I love promotional programs like the new Read It Forward here in Birmingham/Jefferson County. They seem to merge all of the fun parts of technology, connects a community and has FREE books! This year Tom Sawyer has been selected as the book for Alabama Reads and the JCLC system is stepping up to make reading [...]

Amazon fired the opening salvo in the latest skirmish over eBooks with mega-publisher Macmillan. Macmillan, one of the largest publishers in the world is at odds with Amazon over the pricing of Kindle books, so Amazon deleted all of the “Buy Now” buttons from all Macmillan published titles! I’m sure Amazon can predict the impact [...]

The Alabama Book Festival launched a new website last weekend. This year will be the 5th year for the state-wide literary festival. It scheduled to run 10 a.m. through 4 p.m. Saturday, April 17th, in the Old Alabama Town section of Montgomery. The full line up of speakers and authors is listed here and includes [...]

It’s less than a week before Steve Jobs takes the stage atop a unicorn showing the world the fabled Apple Tablet (iSlate). And it appears that Amazon thinks there is going to be a real battle for books. In the past two years, Amazon has used its size to bulldoze its way through publishing. But [...]

It is almost 2010 and despite the rose-colored glasses being handed out by the Amazon PR team, eBooks and print-to-digital products still have a ways to go before becoming mainstream and major streams of revenue. This post is also serving to round out some views I’ve passed along via Twitter recently and in reply to V.Sandbrook.
Publishers [...]

I have never used the word “charming” in a book review before, but this one totally qualifies. Alan Benet’s The Uncommon Reader is a quick (only 128 pages) captivating read for anybody who enjoys books and the discussion around them.
The basic premise is that the Queen of England takes up reading books from a local [...]

The annual Local Author Expo has been in full swing since 11 a.m. today and ends at 3 p.m. for the day. If you didn’t make it out today, you can go by the Birmingham Library tomorrow (Sat., Dec. 5th) and mingle with some of Birmingham’s literary minds.
Over 140 local authors are attending this year [...]

The Richest Man in Town is a book in the vein of The Millionaire Next Door and paints an interesting picture of America’s most financially successful people. Author Randall Jones pulls out his notes and rolodex he amassed while putting together Worth magazine. The cross section and insights these provide are very illuminating. This book [...]

Experimenting. That’s what publishers are doing and it is very cool to think about what the near-future holds. This week I’m playing with two such experiments. One from a magazine publisher, the other from a book publisher.

First, the print magazine. While many magazines are still reeling from economic and industry shifts, Esquire is charging ahead [...]

I recently ran across this video of Chip Kidd and James Ellroy. Though the video centers mostly on James Ellroy’s style and writing (he is one intense dude, no doubt) there are some spots where they discuss how the writing influences Kidd’s approach to designing a cover for the same author over and over. (Sidenote: [...]