Amazon has announced that it will be launching a new imprint dedicated exclusively to comic books and graphic novels. Jet City Comics will debut this fall with Christian Cameron and Dmitry Bondarenko’s Symposium, and will be followed by an adaptation of George R.R. Martin’s story “The Meathouse Man” and the sci-fi novel Wool.
It took less than a year for Arthur Frommer, the 83-year-old creator of the Frommer’s travel guides, to buy his company back after selling it to Google last year. The former G.I. isn’t wasting any more time: he plans to release a new series of guidebooks this October under the name FrommerMedia, and has struck a deal with Publishers Group West to promote and distribute the books.
A group of scholars has filed suit against the New York Public Library “to stop the Library from demolishing the stacks in its flagship 42nd Street building or moving any books off the site.”
JK Rowling has been outed as the author of the UK crime thriller The Cuckoo’s Calling. The book came out last April to positive reviews—though it only sold 1,500 copies—and was published under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith. The gig was up when literary sleuths noticed that Rowling shared the same publisher and editor as Galbraith. Little, Brown confirmed Rowling as the author last week, and said that reprints of the book would carry a disclaimer: “Robert Galbraith is a pseudonym for J.K. Rowling.”
Goucher College in Baltimore, Maryland, is debuting what may be one of the country’s first undergraduate programs in book studies. The eighteen-credit minor will "explore the past, present, and future of the book," and objects of study will range from “the cuneiform tablet to digital media."
A linguist working in remote regions of Australia has discovered that members of an isolated village in the northern part of the continent have invented a new language. Roughly 350 people under the age of 35 speak Light Warlpiri, which is “neither a dialect nor the mixture of languages called a creole, but a new language with unique grammatical rules.”
