Children's laureate Michael Rosen has stepped up his mission to put the pleasure back into reading by creating a prize for the funniest children's books. The Roald Dahl prize, which will be administered by the charity Booktrust, is said to
Is your cat writing his memoirs? It might explain those cold stares. One day you will be passing Waterstone's and you'll see a tremendous window display with his photograph and copies of a book entitled Blackie: My Lives So Far.
Prepare for the day that we transfer money as easily as sending a text message, pay for products by placing a card next to a sensor and only see cheques in a museum.
Search is the defining issue of digital publishing. It is as critical to the success of an online publication as WH Smith is to magazine retailers, and it represents the task-oriented nature of the web, very different from the laid-back,
Random House has acquired the craft, photography and reference publisher Watson-Guptill Publications from Nielsen Business Media (formerly VNU). The sale follows Nielsen's recent moves to get away from its book publishing-focused businesses. In a statement, Greg Farrar, president of Nielsen
Reading to young children stimulates their development and gives them a head start when they reach school, according to researchers who have reviewed studies on the effects of reading. Apart from helping their reading, sharing a bedtime story with a
Wikipedia got a new rival on Tuesday, when the French publisher Larousse introduced an online French-language encyclopedia inviting users to contribute content and offering free access to its dictionary, Agence France-Presse reported. But larousse.fr said its contributors, unlike Wikipedia's, would
Mark Coker, founder of a Silicon Valley public-relations firm that specializes in working with startups, says he started Smashwords.com as a way of trying to help authors deal with the realities of life online. An author himself - of a
Next month, Waterstone's is hoping to work something of the same abracadabra on behalf of English PEN and Dyslexia Action. A clutch of authors - including Sebastian Faulks, Doris Lessing, JK Rowling (is it rash to think this one will
They are petty, shabby and shallow, and tell us nothing about the real workings of government. No wonder the latest crop of backbiting political memoirs - from Cherie Blair, Lord Levy and John Prescott - make such compelling reading. But
Bookstore sales rose 1.3% in March, to $1.03 billion, according to estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau. Sales have increased every month so far in 2008 and finished the first quarter up 5.1%, to $4.46 billion.
