Bookstore tours are always enlightening. MacWorld's Kirk McElhearn browsed the virtual aisles and shelves of Apple’s iBookstore: "Having been a bookseller for three years and being a regular customer of Amazon.com and other online book vendors, I had a number of expectations. I was also curious to see how Apple approached selling this new type of content."
His verdict is disappointment mixed with patience. "What I’ve found most useful, as both a bookseller and buyer, is serendipity--the ability to come across a book you’ve never heard of because it’s on the same table or in the same shelf in a brick-and-mortar bookstore, or on the same page on Amazon.com," he wrote. "The iBookstore fails in this respect. Aside from the books you see on the main page of each category, there are no links to other titles."
McElhearn conceded, however, that this "is the initial version of the iBookstore, and Apple will hopefully figure out how to get it right. (And in fairness to the company, it’s hard to implement a 'Readers Also Bought' feature when you’ve got only a month’s worth of sales data to build off of.) What’s missing at this point is consistent metadata about books, and especially links to other books, so I can browse the iBookstore as I browse a dead-tree bookstore, wandering from section to section, discovering plenty of books I’d never heard of."
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Jessica Seinfeld, wife of comedian Jerry Seinfeld and author of Deceptively Delicious: Simple Secrets to Get Your Kids Eating Good Food, "did not plagiarize techniques for sneaking healthy foods into child-friendly dishes," according to a ruling Wednesdday by the U.S. Court of Appeals for New York's second circuit, which upheld a lower court ruling from last year, Reuters reported.
In 2008, cookbook author Missy Chase Lapine sued Seinfeld, her husband and publisher HarperCollins, alleging copyright infringement, trademark infringement and trademark dilution of her book The Sneaky Chef: Simple Strategies for Hiding Healthy Foods in Kids' Favorite Meals.
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This Saturday is Free Comic
Book Day, "comic book retailers' annual Big Push to reach beyond
their established customer base (read: people like me) to those who walk
in the light and breathe the clean air of the upper world (read: people
like you.)," observed Glen Weldon at NPR's Monkey See blog, where he offered suggestions
for best bets, best avoideds, classic reprints, modern updates because
"whether your free books come a la carte or table d'hote, you might need
some help in sorting through the offerings."
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Business Insider's Chart of the Day documented Amazon's gradual transition away from being a site for buying books, movies and music, showing "sales from media versus the rest, on a trailing four quarters basis. You can see they are now evenly split."
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British publisher Michael O'Mara will publish a mash-up novel combining elements of Stephenie Meyer's Twilight series and Jeff Kinney's Diary of a Wimpy Kid books. The Bookseller reported that Diary of a Wimpy Vampire: Because the Undead Have Feelings Too by Tim Collins will be released May 20.
"It seemed like a perfect marriage to create a parody between these two hot topics," said Alison Parker, sales director for the publisher.
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The Elements: A Visual Exploration may be "the future of digital books," suggested the Los Angeles Times in its piece exploring "the story of how a wooden conference table in Champaign, Ill., turned into a iPad phenomenon."
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A novel handselling idea. Author M.J. Rose has created a bookstore handselling contest to coincide with the release of her latest novel, The Hypnotist. Booksellers are invited to to e-mail her about their favorite handselling experience with The Hypnotist and the "bookseller who sends in the most memorable will win a Skype appearance with me, plus a set of personally inscribed copies of each book in the series--The Reincarnationist, The Memorist and The Hypnotist. Plus I’ll put your bookstore in my next novel--or name a character after you. It's the least I can do, you've all been so supportive of my books--putting all three in this series on the Indie Next Lists."
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Embattled former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich's luck has taken another bad turn with the recent announcement that Phoenix Books, publisher of his book, The Governor, has gone out of business. The Chicago Tribune reported that clients of the company "said they were informed by e-mail just days before the company closed."
Spokesman Glen Selig said Blagojevich was "sorry" to hear the news: "The governor will always be grateful to Phoenix and to its late publisher Michael Viner for believing in him and for giving him a platform to share the truth."
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"Three Books to Get You Out of a Political Wilderness" were recommended on NPR's All Things Considered by Christine Rosen, who observed, "In these wildly partisan times, what we really need is an alternative reading list--one suitable for anyone who finds himself in political exile."
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Abandon all hope, ye who read John Mullan's "Ten of the best visions of hell in literature" in the Guardian.
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You know you've been waiting for an infographic explaining how a book is made. Funnel Inc. created a chart for Webcrafters Inc., in Madison, Wis., that "details the publishing process in all of its inky glory," io9.com wrote.
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Book trailer of the day: A People's History of the Hmong by Paul
Hillmer (Minnesota Historical Society Press). This trailer was created
by Eric Rieger, a design student at the Minneapolis College of Art and
Design, with which the press has an internship collaboration.
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Mary Pomponio has been promoted to publicity manager of Plume books. She has been with the company for four years and worked on a range of publicity campaigns.
"In the end, meeting with people who have actually read your book is mostly like winning the lottery: I have never felt so lucky. These are hard times for writers and readers, with magazines folding, book publishers often springing only for name brand authors, and independent book stores dwindling. Authors spend hours each day writing, without knowing if anything we put on the page will ever be read. Book groups allow us to learn what moved our readers (or didn't). They inspire us, giving us hope that writing is a craft worth pursuing."
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Booksellers Richard Goldman and Mary Alice Gorman, co-owners of 
Summit Entertainment confirmed that Bill Condon (Dreamgirls) will direct The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn, the final movie in the series based on Stephenie Meyer's books. Melissa Rosenberg is adapting the novel, with actors Kristen Stewart, Robert Pattinson and Taylor Lautner set to return, according to the 
Threading my way east along the 10 Freeway toward downtown Los Angeles early on a Wednesday morning, I knew what was waiting in my office. A senior partner on the forty-fourth floor was expecting a draft of a demurrer motion I'd promised him by midday. Another partner, on forty-two, wanted to talk to me "urgently." ...I had interrogatories to answer in an employment case and deposition prep to do for a toxic tort case.... But approaching downtown, I didn't [exit, but] stayed straight on the 10, heading east toward Palm Springs and beyond, my knuckles frozen white on the wheel.
Robert Remini paints a vivid portrait of Henry Clay in this tightly focused analysis of a critical moment in United States history. Clay was a man of enormous contradictions: he owned slaves but fought against slavery; he was one of the most popular men in the country but couldn't come close to being elected president; he was an outstanding statesman but famously lacked discipline. There was no uncertainty, however, about Clay's dedication to the idea of the country as a perpetual Union of people.