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from India Insight:
Book lovers in India lap up myths with a makeover
Mriganka Dadwal knows everything about the Ramayana, the ancient Hindu epic that tells the story of warrior-god Rama and the abduction of his wife Sita by the powerful demon king Ravana.
The journalist-turned-entrepreneur says she would love to read the epic from the point of view of the vanquished Ravana. And now she can.
With several mythological tales getting a modern makeover and imaginative retellings crowding bookshelves, Dadwal and millions of urban, educated Indians who prefer to read in English have more choices than ever before.
The trend spells good times for bestselling Indian writers such as Amish Tripathi, Ashwin Sanghi and Ashok Banker who are wooing readers with characters cast in a human mould amid a masterful weaving of mythology and suspense.
from Breakingviews:
Review: Walking cure for cash-strapped U.S. cities
By Martin Langfield
The author is a Reuters Breakingviews columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.
Many American cities, from Detroit to San Bernardino, are under financial pressure. Jeff Speck, an urban planner, has a suggestion: make them more pedestrian-friendly. His book “Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at a Time” makes the case. Provide it, and they will come.
from Breakingviews:
Owners deserve right to resell book, byte or bean
By Reynolds Holding
The author is a Reuters Breakingviews columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.
Americans should have the right to resell their property, be it books, digital bytes or beans. Yet U.S. courts are all over the map on the issue of what can be sold and resold. Judges have ruled that peddling dusty old tomes is fine, but digital tunes are different. The jury is still out on genetically altered legumes. Why so complicated? The relevant law is broad enough to satisfy consumers and rights holders alike.
from Global Investing:
Weekly Radar-”Slow panic” feared on Cyprus as central banks meet and US reports jobless
US MARCH JOBS REPORT/THREE OF G4 CENTRAL BANKS THURS/NEW QUARTER BEGINS/FINAL MARCH PMIS/KENYA SUPREME COURT RULING/SPAIN-FRANCE BOND AUCTIONS
Given the sound and fury of the past fortnight, it’s hard not to conclude that the messiness of the eventual Cyprus bailout is another inflection point in the whole euro crisis. For most observers, including Mr Dijsselbloem it seems, it ups the ante again on several fronts – 1) possible bank contagion via nervy senior creditors and depositors fearful of bail-ins at the region’s weakest institutions; 2) an unwelcome rise in the cost of borrowing for European banks who remain far more levered than US peers and are already grinding down balance sheets to the detriment of the hobbled European economy; and 3) likely heavy economic and social pressures in Cyprus going forward that, like Greece, increase euro exit risk to some degree. Add reasonable concerns about the credibility and coherence of euro policymaking during this latest episode and a side-order of German/Dutch ‘orthodoxy’ in sharp relief and it all looks a bit rum again.
from MediaFile:
By Nook or by crook
Barnes & Noble, the venerable book merchant whose history spans three centuries, is in the midst of a strategic identity crisis: how to admit defeat on its Nook platform while turning its last-bookstore-standing status into a de facto monopoly. Barnes & Noble did not spark the e-book revolution – now accounting for 22 percent of all book sales – nor has it proven particularly good at evolving it. So now it’s back to basics, which is to say, back to books.
The precise fiscal health of the company’s Nook Division ‑ e-readers and e-books ‑ is not public knowledge. But the company's most recent results revealed that its total losses had increased from the previous year. This, as you might surmise, is not the desired trajectory for a business unit that Microsoft asserted was worth $1.7 billion a mere 10 months ago (when Microsoft invested $300 million for a 17.6 percent stake). Only three months ago, Pearson reaffirmed that estimate when it took a 5 percent stake for $89.5 million.
from Breakingviews:
Review: The real story of Bo Xilai’s ruin
By Peter Thal Larsen
(The author is a Reuters Breakingviews columnist. The opinions expressed are his own)
Sometime in the next few months, Bo Xilai is expected to stand trial in the most high-profile political prosecution in China for over three decades. The former Chongqing party chief, once a contender to join the inner core of China’s leadership, stands accused of corruption, abuse of power and - more prosaically - “improper sexual relations” with women.
from MediaFile:
Inkling takes aim at Amazon
Inkling, the three-year-old start-up that transforms bulky textbooks into an interactive experience for the iPad and other tablet devices, launched on Tuesday an ambitious new publishing and search platform aimed for non-fiction content such as books on wine and cooking or ones that covers topics like pregnancy.
Inkling is taking on the big cheeses of distribution by making content produced on the Inkling platform easier to search through Google. So the titles or chapters or just a page of a relevant book will pop up when someone is seeking a specific topic.
from India Insight:
Photo gallery: Old Delhi book fair is no page turner
The Ramlila Maidan in old Delhi is a reasonably eventful place. That's what made the National Book Fair stand out; it was practically abandoned. On the second day of the event, there were fewer book stalls, unoccupied slots, and few enough visitors that you could count them on your fingertips. Then there was one organiser bellowing into his mobile phone about a lack of adequate power, and bored stall owners like this man:
Stall owners I spoke to said the show disappointed them in part because there was a lack of publicity. Another said that the location in Old Delhi wasn't a good idea. But I managed to get shots of visitors:
from Photographers Blog:
Tales from a rare bookstore
By Andy Clark
The book immediately caught my eye. It was small, about the size of a deck of cards, but twice the thickness, and there was no question it was very old. It sat in a pile of other aged publications that had just arrived at MacLeod’s Books in downtown Vancouver. It looked fragile as I picked it up and opened to the title page. “Wow!”, I said.
I had been in MacLeod’s Books about five or six hours at that point, not to search for any rare or out of print books but to do a day in the life photo essay on the 50-year-old used book store. The store originally opened in the early 1960s but in 1973 a young Don Stewart bought the place and has been there ever since.
from Felix Salmon:
Judging Greg Smith’s book by its cover
We don't know much about the new book by Greg Smith, Why I Left Goldman Sachs. But we do know what its cover looks like. And there's no mistaking the fact that the font on the cover of the book is very similar to the font used in the Goldman logo:
The font in question is Bodoni. There are hundreds of different flavors of Bodoni, but I asked the lovely Josh Turk at Reuters to try to recreate both the book cover and the Goldman logo using Bodoni Bold Condensed. There's no painstaking work here, just typing the words on a colored background. Here's the cobbled-together logo, on the left, and the real one, on the right:
