Shine A Light

From DailyFinance:

At first glance, … news that Amazon … had removed buy buttons for all comics and graphic novels distributed by Diamond Comics Distributors sent an alarming shockwave of déjà vu. Would this be another replay of Macmillan’s battle with Amazon last month …? Or was there some even larger battle brewing …? The answer is more prosaic. Amazon’s move corrects a glitch that had its origins over the weekend, when the retailer’s top 100 sellers were suddenly dominated by comics and graphic novels, all of them distributed by Diamond. Hundreds of titles were offered at staggering discounts, which, as Publishers Weekly reported, saw high-end hardcover boxed editions — normally offered for $100 or more — priced at $14.99 or less. Naturally, customers took great advantage, and rumors flew that thousands of orders had been placed for these below-bargain-basement products. …

The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review
introduces a library that is
experimenting with lending
Amazon Kindles to patrons.

From the New York Times:

… [There was a] flurry of attention recently about a teenage German novelist, Helene Hegemann, whose book about Berlin’s club scene was named a finalist for a prestigious literary prize to be awarded next month in Leipzig. After a blogger and fellow novelist announced that Ms. Hegemann had blended sizeable chunks of his own writing into hers, Ms. Hegemann, instead of following the plagiarism-gotcha script of contrition and retraction so familiar in recent years, announced that appropriating the passages from that book and other sources was her plan all along. A child of a media-saturated generation, she presented herself as a writer whose birthright is the remix, the use of anything at hand she feels suits her purposes, an idea of communal creativity that certainly wasn’t shared by those from whom she borrowed. In a line that might have been stolen from Sartre (it wasn’t) she added: “There’s no such thing as originality anyway, just authenticity.” The news made waves in the United States with an almost novelistic kind of timing, just before the publication last week of a highly anticipated book by David Shields, “Reality Hunger,” a feisty literary “manifesto” built almost entirely of quotations from other writers and thinkers. …

from Shelf Awareness:

The parts of The Last Train from Hiroshima by Charles Pellegrino, published by Holt in January, that concern supposed technical problems with the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945 are based on fraudulent testimony by a serviceman who claimed untruthfully that he had been on the plane that dropped the bomb, the New York Times reported. Pellegrino told the Times he will rewrite sections of the book for the paperback and foreign editions of the book. The late Joseph Fuoco stated that he was a last-minute substitute for another flight engineer on the Enola Gay, that an accident with the bomb had killed a young scientist and that the bomb had been damaged so much that its destructive power was cut in half–all claims that have been widely refuted.

from a press release:

Thomas Nelson’s celebrity-voiced The Word of Promise® Audio Bible has been selected as a finalist in four categories of The Audio Publishers Association’s (APA) 2010 Audies competition, which include “Audio Drama,” “Multi-Voiced Performance,” “Inspirational/Faith-Based Non-Fiction,” and “Package Design.”  The Audie Awards is the only awards program in the United States devoted entirely to honoring spoken word entertainment. Winners will be announced at the Audies Gala on May 25, 2010, at The Museum of the City of New York in New York City. The Word of Promise® Audio Bible is a scripted dramatization of the trusted New King James Version (NKJV) of the Bible presented in a compelling, dramatic audio theater format. The project features the talents of Hollywood actors including Michael York (narrator), Richard Dreyfuss (Moses), Gary Sinise  (David), Jesse McCartney (young David and Daniel), Stacy Keach (Paul and Job), Ernie Hudson (Peter), Sean Astin (Elihu), Malcolm McDowell (Solomon), Joan Allen (Deborah), Lou Diamond Phillips (Mark), Luke Perry (Judas), Harry Hamlin (Nehemiah), Jim Caviezel (Jesus), and Martin Jarvis (voice of God). Complete with production by AFTRA Award winner Carl Amari (The Twilight Zone™ Radio Dramas), an original music score by prolific Italian composer Stefano Mainetti (Abba Pater & The Shooter), and movie-quality sound effects produced, engineered, and mixed at Cerny American Creative in Chicago—an award-winning facility ranked in the Top 3 in the nation for sound design headed by director JoBe Cerny. The 90+ hour project released through Thomas Nelson, Inc., in October in a special 79-CD box set collection and an 11-MP3 CD offering, both with a bonus features DVD. Stand-alone New Testament and Old Testament sets are also available. Audio samples, a free iPod application, and additional information about The Word of Promise® Audio Bible are available by visiting http://www.thomasnelson.com/thewordofpromise. Updates are also available by following The Word of Promise® on Facebook and Twitter, @WordofPromise.

From Publishers Weekly:

Ian Brown’s nonfiction book The Boy in the Moon was awarded this year’s C$25,000 Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction Monday in Toronto. Acclaim for Brown’s account of his family’s struggle to care for their severely disabled son, published by Random House Canada, is building. In January, it was also awarded the C$40,000 British Columbia Book Award. The book does not yet have a U.S. publisher, but Brown’s agent Bruce Westwood of Westwood Creative Artists, said the B.C. prize and being short-listed for the Charles Taylor Prize had sparked interest in the book from three parties and e-mails announcing this latest win would be going out immediately.

Anne Collins, the book’s editor and publisher of the Knopf Random Canada Publishing Group, said many publishers outside Canada weren’t interested earlier because they said the book was “too tough” or because not enough people suffer from Brown’s son’s condition, cardio-facio-cutaneous (CFC) syndrome, a random genetic mutation. Although CFC is only known to have about 100 cases in the world, difficulties and questions Brown’s family faced have a broader resonance with families of the severely disabled, such as worries about who will care for such children when they outlive their parents. Collins suggested any parent could relate. “We’re all hostages to these acts, these acts of giving birth, these acts of living our lives. He just did just a beautiful job of bringing us into that world.” She said the book’s humor balances its heartbreak. “I can’t think of a book in this kind of territory that is written by a guy who is so unheroic in the way he casts himself,” she said.

“In telling the story of his son afflicted with a rare, mysterious disease, Ian Brown takes us into a netherworld where medicine and morality meet,” the Charles Taylor jury commented. “He recounts the quotidian struggles of Walker with artless candour, quirky humour and unsparing detail….His account of his journey is deeply discomfiting and deeply affecting.”