Book News, In Brief

The results of About.com's Best Manga of 2oo8 polls are in. Voting categories included shonen (boys'), seinen (men's), shojo (girls'), josei (women's), and yaoi (gay). Winners include High School Debut, Slam Dunk, and COWA!

Finally, an article about print-on-demand publishing that pulls no punches! From The Indiana Gazette's gleefully cruel Self-publishers Flourish as Writers Pay the Tab: Robert Young, chief executive of Lulu Enterprises, [says that] a majority of the company's titles are of little interest to anybody other than the authors and their families. "We have easily published the largest collection of bad poetry in the history of mankind,'' Young said.

The Kindle can't seem to do anything right. Via The Consumerist: It's been a little over a year since Amazon released the Kindle, and now publishers are finally getting the chance to set their own pricing on ebook editions. The result has been a slow creep in pricing on some titles—in some cases to levels above the price of a paper edition of the same book—for a digital edition that you can't resell, give away to someone else, or read on any other device.