Update: Amazon caves to Macmillan’s demands! Read on to learn more about the dispute:

After Macmillan Publishers challenged Amazon’s pricing of e-books for Kindle users, Amazon retaliated on Friday by pulling not only all e-books by Macmillan authors but also physical literature by the publisher as well.

Macmillan is a large international publishing house with smaller  presses such as Farrar, Straus & Giroux, St. Martins Press and Henry Holt under its wing. Macmillan’s decision to pressure Amazon to raise its prices for e-books  has caused Amazon to render its digital shelves purposefully bereft of books by authors like Jeffrey Eugenides and Hilary Mantel. …more

“These things, writing and reading, are never, I don’t think were ever, ever meant to be exclusive from anything else. I think they were always meant to be part of the grand fabric of life.”

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Magazine offices are the new Detroit.

A quality short story.

The winner of the second annual World Building of the Year award: the Mapungubwe Interpretation Centre.

NY Times on the best Children’s books of 2009.

Most bad-ass headline of the day: Plan to pierce heart of urban monster volcano.

Author and ex-soldier for the publishing world, former Executive Editor-in-Chief of Random House and fiction editor of The New Yorker Daniel Menaker attempts to break down the industry’s struggle into variables of audience, cost, risk, and heart in his recent essay, “Redactor Agonistes.”

My plan was to allow anyone who wanted to read an advance copy of the book the opportunity to do so, provided they forwarded the book within a week to the next reader. …more

“Soft Skull began at a Kinko’s in 1993 courtesy of Adobe and Xerox. It started with fewer resources and far less maturity and experience than, say, Seven Stories, Arcade, Manic D or New Press. But we all benefited from the collapsing barriers to entry into the publishing business.

Distributors like PGW, IPG, Consortium, SCB arose to service these publishers and in so doing engendered yet more presses—first Akashic, then Two Dollar Radio, Featherproof, Chiasmus. First, we were the barbarians at the gate. Then, we became the alternative establishment.”

Richard Nash recounts his past at Soft Skull, and talks about his vision for the future of publishing in this article at Publisher’s Weekly. …more

“Books ought to be so cheap that we can throw them away if we do not like them, or give them away if we do. Moreover, it is absurd to print every book as if it were fated to last a hundred years. The life of the average book is perhaps three months. Why not face this fact? Why not print the first edition on some perishable material which would crumble to a little heap of perfectly clean dust in about six months time? If a second edition were needed, this could be printed on good paper and well bound. Thus by far the greater number of books would die a natural death in three months or so. No space would be wasted and no dirt would be collected.” – Virginia Woolf in a debate with her husband Leonard, a publisher (from The Book Bench.) …more

The book blogs are in a tizzy! One second, it doesn’t look good for literature.  The cancer has spread. The postmortem is imminent. But then all of the sudden they are saying everything is fine and pointing us in the direction of some really cool stuff, like kids who read and write and stories embedded in web sites!

So which is it, book blogs? What they’re saying, plus an Agatha Christie serial killer, a great conversation about writing child characters, and Charles Dickens fruit corners, all below the fold.  …more

by Joshua Mohr

Lately people have been asking me why I decided to publish my novel, Some Things that Meant the World to Me, with a small press. Instinctively, my gut wants to lie, stammer some kind of self-justification: “Well, uh, I felt that a boutique house (note that I didn’t say “small press”) would give me more attention (i.e. answer my emails) and nurture the book in a way true to my artistic vision (i.e. not perform fellatio on the marketing department)

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Publishers Marketplace reports that Harpers has agreed to publish “The Sea is My Brother,” a “lost” novel by Jack Kerouac, written in 1942 and based on his experiences in the Merchant Marine. According to the book “Desolate Angel” by Dennis McNally, Kerouac wrote the work while on the SS Dorchester, where he served in the galley.

The biography Jack Kerouac by Michael Dittman, which describes Kerouac’s somewhat rocky service in the merchant fleet, quotes Kerouac as describing The Sea is My Brother as being about “man’s simple revolt from society as it is, with the inequalities, frustration, and self-inflicted agonies. Wesley Martin loved the sea with a strange, lonely love; the sea is his brother and sentences. He goes down. The story also of another man, in contrast, who escapes society for the sea, but finds the sea a place of terrible loneliness.” If it sounds familiar to fans of Kerouac, Atop an Underwood, the 1999 compendium of Kerouac’s early and unpublished writings contained “a substantial chunk of the third version of The Sea is My Brother,” according to the Kerouac fansite Jack Magazine.

The news, and the photo of Kerouac wearing a naval cap, made me think of other sea-going novelists. …more

After months of speculation, and a piece in The New Yorker’s “Talk of the Town,” it’s official: …more

The Miami Herald is for sale.

The Tribune Company is broke.

The Huffington Post is expanding into San Francisco.

Despite the fact that the Wall Street Journal isn’t very good anymore, Newsweek says Rupert Murdoch is saving it.

Bill O’Reilly says he hasn’t seen any evidence of abuse at Guantanamo Bay.

Eliot Spitzer’s going to write a column about sex work for Slate.com (kidding, it’s about government).

Tina Brown, who almost sank The New Yorker, is barrelling through millions to build The Daily Beast.

Markus Dohle sends a less ominous note to the Random House staff.

Meanwhile, it’s all good over at Graywolf Press.

Maud Newton has a more in-depth look at the Random House reorg and some great insight into what this might mean for publishing. Here’s Random House Memo in full, also via Maud:

Dear Random House Colleagues:

I am writing today to tell you about a new publishing structure and a new leadership team for the adult trade divisions at Random House, Inc. here in the U.S., effective immediately. After looking closely and extensively at our organization and its rich diversity of authors and resources, we have created a plan for our future that aligns existing strengths and publishing affinities and fosters teamwork throughout the company. It will maximize our growth potential in these challenging economic times and beyond.

The new structure will augment the exceptional publishing programs of the Random House, Knopf and Crown divisions and draw on the veteran leadership of Gina Centrello, Sonny Mehta and Jenny Frost, respectively. …more

Less than a year after Houghton Mifflin bought Harcourt, the new entity – Houghton Mifflin Harcourt – seems to be collapsing. Two weeks ago, it was announced – and then retracted, and then sorta-kinda reannounced – that HMH was freezing acquisitions (i.e. not buying anymore books). Yesterday, Rebecca Saletan, who unseated longtime Houghton publisher Janet Silver last spring, resigned as publisher of HMH.

Today, Galleycat reports that executive editor Ann Patty has been fired, along with an unspecified number of other employees.

Rumors point to an eventual sale of the trade division, which publishes luminaries like Philip Roth and Umberto Eco, as well as new stars like Padma Viswanathan, by its Irish owners, Education Media and Publishing Group.

This comes as major restructuring is announced at Random House and Knopf, leading one to ask, inevitably, was Chicken Little right?

Update: Double Day is also having some problems.