Publishers Weekly News

Penguin Authors Share Holiday Recommendations
More than 40 Penguin authors are sharing book recommendations for holiday gift-giving as part of Penguin’s What to Give & What to Get campaign. The program, started last year, includes books from any imprint that are new, old, for children and adults.

Judge Gives Preliminary Approval to Google Deal, Sets Feb. 18 for Final Hearing
Judge Denny Chin has given his preliminary approval to the Google Book Search settlement agreement and set February 18 as the date for the final fairness hearing.

Borders Adds New Exec, Keeney, Norton Get New Roles
Borders has named Bill Dandy senior v-p for marketing and given new roles to Art Keeney and Larry Norton.

Book Category "Stabilized" at Books-A-Million, Though Sales Slip
Total revenue fell 0.6% at Books-A-Million in the third quarter and comp sales were off 1.9%. Still the company said the book business stabilized in the quarter and execs were optimistic about the holiday season.

The PW Morning Report: Friday, November 20, 2009
A daily roundup of book and publishing news from across the Web: Oprah to Go Off Air; Palin Sold 300,000; Canadian Publishers Scramble for Kindle; Google Hearing 3; More Apple Tablet Rumors

Colum McCann, Phillip Hoose Among National Book Award Winners
Novelist Colum McCann won the 2009 National Book Award for Fiction for his novel Let the Great World Spin (Random House); Gore Vidal (awarded the medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters) was rambling, witty and profound as he recounted his life; and master of ceremonies, humorist Andy Borowitz, sent everyone home at 10:45 p.m. with a crack about Sarah Palin’s new memoir, Going Rogue, being an early candidate for the 2010 NBA fiction prize.

Canadian Publishers Getting on Kindle Bandwagon
With the Kindle finally available in Canada, most houses are now getting their titles ready for sale on the e-reader.

FiledBy Adds Scribd Publishing Technology
Online author Web site directory FiledBy—which provides information on more than three million authors—has added a tech feature to its site from the online “social publishing company” Scribd. The new technology will allow FiledBy authors to use Scribd’s document reader to publish content on FiledBy and Scribd simultaneously.

Norton Signs NBA Nominee to New Deal
Although no Norton authors walked away with a National Book Award last night, the house made an impressive showing with three nominated authors.

Obituary: Waldo Hunt
Waldo (Wally) Hunt, considered by many to be the father of the modern pop-up book industry, died on November 6, three weeks shy of his 89th birthday. Through his three companies - Graphics International, Intervisual Communications and finally Intervisual Books - Hunt pioneered the creating, producing, and marketing of pop-up interactive books, and Hunt’s companies dominated the pop-up book business from the 1960’s until the late 1990's.

Threshold Sets Pub Date for Rove Memoir
Simon & Schuster's conservative imprint, Threshold Editions, has set a pub date of March 9, 2010, for Karl Rove's forthcoming memoir, Courage and Consequences.

The PW Morning Report: Thursday, November 19, 2009
A daily roundup of book and publishing news from across the Web: A couple of takes on the National Book Awards; Wal-mart Chief Defends Discounting; Smartphones vs. E-Readers; Nabokov Recovered.

iMinds in Distribution Agreement with OverDrive
iMinds, which produces eight-minute downloadable audiobooks, has signed a worldwide distribution agreement with OverDrive. Since launching in September, iMinds has had 30 titles in the Top 100 AudioBook charts on iTunes. It has also doubled its catalog to 180 titles; and launched iMinds Juniors (five-minute tracks for children ages seven to 14) and six iPhone Apps.

Barnes & Noble Responds to Burkle Investment with Rights Plan
After investor Ron Burkle revealed that he now owns a 16.8% in Barnes & Noble, the retailer's board approved a shareholder right plan that will make it difficult for an outsider to take control of the company.

Ingram Continues to Distribute Bankrupt Graphic Arts Center Press
IPS is continuing to distribute titles from its distribution client, Graphic Arts Center Press, following the Chapter 7 filing by the publishing house.

Friedman Talks Further About Open Road
Tuesday, at an appearance sponsored by NYU, Jane Friedman talked to grad students and the press about her new company, Open Road Integrated Media.

Recorded Books Forms Nonfiction Imprint
Recorded Books has announced a new nonfiction imprint, ITK Audio (In the Know Audio).

Aptara Offers High-Volume ePub Conversion Software
Aptara, a digital vendor specializing in e-book data conversion, has developed eGen, a new e-book platform for converting large volumes of digital content into the ePub standard e-book format for distribution to multiple e-reader hardware platforms.

The PW Morning Report: Slightly Late Edition for November 18, 2009
A daily roundup of book and publishing news from across the Web: Dan Brown Boosts RH E-books; Pre-‘Sex in ihe City’; AP Fact Checks Palin;  Meet Alex.

Dynamite: Five Years and Counting
While many have proclaimed the "death of the pamphlet" where periodical comic books are concerned, a few companies have been able to prove that it still has a lot of life left in it. Five-year-old Dynamite Entertainment is one of the success stories in recent years with a mix of licensed and creator-owned titles.