Publishers

The annual college textbook rush starts this month, a time of reckoning for many students who will struggle to cover eye-popping costs of $128, $156, even $198 a volume. Caltech economics professor R. Preston McAfee finds it annoying that students and faculty haven't looked harder for alternatives to the exorbitant prices. McAfee wrote a well-regarded open-source economics textbook and gave it away -- online. But although the text, released in 2007, has been adopted at several prestigious colleges, including Harvard and Claremont-McKenna, it has yet to make a dent in the wider textbook market.

Robert Weil, formerly executive editor at W.W. Norton & Co., is at the helm of the company's recently revived imprint, Liveright & Co., well known for publishing great early 20th-century writers. Liveright's new editor in chief and publishing director, scheduled to appear on a panel about the nuts and bolts of publishing at this weekend's Festival of Books, talks about Norton's surprising move and other issues facing the book industry. Let's talk about how and why the Liveright imprint was revived.

A few years ago, in a moment I like to think of as inspired, I conceived of my next book. Read in one direction, it would consist of 30 one-page stories; flip it over and there would be 30 one-page essays on the psychology and practice of writing. Corny as it sounds, I even had a title picked out: "This Won't Take but a Minute, Honey." I pitched this project to a number of editors over the ensuing months. Aspiring writers and fans of micro-fiction would go nuts. Members of the iPhone generation would embrace it as a quick and accessible form of literature.

The European Union's antitrust regulators have approved Sony Corp.'s $2.2-billion acquisition of EMI's publishing business, clearing a major hurdle in Sony's ambition to create the world's largest music publishing group with rights to about 2 million songs, including some by David Bowie, Stevie Wonder and Pink. The deal announced Thursday still needs to clear U.S. regulators, who have historically been more lenient than their European counterparts. Nevertheless, antitrust experts cautioned against celebrating too soon.

When Trish Collins gets done with her job working as an administrative assistant for Santa Rosa County, she might have dinner with her husband or take her poodle for a walk — but most other times she'll have her nose in a book. A soft-spoken redhead with a sweet smile, the 31-year-old Collins' love of reading led her to start blogging about books. And online, Collins has quietly emerged as one of the de facto leaders of the book blogging community, a community publishers are beginning to see as vital.

Ex-Forbes Publisher to Head PC Week: Softbank Corp.'s Ziff-Davis Publishing Co. named former Fortune magazine publisher Stuart Arnold as publisher of PC Week. Arnold starts July 9, filling a position that's been vacant since May, when Don Byrnes was named executive vice president of the Business Media Group. Arnold served as publisher of Time Warner Inc.'s Fortune magazine from January 1994 to April 1996.

In a sewer beneath Las Vegas, a lethal vixen named Abigail is locked in a mortal struggle an outlaw cowboy with ties to Greek gods. The scene, recently filmed over three days on a sound stage in Glendale, wasn't for a new sci-fi TV series or movie. It was for a 30-second commercial spot aired on Google TV to promote "Retribution," the latest chapter in the popular paranormal book series "Dark Hunter" from best-selling author Sherrilyn Kenyon. Such commercials, or so-called book trailers, have become increasingly common as publishers look for novel ways to market their best sellers at a time when fewer people are buying physical copies of booksand chains like Borders Group are shutting down.

The judge overseeing an antitrust lawsuit against Apple Inc. over e-book prices was told by a lawyer that two publishers that earlier settled with the Justice Department are now close to a deal with 15 states. Three publishers named in the U.S. government's antitrust lawsuit — CBS Corp.'s Simon & Schuster, Lagardere's Hachette Book Group and News Corp.'s HarperCollins — settled their cases after the complaint was filed April 11. A group of 15 states and Puerto Rico filed a similar suit this month.

Publishers in 10 countries have bought the rights to a novel about the Prophet Muhammad's child bride after a U.S. publisher dropped the book, fearing it could incite violence, the author's agent says. Random House had been due to publish "The Jewel of Medina," a first novel by journalist Sherry Jones, on Aug. 12. But the company pulled out, saying it had received "cautionary advice not only that the publication of this book might be offensive to some in the Muslim community, but also that it could incite acts of violence by a small, radical segment."

A federal judge sentenced former Chicago Sun-Times Publisher David Radler to 29 months in prison for taking millions of dollars in unauthorized payments from the tabloid's parent company. Radler received a reduced sentence in exchange for pleading guilty and cooperating with the investigation of a fraud scheme at Hollinger International Inc.

THQ Inc.'s shares jumped as much as 46% after the Agoura Hills game publisher disclosed that its fourth-fiscal-quarter financials would be less bleak than expected. Bolstered by strong sales of Saints Row: The Third and UFC: Undisputed 3, THQ estimated that revenue for the quarter that ended March 31 probably would come in between $160 million and $170 million, up from the company's previous outlook of $130 million to $150 million. In addition, the company expected narrower losses, between 10 cents and 20 cents a share, compared with earlier expectations for 35 cents to 50 cents.

Criticizing the chief Re "Beck facing rare criticism," April 16 The fact that suspects do stupid stuff that gets them killed or wounded is apparently lost on the L.A. Police Commission, which has criticized Los Angeles Police Chief Charlie Beck for not punishing officers it found to have used improper force. By insisting that errors of the head be punished, the message to the rank and file is to hesitate the next time - and you too can be among the "honored fallen.

The judge overseeing an antitrust lawsuit against Apple Inc. over e-book prices was told by a lawyer that two publishers that earlier settled with the Justice Department are now close to a deal with 15 states. Three publishers named in the U.S. government's antitrust lawsuit — CBS Corp.'s Simon & Schuster, Lagardere's Hachette Book Group and News Corp.'s HarperCollins — settled their cases after the complaint was filed April 11. A group of 15 states and Puerto Rico filed a similar suit this month.

From the White House to the American Embassy in Kabul, American officials rushed to distance themselves from the actions of U.S. soldiers who posed for photographs next to corpses and body parts of Afghan insurgents. Two photos of incidents from a 2010 deployment were published Wednesday by the Los Angeles Times. In one, the hand of a corpse is propped on the shoulder of a paratrooper. In another, the disembodied legs of a suicide bomber are displayed by grinning soldiers and Afghan police.

SEATTLE -- Greg Mortenson's “Three Cups of Tea” purports to describe the Montana philanthropist's harrowing adventures in Pakistan that led him to launch a charity for building schools in the impoverished region. But did it really happen the way he said it did? And if not, are readers entitled to their money back? That was the subject of a federal court hearing Wednesday in Great Falls, Mont., where Mortenson and his publishers are seeking dismissal of a lawsuit that aims to obtain class-action relief for book-buyers allegedly defrauded by purported fabrications in the book and its sequel, “Stones into Schools.” The Montana attorney general already has completed an investigation into charges that Mortenson and the Bozeman-based Central Asia Institute he co-founded mishandled money donated to the popular charity, substantiating many of the financial allegations.

The Justice Department filed suit last week againstApple Inc.and two major book publishers, Macmillan and Penguin Group USA, accusing them of colluding in 2010 to raise the prices of e-books. Three other publishers that were investigated - Hachette, Simon & Schuster and HarperCollins - agreed to a settlement, which Sharis A. Pozen, the acting director of the Justice Department's antitrust division, said "will begin to undo the harm caused by the companies' anticompetitive conduct, and will restore price competition so that consumers can pay lower prices for their e-books.

The renowned book editor and publisher who edited many of Thomas Merton's works donated nearly $1 million worth of the late poet's papers to the Thomas Merton Center at Bellarmine University in Louisville, Ky. Robert Giroux said he was sorting through his New Jersey apartment last year when he discovered more than 3,000 pages of documents from the Roman Catholic monk and poet who died in 1968. Now 91, Giroux was a partner at publishing house Farrar, Straus & Giroux. He edited works by T.S.

Venice Beach resident Karen Wolfe says she will file a police complaint against a community activist and blogger who published on his website her name, address and a photograph of her home as a place where the homeless would be welcome to camp overnight. Mark Ryavec, president of Venice Stakeholders Assn., listed not only Wolfe's name and home address but also those of 10 other activists, journalists and politicians who he said shouldn't mind having the homeless set up tents and sleeping bags outside their doors because they had expressed sympathy for them.

Apple Inc., responding for the first time to antitrust charges levied against it and five major book publishers this week, denied that it had engaged in price-fixing to inflate prices paid for electronic books. In a statement to The Times on Friday, Apple spokesman Tom Neumayr said that the Department of Justice's accusation against Apple "is simply not true. " Neumayr said customers have benefited from e-books that are more interactive and engaging and, "just as we've allowed developers to set prices on the App Store, publishers set prices on the iBookstore.