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:
Import fees will still apply, but Amazon has finally made its Kindle reading device available to customers in Canada (Press Release [2]).
Citing a budgetary deficit, officials in Colton, California, have closed all three of the city’s public libraries and laid off nearly sixty employees (Contra Costa Times [3]).
Calling the matchup an unfair fight, a Google Books engineer backed down yesterday from a television debate against a lawyer from the Open Book Alliance (TechCrunch [4]).
Meanwhile, the Writers Union of Canada has become the first group among those newly covered by the Google Book Search settlement to reject the revised deal (Bookseller [5]).
Jack Fogg, previously a senior editor at Hodder & Stoughton, has been appointed editorial director of Random House imprint Century (Press Release [6]).
Window Media—the country’s largest publisher of newspapers for the gay and lesbian community—has closed its offices and will file for bankruptcy (Associated Press [7]).
After rating more than seven thousand public libraries, Library Journal [8] has released this year’s second list of “America’s Star Libraries.”
Self-publishing platform Smashwords has signed a deal with “device-agnostic” e-book distributor Shortcovers (BNET [9]).
Penguin’s authors [10] have sounded off about the books they’re giving—and hoping to receive—over the holidays (and no, they aren’t all Penguin titles).