“Black & White and Dead All Over,” a murder mystery set in a modern newspaper newsroom, features plenty of gallows humor in ‘John Darnton’s new novel. USAToday says, “Drawing on his storied career at The New York Times, Darnton delivers a well-turned whodunit that reads like The Front Page with additional reporting by Evelyn Waugh and Agatha Christie.”
A colorful cast of characters populates the novel, including reporters and a certain New Zealand publisher whose name rings vaguely familiar: Lester Moloch (almost rhymes with Murdoch).

To read all about it, CLICK HERE.

The New York Times’ Talking Business columnist Joe Nocera has conjured a list of the best nonfiction business books. He had solicited readers’ input on business fiction a few years back, but the results were unsatisfying.

Here are some of his picks, and we are quoting the column here:

“Liar’s Poker,” by Michael Lewis (even though I’ve since become convinced that the anecdote that gives the book its title never happened).
“The Devil’s Candy,” by Julie Salamon. (Greatest dissection of the movie business ever written.)
“The Box,” by Marc Levinson. (Hard to believe you can write a great book about the rise and importance of the shipping container, but he pulled it off.)
“Indecent Exposure,” by David McClintick. (Published in 1982, it single-handedly created the business narrative genre).
“The Go-Go Years,” by John Brooks. (The best book by the most elegant writer to ever make business his subject.)
“The Kingdom and the Power,” by Gay Talese. (Yes, the subject is The New York Times, but how can you leave it off any list of great business books?)

To see the whole list, CLICK HERE.

To hear book publishers, publicists, marketers, etc., you’d think books were a dying industry. But selling 3 billion units a year doesn’t sound like a death knell to me. Sure, individual publishers might see numbers shrinking, but that could be the result of having to share the pie with more hungry publishers, to stretch a metaphor beyond its useful range. It’s not dying. It’s changing.

In fact, The New York Times is expanding its books section to a 15-minute segment Friday evenings on its radio station, WQXR FM. See news, CLICK HERE.

The future of books may or may not be Kindle and like technologies, but clearly the industry must adapt or die. And taking books to the radio represents adaption. Going to the Web, a la DelMio.com, is another adaption. I have a vested interest in the well-being of books and their authors and publishers.

So when I see news such as the Times’ expansion of its radio segment, I find it heartening. Rather than cut back, as newspapers so mistakenly tend to do (thus my exit from that industry), The Times is pushing forward, outward.

That’s what we all ought to be doing.

The popular New York Times books section is expanding its presence on the Times’ radio station, WQXRFM. “Inside The New York Times Book Review” debuted Friday with a 5-minute segment, which the Times plans to air every Friday at 6:05 p.m.
The show, expanding on what was a one-minute segment, is based on the Sunday Book Review section. Book section editor Sam Tanenhaus is the host.
To read more about it, CLICK HERE.

Flat-world believer Thomas Friedman (he’s speaking metaphorically, of course) continues to insist it’s a flat world, and that we need to get serious about going green. A continuation of his treatise, The World is Flat, is due out in September: Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution–and How It Can Renew America.
Impatient (or forgetful) readers can pre-order the book at your usual outlets – Barnes & Noble, Amazon, etc.
The New York Times columnist still has plenty to say, even if he’s reading from a computer to a crowd as he was Friday at Book Expo American in Los Angeles.
Attendees of the expo were openly questioning the need for a book expo, reports Publishers Marketplace, as crowds have grown thinner and no-shows were conspicuous.
The expo could be an example of Friedman’s flat world playing out – a convergence of technology and economies has made the expo unnecessary and unnecessarily expensive. Relationships and business are built via the Internet, and have you seen the price of gas lately? Those factors could mean the end of the expo as we know it.

To see the Publishers Lunch, CLICK HERE.

To preorder the book, CLICK HERE.