⇒I interviewed outgoing Simon & Schuster CEO Jack Romanos, as he expressed his confidence in successor Carolyn Reidy: “You don’t want to bring somebody in who feels like she has to tear the company apart and put her own stamp on it. Carolyn knows how S&S works. She knows the people. She knows the financial expectations.”
⇒Judith Regan finally filed her wrongful termination lawsuit against HarperCollins, accusing Rupert Murdoch and News Corp. of trying to silence her so they could keep Rudy Giuliani’s presidential campaign on track.
⇒Everybody got excited about the release of the Kindle, Amazon.com‘s e=book reader. Until they realized they hated the design. Unless, of course, they were too excited to care.
⇒Charles Ardai got into it with the Mystery Writers of America over whether the novel Songs of Innocence is self-published, and thus ineligible for the MWA’s Edgar award despite its overwhelming awesomeness.
⇒Somebody leaked me one of the most overblown pitch letters in recent memory.
⇒J.K. Rowling sued Harry Potter fans for daring to publish a print version of the website they’d created to explain all the people, places, and magic spells in her novels.
⇒Emily Gould gave notice at Gawker, which I didn’t mention at the time because it didn’t really have anything to do with book publishing. Except to the extent that her fourteen-month tenure gave the site its sharpest coverage of the publishing industry to date, not to mention some of its best writing, period. (Gould also gave notice for Choire Sicha, whose insightful eye on media culture will likewise be sorely missed on the site after today.) Here’s hoping lines like “we get a lot of our book advice from people who eat broccoli for dessert” turn up somewhere else early on in ’08.