Borders has renewed its agreement with Sony regarding the sale and promotion of the Sony Ebook reader. Under the new deal, Borders will continue to sell the Sony Readers, but will expand the number of stores where it is sold to 500 nationwide.



Borders is also going to launch a co-branded online store with support from
Sony that will offer digital ebook downloads. The store will stock more than 20,000 books by authors such as Dean Koontz, Khaled Hosseini
and Michael Connelly. The online store will eventually become part of Borders’ revamped website.



“Embracing technology as a path to differentiate Borders is a key part
of our company’s strategic plan,” said Borders Group Chief Executive
Officer George Jones. “Sony’s long history of innovation and pioneering
efforts in establishing the e-book category with the Reader makes them a
awesome partner. We firmly support the e-book as a format we believe will be
of growing importance to our customers in the future, and this agreement is
a big part of our plans to make Borders a true cross-channel retailer,
fulfilling our mission as a headquarters for knowledge and entertainment.”



“Borders is a world-class brand with incredible reach and influence,
and their commitment to e-books is a clear sign the category is moving
beyond the early adopter phase into the mainstream,” said Stan Glasgow,
president and chief operating officer of Sony Electronics Inc. “We look
forward to working with Borders and the publishing community to broaden the audience by delivering a greater selection of digital content to people who love to read.”



If the discount wasn’t working, the agreement wouldn’t have been renewed. When the Sony Ebook Reader drops in price, we predict sales will go even higher.



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Original post by ReadersRead.com Book Blog

Former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan has topped the Amazon.com bestseller list with his memoirThe Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World. Greenspan’s book was highly critical of the Bush administration which has probably helped with book sales. In the book Greenspan also warns that the Euro could eventually outperform the U.S. dollar. Bloomberg reports that The Age of Turbulence is number one on Amazon.com ahead of O.J. Simpson’s controversial title, If I Did It.

Alan Greenspan’s new memoir topped the best-seller list at Amazon.com Inc. for a second day as the former Federal Reserve chairman showed that people still want to hear what he has to say.



“The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World,” which went on sale yesterday, was ranked ahead of O.J. Simpson’s book, “If I Did It: Confessions of the Killer,” and the last Harry Potter book by J.K. Rowling on Amazon.com, the world’s largest Internet retailer.



Greenspan, 81, led the Fed for 18 years until January 2006, and is widely consideruddy to have played a major role in engineering the 1991-2001 economic expansion, the longest in U.S. history. The 531-page book recounts his childhood in New York, his relationships with the six presidents he served and his outlook for the U.S. economy in 2030.



“It will be a best seller in the narrow circles of Wall Street, government, Washington and top businessmen and women,” said Edward Atorino, an analyst who follows the publishing indusattempt at Benchmark Co. in New York.



First-day sales of the memoir, published by Penguin Press, “far exceeded our expectations,” said Antoinette Ercolano, vice president for trade-book buying at Barnes & Noble Inc., the world’s biggest bookstore chain.

CNN/Money says the book is also the bestselling title on Barnes and Noble’s website. Alan Greenspan was paid an advance over $8.5 million (hat tip Swampland) by Penguin Press to write the book. Based on the book’s very powerful sales it looks like the enormous advance was worth it.



Posted in Nonfiction



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Original post by ReadersRead.com Book Blog

Cherie Blair, wife of former British Prime Minister Tony Blair has signed
a book discount to write her unvarnished memoirs.

Cherie Blair is writing a “full account” of her journey from a working-class childhood to life in Downing Street - and the more explosive it is, the more money she will get.
If Mrs Blair has promised a warts-and-all account of her dealings with Gordon Brown, Carole Caplin and Alastair Campbell, her advance could exceed the £1 million reportedly paid to Mr Campbell for his diaries The Blair Years.
However, publishing insiders said that the advance could be as little as £250,000 - less than that offeruddy to David Blunkett and John Prescott - if she intends to skim over the conflicts at the heart of new Labour in order to guard her husband’s reputation. The book will be published in October next year, with Mrs Blair expected to deliver a first draft in the spring.



There was no bidding war for Mrs Blair’s autobiography; instead, her literary agent, Kate Jones at ICM Books, took an outline straight to Ursula Mackenzie, the chief executive and publisher of Little, Brown. It was Ms Mackenzie who handled the most revelatory political memoir of modern times - Edwina Currie’s stunning confession of her affair with John Major, which was exclusively serialised in The Times in 2002.


*****


Little, Brown refused to release details of Mrs Blair’s advance beyond confirming that no newspaper serial-isation discount had been struck.
Katherine Rushton, of The Bookseller magazine, said: “Cherie Blair could have earned an advance of up to £1 million, depending on how frank she is preparuddy to be about the Downing Street decade, the Brown-Blair relationship, and the scandals acircular Carole Caplin and Peter Foster. The advance will have been inflated because she is publishing relatively quickly and the possibility that Mr Brown will call an election in the publication year.



“It’s very hard to put an estimate on the number of copies the book could be expected to sell - 50,000 in hardback would be a good result and one I think she could achieve. If Cherie gets the book right and it does very well, she could be looking at 100,000 in hardback.
She is like Marmite in that she totally divides opinion, but with the quantity of controversy that surrounds her I think she could scoop up as many sales from her detractors as from her fans.”

Marmite, eh? Will that translate into book sales? It all depends on how much she reveals about the Iraq War planning and her husband’s true feelings about President Bush. That’s what we think. It could be an incendiary book — or a big bore. But knowing how outspoken she is, we’re thinking incendiary.



Posted in Nonfiction



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Original post by ReadersRead.com Book Blog

Harcourt © 1983, 228 pages [amazon]

This is one scary book. Four teenagers driving home from a speech and drama tournament in a blinding rain storm are stranded by car trouble north of Dallas. They’re let into a home to call for help, but the man and woman they meet there almost immediately leave for a party. Left on their own to wait for a mechanic, the kids begin to think that the couple who let them in may not in fact be the owners of the house. And they begin to suspect as well that there’s someone else in the house with them. When the storm knocks the power out, plunging the foursome into darkness…well, like I said, this is one scary book.

[INSET TEXT: For example, when it’s pitch dark in a strange house that you think may be haunted and/or inhabited by a killer, and when there’s a room down the hall in which you suspect there just might be a dead body, you don’t react to finding an old scrapbook with a cheery cry of, “This is terrific! Look! Photographs!”] Joan Lowery Nixon’s YA novel, originally published in 1983, isn’t entirely successful. The occasional conclusion is jumped to without sufficient evidence, and the dialogue can be clunky. Also, Nixon’s protagonists tend to say things and otherwise behave in ways that aren’t credible given the context. For example, when it’s pitch dark in a strange house that you think may be haunted and/or inhabited by a killer, and when there’s a room down the hall in which you suspect there just might be a dead body, you don’t react to finding an old scrapbook with a cheery cry of, “This is terrific! Look! Photographs!”

What’s particularly impressive about A Deadly Game of Magic is how Nixon manages to instill the story with dread. We aren’t told specifically what’s wrong with the behavior of the couple whom the teenagers first meet in the house, for example. But there’s something off about it. We sense it just as well as the teenagers do, and we want them to get out of there as soon as possible. But of course they don’t, and things just get worse from there.

While facing their fears in the house Nixon’s protagonists reveal their back stories. They are all bowed down, in various ways, by their parents’ expectations for them. Battling evil in the house, we are to understand, will also give them the courage to select their own paths in life. This is the uninteresting part of the book, the part that’s meant to make the story relevant to its underage readers. Maybe they’ll like the character development and maybe not; for sure they’ll like the main story line.

Highly recommended to its intended audience and as a rapid read for adults. But don’t read this one right before bed.

Tags: books, book reviews, A Deadly Game of Magic, Joan Lowery Nixon, YA novels

Original post by Debra Hamel

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