Google to Begin Selling E-Books This Summer
Google will sell e-books as soon as late June or July, a Google
manager said yesterday at a Book Industry Study Group panel, the Wall Street Journal reported.
Under
Google Editions, the company said "users will be able to buy digital
copies of books they discover through its book-search service. It will
also allow book retailers--even independent shops--to sell Google
Editions on their own sites, taking the bulk of the revenue. Google is
still deciding whether it will follow the model where publishers set the
retail price or where Google sets retail prices."
"This levels the retail playing field," said Evan Schnittman, v-p of global business development for Oxford University Press. "And as a publisher, what I like is that I won't have to think about audiences based on devices. This is an electronic product that consumers can get anywhere as long as they have a Google account."
As part of the Northern California Children's Booksellers Association's Kids Otter Read Day on Saturday, authors and illustrators celebrated at more than a dozen stores. Here at the Books Inc. branch on Chestnut Street in the Marina district in San Francisco: (from the l., in the back) Erin Dealey, author of Goldilocks Has Chicken Pox, and Susan Meyers, author of Bear in the Air and Kittens, Kittens, Kittens. In the foreground, with her children: Elizabeth Gomez, illustrator of A Movie in My Pillow.
Good news for fans of the late Hunter S. Thompson: Motion Picture Corporation of America has acquired rights to "Prisoner of Denver," a Vanity Fair article Thompson co-wrote with contributing editor Mark Seal for the June 2004 issue of Vanity Fair and one of Thompson's last works, according to the 
Barnes & Noble's latest main selection in its Recommends program is The Scent of Rain and Lightning by Nancy Pickard (Ballantine), which went on sale yesterday.
"Now batting, the center fielder, number six, Doug Glanville."
It's summer, and Olive Dunwoody, age 11¾, has just moved into a new house on Linden Street with her mathematician parents. Well, it's new to the Dunwoodys, but the house is very, very old. Olive thinks it's "crumbly and dark and weird," but the old stone house is certainly more interesting than the apartments they've called home in the past. For instance, when Olive tells her mother about a painting that she finds "creepy" ("It's like the houses are trying to pretend they're asleep, and stay quiet... like something bad is coming"), her mother tries to take it down, but the painting won't budge. That's Olive's first clue that something strange is going on here. Next, an orange cat enters her bedroom and introduces himself as Horatio. He warns Olive, "There is something that doesn't want you here, and it will do its best to get rid of you." Olive's absent-minded-professor–type parents spend all their time in the home's library, leaving Olive plenty of freedom to explore the seemingly endless hallways and five guest rooms upstairs. In the chest of drawers in the violet guest room, Olive finds a pair of spectacles. No ordinary eyeglasses, these allow Olive to peer inside the paintings and, as she gets closer and closer to them, she discovers she can actually press her nose through what should be the canvas, which seems to "turn to jelly as her face [sinks] through it." Olive can enter the paintings.
Book you've faked reading: