On Amazon, people don’t browse and buy
So much for “Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought …” and “Frequently Bought Together”: A fascinating dispatch in Forbes reports that less than 10% of book purchases on Amazon… Read more »
In England, Amazon is the new coal mine
The mines have closed, and a new industry has come to town… Read more »
Georges Perec’s dreams: “Fifty Kilos of Quality Meat”
Over at the New York Review of Books blog, you’ll find an excerpt from our forthcoming La Boutique Obscure: 124 Dreams by Georges Perec, in a translation by Daniel Levin… Read more »
The coming Amazon crash?
In a provocative article for Forbes, Igor Greenwald ponders Amazon’s high, high stock price—and predicts a big crash. He begins by asking what it is that keeps share prices so high. Amazon, Greenwald… Read more »
Buy F. Scott Fitzgerald’s house
As the Los Angeles Times reports, one of the houses F. Scott Fitzgerald lived in during his time in Baltimore is up for sale. The town house at 1307 Park… Read more »
New York Times critic on NYPL renovation plans: “I’m not buying it”
But what’s an angry critic — or a concerned citizen — to do?… Read more »
Selling Kerouac
An AP report by Hillel Italie zooms in on the life of agent Sterling Lord, whose memoir Lord of Publishing, is just out. One of Lord’s big coups, Italie writes, was finding a publisher… Read more »
More Kindles in Canada
But it remains to be seen if Canadians will buy the devices… Read more »
In praise of William Deresiewicz
There’s no better news in the National Book Critics Circle list of finalists than the awarding of the Nona A. Balakian Citation for “excellence in reviewing” to critic William Deresiewicz.… Read more »
Poet wins contest …. by copying another poet
Poet Christian Ward recently won the Exmoor Society’s Hope Bourne poetry prize, but there’s a problem, as Alison Flood reports in the Guardian: Organisers later discovered that it [Ward’s poem… Read more »