Great publishers are everywhere. Lookout Books, a new one connected with the University of North Carolina at Wilmington's Creative Writing Department, is winning national attention for its first title, reports Ben Steelman of the Wilmington Star-News.

Edith Pearlman's Binocular Vision just appeared on the front page...

Other presidents have experienced the difficulties that now exist between President Obama and General Stanley McChrystal. General George McClellan treated Abraham Lincoln with disdain. Douglas MacArthur did the same to Harry Truman. Those are just the most famous cases.

Lincoln struggled with the decision to fire McClellan, as Truman...

Just posted to the web: video of a must-see presentation by Michael Tamblyn, VP Content, Sales and Merchandising at the ebook bookseller Kobo.

Titled "Lessons Learned from Shortcovers and Kobo: A Year in the Life of the What and How of Selling eBooks," it's clear, funny and surprising....

Looking forward to the new Apple tablet that will be announced next week, I've been wondering if we might eventually see online book rentals.

There'd be nothing new about it. In the 1930s, before the modern era of paperbacks, the U.S. had maybe fifty thousand rental libraries of one kind...

Last week, publishing veteran Jonathan Galassi made the case in the New York Times that William Styron's ebook rights should have remained with Random House, instead of being sold to a different company. Styron's longtime editor, Robert Loomis, figured heavily into Galassi's argument that the Styron estate had an obligation...

A contractual problem threatens the ebook business of all the major publishers.

It begins with the next big thing in book publishing: advertising.

Have you used any free iPhone apps that generate revenue for their creators by running small ads above or below the apps' primary content?

Have you seen...

As reported here in yesterday's Frankfurt Book Fair roundup, Nelson Mandela's diaries are becoming "the book of the fair." The news reminded me of the time I chased the first Mandela autobiography at Frankfurt, exactly twenty years ago.

In October 1989, Mandela was still in prison. It was widely assumed...

In most cities, a bookstore browser picks up a book and reads the back cover and the jacket flaps. In Washington, D.C., you see browsers who go straight to the index. They're looking for their own names. Biographies and histories are the life eternal for politicians.

But there's nothing...