Amazon sent an e-mail to its California Associates warning them that the affiliate program will be terminated in the state due to an online sales tax measure that was part of a budget package passed this week by the legislature and signed into 
law by Governor Jerry Brown yesterday.
TechCrunch featured a copy of the letter, in which Amazon said it "will terminate contracts with all California residents that are participants in the Amazon Associates Program as of the date (if any) that the California law becomes effective. We will send a follow-up notice to you confirming the termination date if the California law is enacted."
American Booksellers Association CEO Oren Teicher noted "the good news is that, even with Amazon's announcement that they will fire their affiliates in California, the law as passed and signed requires the State Board of Equalization to issue rules and regulations that 'clarify the obligations under existing law for out-of-state retailers to collect and remit tax on sales of tangible personal property to California residents.' "
Teicher added that the governor's decision to sign the budget adopted by the state legislature "is excellent news in our decade-long fight to achieve sales tax equity in California. ABA congratulates NCIBA and SCIBA for their steadfast support in seeing this through, and, in particular, we extend our thanks and congratulations to Hut Landon, NCIBA's Executive Director, whose herculean dedication to this effort for years and years has finally paid off."
The Los Angeles Times reported the tax collection requirement for online retailers is expected to raise an estimated $317 million a year in new state and local government revenue. Governor Brown called the taxes "a common-sense idea."
On his blog Daggle, Danny Sullivan posted an open letter to Amazon's CEO. "Dear Jeff... Thank you for your letter today, informing me that after seven years of being one of your affiliates--and having earned for you about $150,000 in that time--that you 'deeply regret' unilaterally terminating my contract with Amazon to be an affiliate. I also especially appreciated the part where you reassured me that this action wouldn’t affect my ability to keep buying from your company. Nice touch."
Sullivan concluded: "I don’t pretend to understand Amazon’s arguments with California or other states.... While I don’t know the legalities, I do know that affiliates in California are clearly being used by Amazon in a fight it has with their own state. I think Amazon can fight that fight without penalizing them. And it should."
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In an interview with Les Echos (original French version), Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos was asked how far along he thought we are in the digital revolution. "We're just at the beginning," he replied. "Day One. Don't you think?... With new technologies, it's very tempting to think that you're further along than you are. But usually, you're more primitive than you think. My guess is we're still pretty primitive. We as a society, as a civilization. I doubt we have figured out the new technologies very well yet. "
He said the most amazing change since he founded Amazon "is the pace at which the Internet has developed. In 1995, I had to raise a million dollars from 22 angel investors who invested around $50,000 each to fund Amazon, and the question all those investors had was 'What’s the Internet?' That was just 16 years ago.... It's been such an extraordinary change, we've never seen a change that rapid. Go back and look at other major technological changes, jet travel, the automobile, radio, television, the telephone: you can look at their growth rate, and nothing has ever swept in as quickly and as globally as the Internet. If you want something that qualifies as stunning, that's probably a first in the history of civilization."
What were the last three things Bezos purchased on Amazon? "I bought soccer cleats, a science fiction novel on my Kindle called Robopocalypse and a video episode of The New Adventures of Old Christine. That was just last night."
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A town called Andrićgrad is being constructed to honor Bosnian novelist and Nobel literature laureate Ivo Andrić, "following plans by film director Emir Kusturica and the Republika Srpska's government," the Guardian reported. Andrić is best known for his novel The Bridge on the Drina, which inspired the town that will be located within Višegrad. Kusturica "plans to use the setting of Andrićgrad in his films Pancho Villa and The Bridge on the Drina. The director previously built a village, Kustendorf, above the Mokra Gora valley in western Serbia, equipped with an underground basketball arena, a library and a cinema."
The New Yorker's Book Bench blog responded to the concept by "thinking about some spots in the United States that might benefit by erecting a town in honor of a literary hero," including Fitz, N.Y., Rothlandia, N.J., Melville, Mass., Gassburgh ("Somewhere in the Heart of the Heart of the Country") and Wolfe’s Hill, N.C.
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What are kids reading in Abu Dhabi this summer? The National offered "suggestions for kids of all ages," noting that from "teens to toddlers, getting to grips with a good book is a productive summer pastime."
"Primary schoolchildren are usually much better about reading, but as soon as they come to secondary other distractions come along and that's when it can start dropping off," said Faye Banks, the head of English at Al Yasmina School. "There is a huge link between children who read and children who are effective English students. They have a better vocabulary, and without even realising it, they have taken on different sentence structures, use of punctuation and ideas. They are often much more imaginative."
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Retired businessman Malcolm O'Hagan, "an Irish engineer with a love for great literature," is working on a plan to open the American Writers Museum in Chicago. The Tribune reported that O'Hagan is optimistic about raising funds for his ambitious project.
"We don't underestimate the difficulty of the undertaking, but it will get done," he said. His initial idea was to house the museum in New England, but "the more we thought about it, we realized it needs to be in a destination city for both tourists and conventioneers, and it needs to be in a large metropolitan city with a rich literary tradition and culture. We've settled on Chicago because we think that's where it belongs."
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Andrew Miller, author most recently of Pure, chose his top 10 historical novels for the Guardian, noting that "at its best, historical fiction is never a turning away from the Now but one of the ways in which our experience of the contemporary is revived. Janus-like, such books look both to the past and to the present, and there is no need to laboriously draw out the parallels for they suggest themselves, inevitably and plentifully.
"The books listed here share the essential virtues of all good fiction: the renewal of our sense of the world, of ourselves, of language, the extension of ourselves across time and space. And how odd it would be, how dull, if novelists and readers confined themselves, in the name of some dubious notion of relevance, to the events and style of one particular period."
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In the Daily Beast, Peter Stothard, editor of the Times Literary Supplement, picked "the best of Brit lit" for this week; and novelist Adam Ross chose his favorite books under 200 pages.
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Bauhaus Bookcase of the day: The New York Times featured a bookcase that is a replica of one designed by painter Josef Albers for the reception room at Walter Gropius’s office in Weimar, Germany. Made of solid white oak by Purdys’ Fine Furniture and Cabinetry, it can be yours for $4,200.
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Effective July 11, Theresa Giacopasi is joining Little, Brown as online senior publicist. For the past several years, she worked in the Holt publicity department and earlier worked in Tarcher/Penguin's marketing and publicity department. She started her career in publishing as an intern at the Penguin Press.