TODAY'S NEWS

British Publishers Try to Find the Money in E-books
By Lynn Andriani
A standing room only crowd jammed into the Cromwell Room at Earls Court mid-morning on day two of the London Book Fair, hoping to learn the answer to what moderator Torin Douglas, media correspondent for BBC News, called “the $64,000 question: where’s the money” in e-books? Heads of some of Britain’s largest and most powerful publishing houses entered into a heated hour-long discussion, all of them of the mind that e-books can’t be ignored, but differing in their ways of dealing with the pitfalls of e-books, namely piracy and pricing. Read on »

Book Rights Registry Closer to Launch
The creation of a Book Rights Registry is one of the key facets of the Google settlement with the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers, and those two groups have signed an agreement with the Book Industry Study Group to have BISG begin to lay the groundwork for launching the BRR. Under the agreement, BISG executive director Michael Healy will devote about half of his time to BRR issues and if the court approves the settlement in June, Healy is likely to become head of the BRR. The BRR, backed with $34.5 million from Google, will be responsible for building a database of rightsholders information and for disbursing all money generated through the use of books in Google’s book search services.

To ease the administrative load on Healy, BISG recently hired Angela Bole as deputy executive director. Bole had been associate director before she left for a job with John Wiley.

Big Rollout for DNL Laptop-format e-Books
by Calvin Reid
Australia-based softwear and e-book developer DNAML announced plans to release more than 31,000 of its DNL format e-books by late summer aimed at the growing Netbook, small laptop computer market. The rollout of DNL format e-books includes titles from more than 35 large publishers like Random House and HarperCollins as well as more than 250 small presses and self-published authors. Read on »

University of Nebraska Releasing New Le Clézio
The University of Nebraska Press has acquired translation rights to J.M.G. Le Clézio's 2008 short story collection, Mondo and Other Stories. The title marks the third book by the French Nobel Prize winner, after The Round and Other Cold Hard Facts and Onitsha, that the scholarly press has published. (The press was among a handful of small houses to have any Le Clézio titles in print--it released Hard Facts in 2002 and Onitsha in 1997--after he won the Nobel in 2008.) Mondo and Other Stories, published in France by Gallimard, is set to bow from the press in 2011.

Norton to Publish Posthumous Volume of Ballard Short Fiction
With the passing of author J.G. Ballard, who died on Sunday, Norton now has a posthumous volume of his work on its list. The house is set to release, in September, The Complete Stories of J.G. Ballard. The volume, edited by Norton's executive editor Robert Weil, is, according to the house, the first complete collection of Ballard's short fiction to be published in the U.S. The collection will contain lauded Ballard short stories like "Belladonna" and "Report from an Obscure Planet," as well as two stories previously unpublished (in the States), "The Secret Autobiography" and "The Dying the Fall."

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Hudson Street Press Signs Weil to Book on Healthcare
Penguin's Hudson Street Press imprint has acquired a new title from bestseller, and health guru, Dr. Andrew Weil. Caroline Sutton, the newly minted editor-in-chief of the imprint, bought world rights to Why Our Health Matters: A Vision of Medicine That Can Transform Our Future and Penguin will publish in September 2009. Richard Pine at Inkwell brokered the deal on behalf of Weil, and the book, per Penguin, will show where, and how, the American healthcare system has broken down, addressing "the crisis in which our country is embroiled." Weil touches on the systemic problems with everything from American medical schools to insurance companies to the pharmaceutical giants.

At London Book Fair, Panel Says Two-Year British E-Textbook Study is Myth-Shattering
The growth of trade e-book sales has been a hot topic at this year's London Book Fair, but it has also been acknowledged on the show floor that the education and academic markets for e-books are much further developed. In findings that portend even more growth for digital publishing, a packed end-of-the-day panel on Monday featuring participants and administrators from Britain’s Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) discussed the results of a recently concluded "observatory" project in which JISC provided free access for two years to 36 core e-textbooks in science, technology and medicine to all U.K. university students, in order to study usage patterns. Read on »

Penguin Breakfast Explains Company's Global Outlook
At Penguin UK’s headquarters at 80 Strand this morning, chairman and CEO John Makinson presented a group of journalists with an overview of the company’s global business, offering commentary and observations from five of its international divisions. The big picture: Penguin is reaching far and wide, especially into developing countries.Read on »

The 2009 Pulitzer Prizes for Letters and Drama
Adding a Pulitzer to her National Book Award, Annette Gordon-Reed has been awarded the prize for her monumental historical work, The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (Norton). The book also won the 2009 National Book Award for nonfiction. Random House won three awards and is moving up the pub date for the trade paperback edition of Jon Meacham's American Lion to the end of April from its original release date in June. Read on »

PW Interview: Ted Dekker
An interview with Ted Dekker, whose novel, Boneman's Daughters, was published last week by Center Street.

PW: Boneman's Daughters seems to be moving in a different direction than your earlier fiction; perhaps in a more strictly thriller mode? Why is that?

TD: My first seven novels were contemporary spiritual novels, my next nine had strong elements of fantasy, and now I’m writing thrillers, more as a choice to spread my wings than anything. Writers, like good wine, should mature with age. Read on »

AUTHORS ON THE AIR

Authors on the Air: Lee Woodruff; The Power of Small; The Asian American Superhero Anthology
On today’s Good Morning America: Lee Woodruff, with Perfectly Imperfect: A Life in Progress (Random House, 978-1400067312, $25; RH Audio abridged CD, $29.95), which pubs today. Read on »

PICTURE OF THE DAY

Toasting Brown
Yesterday Random House popped the bubbly to celebrate the official announcement of Dan Brown’s hotly anticipated new novel, The Lost Symbol. Brown (center) is pictured here with his wife and members of Random House's editorial and sales teams.
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