Pulitzer Prize-winning author and former Newsweek editor Jon Meacham will become an executive v-p and executive editor at Random House Publishing Group effective January 3. His responsibilities in the new position will include acquiring and editing nonfiction titles, focusing on history, biography and religion.

"He's got an idea a minute, he's a terrific editor, his journalistic skills are incredibly helpful in exploring digital initiatives," said his new boss, president and publisher Gina Centrello, in the New York Times. "Is that effusive enough? He's a dream hire."

Meacham's American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House was published by Random House and won a 2009 Pulitzer. The Wall Street Journal reported that he "is under contract to write biographies of presidents Thomas Jefferson and George H.W. Bush."

"He's going to be a strong magnet for writers," Centrello added. "He's got impeccable contacts here and abroad."

In a statement, Meacham said, "For more than a decade, I have had a splendid relationship with Random House as an author, and now it feels natural to extend this relationship into a role as a contributor to their publishing program. I love editing, I love books, and I love the people at Random House, which always has felt like the right place for me. I have benefited enormously over the years as an author from the terrific work of Gina Centrello, my editor Kate Medina, and the greater Random House publishing team."

---

Barnes & Noble chairman Leonard Riggio is seeking to assure shareholders that a sale of the company "would be conducted with their benefit in mind," Reuters reported. In a securities filing on Wednesday, B&N said "Riggio agreed with the board that he would not form a group to acquire the company, or discuss forming such a group, without the committee's consent."

Riggio said he is "absolutely committed" to seeing the sale process through and will "fully support" a process that maximizes value for shareholders, which would include "ensuring that if the company gets sold, it gets sold to the highest bidder able to consummate a deal in a timely manner. He also said that if an interested investor or group of investors wants him to be part of a group, he would consider participating. But he said he would not team up with anyone else to make a bid for the company, other than through the committee process, in order to assure an even playing field," Reuters wrote.

---

The CIA has sued a former officer who published The Human Factor: Inside the CIA's Dysfunctional Intelligence Culture under the pseudonym Ishmael Jones. The Associated Press (via USA Today) reported the "lawsuit accuses the officer of breaking his secrecy agreement with the U.S. The former CIA staffer worked under deep cover before publishing the book in July 2008."

The CIA contends that the book "was submitted to the agency's publications review board under a secrecy agreement that covers books written by former CIA officials. Jones ultimately published the book without the CIA's official blessing."

The agent/author told the AP that "CIA censors attack this book because it exposes the CIA as a place to get rich, with billions of taxpayer dollars wasted or stolen in espionage programs that produce nothing. Despite the talented work force, more than 90% of employees now live and work entirely within the United States where they are largely ineffective, in violation of the CIA's founding charter."

---

Greenlight Bookstore was chosen Best New Bookstore by the Village Voice for its Best of NYC 2010 feature. Greenlight's owners--Jessica Stockton Bagnulo and Rebecca Fitting--"don't even try to compete with Amazon, instead supplying a selection of tasteful, literary reads that appeal to the relatively young and bookish neighborhood," the Voice observed.

In addition, WORD was honored for Best Off-Line Personal Ads: "It's so refreshing and exciting to get out of the online comfort zone when we go to WORD bookstore, where there's a nifty meet-up board on which people post slips of paper noting their favorite authors and books in the hopes of meeting someone with similar interests."

---

"It isn't about the bottom line. It’s about getting these books, these volumes, in the hands of people who will read them," said Hy Wolfe, director of the Central Yiddish Cultural Organization. He spoke with BBC News "about his mission to keep both the bookshop and his language alive." The secular Yiddish bookstore he oversees in Manhattan must relocate by the end of the year (Shelf Awareness, August 25, 2010).

---

The book domino effect. Arizona's Bookmans bookstores debuted a new video that "plays on connectedness, cause and effect, and non-linear lines while evoking the feeling of getting lost in a book so deeply that the hustle and bustle of the rest of the world fades away."

---

E-book readers may still be a minority, but "their ranks are growing and transforming the definition of reading and books," USA Today reported in its exploration of digital trends.

Stephen King predicted that e-books will comprise 50% of the market "probably by 2013 and maybe by 2012," but cautioned: "Here's the thing--people tire of the new toys quickly."

Simba Information analyst Michael Norris envisioned "gradual, uninterrupted growth in e-books, but tipping point implies there will be something overnight which will instantly change the character of the publishing business. Thousands of new consumers are showing up in the e-book 'yes' column every day, but on the other hand, there are still over 120 million people who buy print books."

Morgan Entrekin, president and publisher of Grove/Atlantic, said, "the change will not happen as fast as it has happened in the music business or even in the newspaper and magazine world.... but eventually, 30, 40 or 50 years from now, e-books will be the predominant form."

King managed to get in the last, appropriately foreboding, words on the subject: "Let's just hope there won't be a terrorist EMP (electromagnetic pulse) that'll wipe them all out. They are ephemeral. In a very real sense, not books at all. Of course, books themselves are hardly indestructible: The Germans burned plenty. Not to mention the fundamentalists, who have cheerfully burned some of my own."

---

Despite the increasing availability of digital alternatives, many college students "are still hauling around bulky, old-fashioned textbooks--and loving it," the New York Times reported.

"The screen won't go blank," said Hamilton College sophomore Faton Begolli. "There can't be a virus. It wouldn't be the same without books. They've defined 'academia' for a thousand years."

In recent studies by the National Association of College Stores and the Student Public Interest Research Groups, "three-quarters of the students surveyed said they still preferred a bound book to a digital version. Many students are reluctant to give up the ability to flip quickly between chapters, write in the margins and highlight passages, although new software applications are beginning to allow students to use e-textbooks that way," the Times wrote.

"Students grew up learning from print books," said Nicole Allen, the textbooks campaign director for the research groups, "so as they transition to higher education, it's not surprising that they carry a preference for a format that they are most accustomed to."

"I believe that the codex is one of mankind's best inventions," said sophomore Jonathan Piskor.

---

The New York Times profiled Ernest J. Gaines, whose books include author of The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman and A Lesson Before Dying. Gaines and his wife now live on the River Lake plantation in Oscar, La., where five generations of his family were born. They built a house and restored the cemetery "from near oblivion and they intend to be buried here themselves."

Gaines, 77, is no longer writing because he says he has "nothing original left to say." Referring to the cemetery, he added, "This is what I do instead of writing.... If I didn’t have those people back there, I would never have had anything to write about. That’s where I got all my stories from. My life is from them."

---

Boing Boing showcased Out of Print Clothing, which "sells T-shirts emblazoned with iconic or vintage book covers like Death of a Salesman, Animal Farm, Walden, Moby Dick, Fahrenheit 451 and a slew of others." For every shirt sold, one book is sent to a child in Africa through their charity partner Books For Africa.

"In October 2010, we fully sponsored and sent a 40-foot sea container (560 boxes) of donated text and library books to be distributed to schools and libraries in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania," said Out Of Print founder Todd Lawton.

---

Charles Yu, author of How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, chose his top 10 time travel books for the Guardian. "There are two kinds of stories: those that are explicitly about time travel, and those in which the time travel is hidden," Yu wrote. "Unless a narrative is supposed to represent a single, unbroken, continuous stretch of duration in the timeline of the actions portrayed (in which case it's probably either a court transcript or pornography), there is always, in any story, some element of compression, dilation, distortion or deformation of time."

---

Quillblog featured one "Canadian icon," actor Gordon Pinsent, reading selections from First Step 2 Forever: My Story by "another famous Canadian," Justin Bieber.

---

Book trailer of the day: For Time and Eternity by Allison Pittman (Tyndale House), the first in the Sister Wife series.

---

In another tough year economically, Independent Publishers Group had some good news to report: through September net sales rose 13% and returns were 16% of sales. The increase was not attributable to adding publishers, president Mark Suchomel stressed in a letter to the distributor's publishers. "Forty-three of our top 50 publishers are up over last year at this time. Only one of the top 50 is new to us this year." In addition, the company had a modest increase in sales in the previous year, making comparisons all the more solid.

Suchomel said that in addition to its publishers creating "good, salable books," the increase in revenue stems in part from "costly ongoing investments we've made for many years to develop markets outside the book trade and to create better tools to present a more personalized selection of titles, which have allowed us to better sell to all accounts including those in the trade." These investments include "sophisticated point-of-sale and analytical databases that allow IPG to give its publishers really solid information on which to base reprint decisions, and to give our customers comparative sales analyses that improve their stocking and restocking decisions."

E-book sales continue to rise "exponentially," he noted. The company has sold e-books for nine years, and they are "well integrated" into IPG's sales processes. Unlike some competitors, the company is not branding its e-book distribution operations separately. "We feel it is an essential part of being a good distributor, and that it adds to the definition and offerings of IPG rather than detracts from it."

Another positive sign: the company added several new staff positions and now has more than 170 full-time employees.