Amazon Motion Fails, Record Expected at Poe Auction, and More

by
Adrian Versteegh
12.3.09

Every day Poets & Writers Magazine scans the headlines—from publishing reports to academic announcements to literary dispatches—for all the news that creative writers need to know. Here are today's stories:

U.S. District Court judge Denny Chin has denied a motion filed by Amazon to have the revised Google Book Search settlement thrown out (Reuters).

One of only a dozen extant copies of Edgar Allan Poe’s first published work, Tamerlane and Other Poems (1827), is expected to fetch between $500,000 and $700,000—a new record for American literature—at a Christie’s auction tomorrow (Associated Press).

Major restructuring at Hachette subsidiary Headline has led to staff shakeups; the merging of marketing, digital, and design operations into a new “Consumer Department”; and plans for a leaner nonfiction list (Publishers Weekly). Nonfiction publisher Val Hudson has announced that she will leave Headline later this month (Bookseller).

Courtesy of the Morgan Library and Museum: The original, handwritten, much-emended manuscript of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol will be photographed and made available online in its entirety this year by the New York Times.

Douglas Coupland’s Generation X and Ann-Marie MacDonald’s Fall on Your Knees are among the titles slated to be part of next year’s Canada Reads series, an annual media event in which national notables champion books they believe every Canadian should read (CBC).

In Ormond Beach, Florida, the owner of the Bookstore Cafe—which is closing its doors in less than two weeks—says the deep discounts offered by Walmart and Amazon are squeezing out indie retailers (Daytona Beach News-Journal).

After an unsuccessful bid to sell the thirty-year-old business, Lee Booksellers in Lincoln, Nebraska, is holding a liquidation sale today (Lincoln Journal Star).

The first line of titles from former publishing executive Philip Turner’s eponymous new imprint will be “hosted” by the Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group (Publishers Weekly).