Amazon halts Disney orders of Maleficent and Captain America after price row August 10, 2014 Amazon halted pre-orders of a number of Disney movies on its US website yesterday in what appears to be another contract dispute, following a pricing spat with publisher Hachette Book Group. Last night physical copies of Disney titles such as Maleficent and Captain America: The Winter Soldier were unavailable for pre-order on Amazon.com. Amazon blocked [...]
Cowes Week Diary: Action switches from sea to sky as regatta reaches a conclusion August 8, 2014 AS THE curtain comes down on another Aberdeen Asset Management Cowes Week this weekend, I was lucky enough to join the Women’s Sport and Fitness Foundation on board a racing yacht during the regatta’s Ladies Day yesterday. The weather was glorious. So glorious, in fact, that we didn’t manage to do much racing due to [...]
Amazon Kindle Unlimited: £6 a month “Netflix for books” ebook subscription service launches July 18, 2014 Amazon has officially launched its new book subscription service Kindle Unlimited after details of the new offering leaked earlier in the week. Dubbed the “Netflix for books”, Amazon Unlimited will offer customers unlimited access to selected books and audiobooks, including best sellers such as Harry Potter and the Hunger Games, for a monthly fee of [...]
Rupert Murdoch kicks off Time Warner takeover battle July 16, 2014 Rupert Murdoch has his sights on creating a $150bn (£88bn) media behemoth by shelling out $80bn for the takeover of Time Warner and merging it with his own 21st Century Fox empire, a plan that hit a roadblock last month when Time Warner rejected his advance. Shares in Time Warner jumped 17 per cent to [...]
Eight ways technology has reinvented fiction July 16, 2014 At a recent lecture in Oxford, Will Self announced the death of the novel. The internet, he said, has mercilessly invaded the silent, solitary leisure time we once filled with “serious” reading. As a result, serious books will no longer feature as a central part of culture. Like classical music, they will continue to exist, [...]
World’s most influential women at the Rosewood Hotel June 24, 2014 Some of the world’s most influential women descended on Holborn yesterday for the Fortune Most Powerful Women Conference in the Rosewood Hotel. Theresa May’s partially unexplained absence (due to a mystery scheduling conflict) did little to diminish the high level of inspiring chat. Facebook’s Europe Middle East and Asia vice-president Nicola Mendelsohn touched on the [...]
JK Rowling donates £1m to Scots no campaign June 11, 2014 JK Rowling has donated £1m to the Scottish no campaign, warning that it would be a “historically bad mistake” to allow the nation to split from the rest of the UK. The Harry Potter author was subjected to online abuse over the donation, after she wrote on her website: “If we leave… there will be [...]
Cookery titles lead Bloomsbury to a year of sizzling book sales May 20, 2014 PUBLISHING house Bloomsbury said strong demand for its cookery, adult fiction and non-fiction books boosted revenues 11 per cent last year to £109.5m. Titles such as Tom Kerridge’s Proper Pub Food and Samantha Shannon’s The Bone Season led to what chief executive Nigel Newton described as a “spectacular year”. Despite the sales boom, profits slipped [...]
Big time bidder saves his bacon March 10, 2014 PORK was well and truly off the menu for the star-studded crowd at Tracy Worcester’s “Pig Pledge” event at No 41 in Mayfair last night. The well-connected campaigner was drumming up support for her charity Pig Business, which is trying to encourage people to boycott meat from animal factories – actor Dominic West, Zac Goldsmith [...]
Which came first, the wizard or the app? January 16, 2014 For four years, Harry Potter lived only in the pages of a book. Between The Philosopher’s Stone being published in 1997 and its film adaptation coming out in 2001, the face of the bespectacled wizard existed only in the imaginations of those who had read JK Rowling’s novels (or at least seen the cover art). [...]