Moneyball author Michael Lewis is giving up his position as a contributing writer at Vanity Fair to work for Audible, the Amazon-owned audiobook company. Lewis has signed a multi-year contract with the Audible, for which he will produce original audio nonfiction stories, the first of which will be available in July. “You’re not going to be able to read it, you’re only going to be able to listen to it,” Mr. Lewis says. “I’ve become Audible’s first magazine writer.” At the New York Times, Alexandra Alter uses the move as an opportunity to highlight the growing market for audio content: “After years of stagnation in the industry, audiobooks have become a rare bright spot for publishers. While e-book sales have fallen and print has remained anemic, publishers’ revenue for downloaded audio has nearly tripled in the last five years, industry data from the Association of American Publishers shows.”
In a Vanity Fair profile, Michiko Kakutani discusses her departure from the New York Times, where she was the lead book critic for more than three decades, to write her own book, The Death of Truth: Notes on Falsehood in the Age of Trump, which will be released this July.
The Columbia Journalism Review has created a new ad campaign designed to combat “fake news.”
The winners of the 11th annual Best Translated Book Awards have been announced.
This week, Jaime Green made her debut as the romance-fiction columnist for the New York Times Book Review. Says Green in an interview: “I’ve been thinking about not only how good, fun and smart these books can be (very, very and very), but also why they matter, what motivates romance authors and what readers find in their work.”
Garry Wills pays homage to the legendary oral historian Studs Terkel, and considers the 5,600 tapes that Terkel left behind when he died in 2008. The tapes have recently been digitized and catalogued, and are now available for download.