paper trail

Oct 19, 2012 @ 12:48:00 am

RIP, Newsweek print edition.

If you missed our panel at the New School on Monday—the one with Lynne Tillman, Sheila Heti, Émilie Notéris, and Wendy Delorme, and Chris Kraus—you can read all about it at Capital New York.

In spite of all the muscle they’ve put behind their publishing imprint, Amazon is having a tough time getting their books on bestseller lists. Amazon’s big fall release, a memoir by actress Penny Marshall, sold only seven thousand copies during its first four weeks of sales—in part because it wasn’t stocked in any Barnes and Noble stores, or any big-box chains. Nor was it on shelves in most independent books, or in e-stores operated by Google, Amazon, or Sony. In fact, notes the Christian Science Monitor, “just about the only place a reader is guaranteed to find the memoir is at Amazon.com.”

The Man Asian Prize suffered the same fate as the Orange Prize this week when the investment firm Man Group announced that they would no longer sponsor the five-year-old prize for Asian writing published in English. Moby Lives notes that “he timing of the news was strange, coming as it did just hours after the award of the Booker [which Man also sponsors] to Hillary Mantel.”

CUNY’s j-school and OR Books are teaming up to launch the CUNY Journalism Books imprint. The aim is to publish three to five books a year, and authors on tap for next year include NPR media strategist Andy Carvin, former New York Times counsel James Goodale, and journalism professors Steve Weinberg and David L. Lewis.

The last-ever print issue of Newsweek will be dated December 31, 2012, editor Tina Brown announced this week, marking the end—sorry! next chapter—of the 79-year-old-magazine. Rather than closing entirely, Newsweek will “transition to an all-digital format” and be renamed Newsweek Global. The magazine is reported to be losing $40 million a year.

Here’s the official trailer for the adaptation of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children.