Amazon says that Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs biography was the bestselling book of the year in both print and e-book sales.
Thanks to an Etsy seller with a surplus of books and time, it’s now possible to buy “literary action figures” (aka author dolls) this holiday season.
London Mayor Boris Johnson—who once wondered aloud why girls love “big, epically long, boring books”—supports the idea of opening book swaps in the city’s seven hundred tube and train stations, but he isn’t optimistic about meeting the proposed deadline of the 2012 Summer Olympic Games in the city.
Amazon is preparing an on-the-fly update to its Kindle Fire e-reader after widespread complaints about performance and design. While the Fire isn’t a complete bust, as one usability expert remarked to the New York Times, if the update isn’t a success, “then the Fire is doomed to the dust pile of history.”
The Minnesota-based Utne Reader is moving to Kansas. From its archive, an excerpt from Jean-Paul Sartre’s (imaginary) cookbook: “Today I made a Black Forest cake out of five pounds of cherries and a live beaver, challenging the very definition of the word ‘cake.’ I was very pleased. Malraux said he admired it greatly, but could not stay for dessert.”
