Amazon and Overstock.com fell into a pricing war last Thursday after Overstock ran an ad campaign announcing that it would mark all book prices down ten percent lower than Amazon’s for one week only. Not to be outdone, Amazon then knocked down its book prices, in some cases as much as 50 to 65 percent. As the Christian Science Monitor observes, “it's only the latest skirmish in the drama that has become the e-book pricing wars.”
At the New Yorker, Gary Shteyngart gets to take Google Glass out for a test run.
An opera written by Margaret Atwood about the life of Canadian writer, poet, and actor Pauline Johnson is set to open at the Vancouver Opera House next May. Atwood began writing the opera fifteen years ago, and was drawn to Johnson because "she had courage, brains and beauty, like many of the best operatic heroines. She also led a double life, in which a secret love, a jealous sister and an early death were elements.'' Johnson was born to a Mohawk chief and an English Quaker in 1861, and is a well-known figure in Canada.
Buzzfeed Books brings the listicle to literature with “The expectations versus reality of being a writer.”
Religious scholar Reza Aslan’s book Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth become the bestselling book on Amazon yesterday after a bizarre Fox News interview. Speaking with Aslan on Monday, Fox anchor Lauren Green confronted him about failing to disclose his Muslim faith (in fact Aslan reveals his faith on |http://www.newrepublic.com/article/114066/buzzfeeds-reza-aslan-video-fox-news-traffic-bonanza#|page tw|o of his new book), then remarked, “It still begs the question: Why would you be interested in the founder of Christianity?”
Historians have rallied to Howard Zinn’s defense after it was revealed that former Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels emailed a state education official looking for assurance that Zinn’s book, People’s History of the United States, which Daniels described as a “truly execrable, antifactual piece of disinformation” was “not in use” in Indiana classrooms.
