serve as de-facto trade periodicals for a world of vicious, autocratic thugs, men who are handy with swords and guns, sport full-body tattoos, deal in illegal contraband and laundered money, and rip off [...]
By Jake Adelstein So, you want to become a Gokudokisha 極道記者, or rather, a journalist who writes about the yakuza? Then you should now there are some unwritten rules you will be expected to follow. (Read more about yazuka fan magazines here.) 1) No writing about ongoing criminal ventures or front companies. 2) When writing about yakuza arrested [...]
By Hannah Johnson and Siobhan O’Leary Looking for a good e-reader but don’t have time to research each device? Let me introduce you to the E-book Reader Matrix, a wiki created by the people behind MobileRead. For each device listed in the matrix, you can find out how much it costs, what file formats it supports, [...]
By Chris Artis NEW YORK: On Monday evening, more than a hundred publishing professionals gathered at the Diane Von Furstenberg Studio in New York City’s meat packing district for the sixth annual “Let It Bee,” a spelling bee fundraiser for the Council of Literary Magazines & Presses (CLMP), the 42-year-old nonprofit organization aiding small literary publishers [...]
By Chris Artis and Erin Cox Monday night’s “Let It Bee,” a spelling bee benefit for the Council of Literary Magazines & Presses gathered a full roster of New York book world stars to raise money for the 42-year-old nonprofit organization. We he had a chance to speak to a few of the stars of the night—authors [...]
By Edward Nawotka and Siobhan O’Leary Publishers Marketplace broke the news earlier today of a new contract being pushed out by Macmillian to agents in the United States that asserts the company will only offer a 20% royalty rate for e-books, down from the typical 25% and would be applicable to “all exploitation of the content [...]
By Edward Nawotka AUSTIN: “As a human being who reads, we are moving into a world where people don’t make a distinction between how they read,” says Bob Carlton, vice president of marketing for LibreDigital, an Austin, Texas tech company that provides digitization solutions for publishers. “Information is all complex content with images—and it must be [...]
By Edward Nawotka LibreDigital launched its BookBrowse technology, which provides a digital preview of a book to online shoppers and browsers, only 18 months ago. It has since served up more than half a billion pages to readers (150,000 to Twilight readers alone). Clients using the technology include Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins, Dorchester, Harlequin and Mills [...]
By Siobhan O’Leary Virtual author readings are becoming a more common occurrence in Germany. The Tagesspiegel writes that publishers such as Berlin’s Galiani Verlag are creating bigger and better events that take place even if their authors cannot attend them or are unable or unwilling to attend. One of Galiani’s latest books, Nichts als die Welt [...]
By Emily Williams BARCELONA: Random House Mondadori’s Grijalbo imprint has been on a roll. Under the leadership of Barcelona-based editor-in-chief Ana Liarás, it has been producing homemade bestsellers such as Ildefonso Falcones’s historical epic The Cathedral of the Sea, which sold over 1 million copies in Spain and went on to become a bestseller in Italy [...]
