paper trail

Jan 30, 2013 @ 12:37:00 am

Amy Poehler

Amazon is about to start placing personalized advertisements on Kindles.

After a gloom-and-doom report in the Wall Street Journal quoting Barnes & Noble retail group CEO Mitchell Klipper as saying up to a third of all Barnes & Noble stores could close within the next decade, the bookseller has issued a statement reassuring investors (and readers) that the brick-and-mortar model is still intact. The company is “fully committed to the retail concept,” and plans to test several new “prototype” stores this year.

Hilary Mantel's Bring Up the Bodies wins the 2012 Costa "best book" prize with a unanimous vote.

Poet Cara Benson has started a campaign to launch a 21st-century Works Projects Administration and get the government to hire artists for large-scale arts projects.

Literary website The Millions has published its first e-book. Mark O’Connell’s Epic Fail: Bad Art, Viral Fame, and the History of the Worst Thing Ever is a consideration of the “worst things” that fill our inboxes and crowd our Facebook feeds. In the first in a series of “original ebooks on a variety of unusual topics,” O’Connell reflects on what “our seemingly insatiable appetite for the ‘succès d’incompetence’” says about us.

Following in the proud literary tradition of Tina Fey, Mindy Kaling, and Lena Dunham, Amy Poehler is the latest comedienne to land a book deal. The as-of-yet untitled book is scheduled to come out with HarperCollins in 2014, and is “inspired in part by Poehler’s interest in helping young women navigate the adult world.”