Month: May 2016

Summer is upon us, but book news waits for no Hampton Jitney. Here’s what’s going on this week in books and reading:

Comixology Announces Unlimited Subscription Service

In the on-going quest to find a subscription service for books and reading that actually works, Comixology is throwing its hat into the ring with a $5.99/month all-the-digital-comics-you-can-read offering. The catch: no Marvel or DC titles, which together account for more than 66% of comics sales. It’s hard to imagine that either hard-core comics readers or casual fans will be interested in ponying up without titles for the big two. We shall see.

Writers Begin To Openly Oppose Donald Trump

More than 600 writers, including a fair number of heavy-hitters like Stephen King and Junot Diaz, signed an open letter to the American people outlining the case against Donald Trump for president. More than 22,000 people have signed onto the petition since it first went live.

J.K. Rowling Defends Trumps Right to Be Trump

In her remarks at the PEN American Literary Gala last week, Rowling defended Trump’s right to be, well, basically everything the signers of the aforementioned petition condemned. He was her example of an odious messenger and message that still must be protected in the name of free speech. It was a striking choice, especially considering that there are writers all over the world that are actually imprisoned and persecuted for their speech.

The Millennium Series Gets a Fifth Installment

Quercus announced this week that Lisbeth Salander will be returning for a fifth book in the Millennium series, with David Lagercrantz returning to write it. The Girl in the Spider’s Web sold well enough that the series seems to have enough interest to become one of the very few series that has continued after the creator’s death. No title yet, but the next book will be out in both the US and the UK in 2017.

Special thanks to Penguin Random House for sponsoring This Week in Books. Enter here for a chance to win a modern reading nook stocked with books (or just click the image below).

Welcome to the inaugural edition of This Week in Books, our weekly wrap-up of the most interesting stories from the world of books and reading.

Special thanks to Penguin Random House for sponsoring this maiden voyage of This Week in Books. Enter here for a chance to win a modern reading nook stocked with books (or just click the image below).

On to the news:

1. The big story last week was Goodreads getting into the discounted ebook game. With its treasure trove of user data, Goodreads is positioned to deliver notifications about ebook deals to exactly the right audience. Goodreads users now can sign up to receive notifications about downpriced ebooks for titles they have on their shelves or they sign up for by genre or interest.BookBub is probably the company most likely to feel the pinch here. They have broken out as the go-to resource for both publishers and readers for ebook deals with millions of email subscribers across all genres. In fact, Goodreads might be the only company that has a wider email reach. Goodreads could really squeeze BookBub on pricing if they so desire: Amazon certainly won’t feel the pinch if they drastically undercut BookBub’s prices, and they have a reach, between email and active users of the site, that is the envy of the entire book world.
2. Jeff Bezos says more Amazon bookstores are coming. I promise not to make this an Amazon and Some Other Stuff newsletter, but Bezos announcing that they aren’t done opening bookstores has to be included here. Frankly, I am puzzled by what Amazon is doing. Are they trying to assemble Barnes & Noble’s coffin? Reacting to the resilience of independent bookstores and physical books? Trying to get people to just like Amazon more? All of these?
3. Dan Brown abridging The Da Vinci Code into a YA version.I have to admit that when I read The Da Vinci Code, I did not immediately think, “Boy they are really going to have to dial this back to get teenagers to read it.” As far as I can tell, it will be The Da Vinci Code just…shorter. To my knowledge, this is the first time a big commercial adult hit has been modified this way to be remarketed as YA. Are there really teenagers out there that are like, “YES I always wanted to read The Da Vinci Code but it was just too long,” as they lugged around Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows?
4. Lena Dunham publishes her teenage diary, donates proceeds to charity. Dunham apparently came across the diary she kept in her late teens, and, because she is Lena Dunham, decided that it needed to be public. She is donating the proceeds to Girls Write Now, a surpassingly deserving organization. Dunham is more and more plugged into the book world, and is certainly unafraid to experiment.
5. Katherine Dunn, author of Geek Love, dies at age 70.Okay, so this happened the week before last, but I am cheating because I love Geek Love and am just so sad about this. I had been waiting so long for her next novel that I had forgotten that I was waiting for it. In fact, Dunn had become one of those writers I thought of as being sort of unreal. Not dead, but just existing on a plane slightly refracted from our own and therefore largely inaccessible, like Pynchon or Ferrante. If you haven’t read Geek Love, do yourself a favor. And if you know a geeky teenager that likes to read, please make sure that they’ve heard of Dunn and Geek Love.

Here are some of the most storied book shops to celebrate the bookworm in all of us.

Of these 12 Bookstores to Visit in a Lifetime, I’ve been to three. Work to do still.

This summer, my recommended reading list has a good dose of books with science and math at their core. But there’s no science or math to my selection process. The following five books are simply ones that I loved, made me think in new ways, and kept me up reading long past when I should have gone to sleep.

Bill Gates has some recommendations for your summer reading.

Goodreads has launched a personalized daily eBook discount program. Goodreads Deals will alert members to sales on books by authors they follow or to titles already on their shelves, making clearing space on your TBR a whole lost easier and more cost-effective.

There is a whole cottage industry of ebook deal services. Goodreads entering could change the landscape considerably.

Lena Dunham, star and creator of HBO’s GIRLS and co-founder of LENNY, surprised her fans — and Girls Write Now — with the flash-release of her new book, Is It Evil Not To Be Sure? at 6 a.m. today on LennyLetter.com. In the spirit of women helping women, Lena announced that all profits from Is It Evil Not To Be Sure? will go to Girls Write Now.

Dunham is quickly becoming a serious mover & shaker in the book world.