Book News, In Brief

It's a plate of cyanide...with whipped cream on top: According to Publishers Weekly, bookstore sales for the first six months of 2009 were down $7.41 billion. That said, sales rose 3.4% in June!


Publishers and college bookstores are hoping that a too little, too late rental option will keep kids from dropping traditional ink & paper textbooks in favor of free, downloadable, e-Books. In other can-they-really-be-that-stupid news, people are dancing for rain, praying for peace, and hoping Dan Brown's next book will be the one to silence his critics.


Facebook break! Author Ben Mezrich and his Doubleday publishers are denying claims made by Facebook founder, Aaron Greenspan, that parts of Mezrich's new book, The Accidental Billionaires, were swiped from Greenspan's self-published autobiography-of-sorts, Authoritas. Frankly, I think they're both being b*tches, and I plan to un-friend the as soon as I'm done typing this.


Yale has traded in their traditional navy blue for a more cowardly shade of yellow, refusing to publish any cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad in a new book about those very images. Quick question for the University Press: If you were this afraid of violent, extremist reprisals, why did you agree to publish such an obviously hot button book in the first place? If Larry Flynt got fidgety around feminists, do you think he'd be hawking HUSTLER?