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The Irish Competition Authority has cleared the acquisition of The Book Depository by Amazon after a three-week investigation into the deal. In a short statement, the authority said: "[We have] formed the view that the acquisition will not lead to a substantial lessening of competition in any markets for goods or services in the state."

It said it will publish its reasons in full no later than 25th September but is allowing the relevant parties to remove any confidential information from the published version.

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Amazon.com has reached an agreement to acquire The Book Depository, the fast-growing online retailer founded by Andrew Crawford in 2004.

Greg Greeley, Amazon's vice president of European Retail, said: "Customers in more than 100 countries enjoy The Book Depository's vast selection, convenient delivery and free shipping. The Book Depository is very focused on serving its customers around the world, and we look forward to welcoming them to the Amazon family."

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Actually, I've not gone fishin' at all, but we are freezing the data (!) here on ReadySteadyBook whilst we do a major upgrade of the site (especially in the "back end")...

See you in July.

Finally, after lots and lots of work -- much of which accounts for the relative silence around here of late -- we've launched BookDepository.com, the American sister website to BookDepository.co.uk.

It has been a tough and very busy year already, so I'm going to put ReadySteadyBook on ice for the next few weeks. I need a break and, in addition, I'll soon be moving house: very exciting for me, I'm heading to Big London. When I get there, and get settled, then I need to focus on making ReadySteadyBook a lot more vibrant than it has been over the last few months.

Have a great summer!

Building on Stephen Mitchelmore's excellent review of Hugo Wilcken's Colony, last week John Self, on his Asylum blog, wrote a very positive piece on Hugo's novel which he says his readers should regard "as a recommendation as strong as any I've given this year."

Over on Twitter, John has set up the #wilckenwatch tag (which simply means that all Tweets about Colony tagged with #wilckenwatch get organised together so that they can easily be browsed). Over on The Book Depository I popped Colony onto the homepage and made it my Something for the Weekend selection last Friday. I've also made Colony one of my June Books of the Month here on ReadySteadyBook.

All this, as John has said, is because Colony is "an exceptional achievement whose overlooked status is little short of scandalous." Hopefully, this wee blog-based campaign can get Colony more of the readers that it undoubtedly deserves.

This Bank Holiday weekend (you've got until Tuesday 26th May), we're running a Friends and Family discount over on The Book Depository.

Just use my personal promotional code (MTRSCP) and you'll save an additional 10% on our already really rather fab prices (free delivery to over 90 countries around the world too, don't forget!)

You need to go via this link on The Book Depository, enter my code, and you'll be away!

Over at The Book Depository, we are having a charity auction with all the proceeds going to Downsed International ("Down Syndrome Education International works around the world to improve education for young people with Down syndrome"):

To celebrate our new website launch we asked our favourite authors and illustrators to design an exclusive bookmark to be sent out to our customers to thank you for your support, whilst raising money for a worthwhile cause.

We were absolutely thrilled with the results, with fantastic bookmarks from people as diverse as cartoonist Matt from The Daily Telegraph to Noel and Dave from the Mighty Boosh - take a look for yourself, you can see the full list of bookmarks at the bottom of this page.

From the 18th April we will be enclosing one of these exclusive, limited edition, Book Depository bookmarks with all orders from the site (whilst stocks last of course). There are 18 bookmarks to collect. If you have a favourite, or indeed want to collect all 18, you will need to get your orders in quick, as they are in limited supply.

And what's more, you also have the chance to own the original artwork! Starting on Thursday 23rd April we will be auctioning off the signed originals on eBay, with all the monies raised being donated to Downsed International. (More.)

Thanks to Nigel Beale and D.G. Myers for responding to my question concerning what should be on a history of the novel reading list with long reading lists of their own. Both Nigel's and D.G.'s lists are very useful (and this bibliography from the University of Warwick has some good pointers too), but I'll compile one of my own here soon which is specifically just about the history of the novel itself. (For starters, my current Book of the Week, The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain: Volume 2, 1100 - 1400, would certainly be on it, as would Robert Mayer's excellent History and the Early English Novel and Nancy Armstrong's flawed engagement with Ian Watt, How Novels Think: The Limits Of Individualism From 1719-1900.)

Really, though, the last thing I should be doing is starting a new project! I'm run off my feet at the moment: we got over 120 submissions for this year's Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, (so lots and lots and lots of reading, but nothing I can talk about until after we've longlisted some of them); and I'm also working on getting all sorts of content together for the new look Book Depository website which will land some time in the next couple of weeks.

Whilst all that should be enough for anyone, I'm rather beside myself with excitement as The Letters of Samuel Beckett: Volume 1, 1929-1940 (CUP) has just landed. A bottle of whisky and a few nights without sleep seem in order!

Finally, you'll have all no doubt noticed that Twitter has become all the rage -- despite having been around for quite a while, it suddenly seems to have really taken off. RSB has had a Twitter page for ages (and so has The Book Depository and BritLitBlogs), but I've relied on RSB's RSS feed to do all the tweeting for me and have not actually done much active tweeting myself. Well, expect that to change soon!

Each Tuesday over on Editor's Corner I do a Tuesday Top Ten. Normally, a chosen author picks their top ten favourite books (in any category or none), but today I've taken the opporutunity to list ten of my own favourite books of 2008.

I've just posted a nice interview with Professor David Ellis, D.H. Lawrence expert and author of Death and the Author, over on The Book Depository:

I think the story of Lawrence’s death, and what happened after it, is peculiarly dramatic and poignant (as well as on occasions grotesque), but I wanted to make its arresting details an occasion for reflection on a number of issues which matter to us all: what it feels like to suffer from a disease for which there is no cure, for example, what we feel about hospitals, the allure of alternative medicine or the powerlessness of the dead to affect how they are remembered. My aim was to write a different kind of biographical study, one which was something more than "one damned thing after another" (more...)

The Guardian has picked up on a TBD press release I sent out last week:

Online book retailer The Book Depository estimates that of the 350 US election books it has sold lately, 96% have been Obama titles. "According to The Book Depository's global book-buyers: Democrats read, Republicans don't; Palin isn't popular, Biden is invisible. If The Book Depository's customers were voting it would be an Obama landslide," said Mark Thwaite, managing editor of the site (more...)

Posts up on my Editor's Corner blog today about the: Inaugural Desmond Elliott prize shortlist; Charles Leadbeater's We Think and the Hay Festival's 21 of the best up and coming writers.

I've just been working out all the places where The Book Depository delivers book for free and it really is worldwide.

Y'all probably know that we -- The Book Depository that is -- deliver to the UK, US and Canada for nothing, zero, zilch, zip. But shipping to "Western Europe" (which includes: Austria, Belgium, Cyprus, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, Malta, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the Vatican City and Liechtenstein) is also free.

Other free delivery destinations include: Australia, Hong Kong, Israel, Japan, New Zealand, Puerto Rico, South Korea, Singapore, the Bahamas, Barbados, Antigua & Barbuda and Trinidad & Tobago.

Earlier, I mentioned my Editor's Corner Tuesday Top Ten feature (today featuring Two Ravens Press publisher Sharon Blackie). Well, I'm going to go ahead and steal my own idea (hardly original, for sure) and have a Tuesday Top Ten here on ReadySteadyBook ...

Below is a list -- how exciting is this! -- of Gabriel Josipovici's "top ten novellas – or short novels, or long short stories – books of about 100 pages that ask to be read in one go. I give the English title of standard translations for all except the Perec, which, so far as I know, has not been translated:"

• Diderot, Rameau’s Nephew
• Kleist, Michael Kohlhaas
• Stifter, Ice Mountain
• Melville, Bartleby
• Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilitch
• James, The Turn of the Screw
• Mann, Death in Venice
• Kafka, Metamorphosis
• Pinget, Passacaglia
• Perec, Un Cabinet d’Amateur

Anyone have a copy of Adalbert Stifter's Ice Mountain they want to swap for ... a pile of new books? I can't find a copy anywhere!

I've just posted an interview with web-superstar Clay Shirky over on The Book Depository site (Shirky is the author of Here Comes Everybody, the book-puff of which runs thusly: "Our age’s new technologies of social networking are evolving, and evolving us. New groups are doing new things in new ways, and we’re doing the old things better and more easily. Business models are being transformed at dizzying speeds, and the larger social impact is in a way so profound that it’s under-appreciated. In Here Comes Everybody, one of the culture’s wisest observers give us his lucid and penetrating analysis on what this means for what we do and who we are.")

Perhaps a bit more ReadySteadyBook-ish, my Tuesday Top Ten over on Editor's Corner today is with Sharon Blackie:

Sharon Blackie is the author of The Long Delirious Burning Blue, translator of Raymond Federman's memoir of Samuel Beckett, The Sam Book, and editor of the forthcoming Cleave: New Writing by Women in Scotland and Riptide: New Writing from the Highlands and Islands. She has a croft in the north-west Highlands of Scotland and in her spare time runs Two Ravens Press with her husband, David Knowles (publishers of recent RSB Book of the WeekAuschwitz by Angela Morgan Cutler).

I'm very busy with Book Depository stuff today. So, whilst I have my work hat on, I'll take the opportunity to remind you of the last twenty author interviews that I've done over on The Book Depository site.

The interviews have been with: Steven Pressfield; Nicholas Murray; R.J. Ellory; Jacqueline Wilson; Paul Torday; Danny Scheinmann; Mark Slouka; Robert Rankin; Jane Brocket; Caroline Smailes; Gillian Darley; Toril Moi; Edward Docx; Esther Leslie; Ken Worpole; Marcus Chown; Markus Zusak; Leora Skolkin-Smith; Lee Rourke; and Michael Redhill.

Philip Davis professor of English literature at Liverpool University, author of Bernard Malamud: A Writer’s Life, and editor of The Reader is fed up! This post originally appeared on Moreover.

It is probably because when I was a young beginner, trying to write about literature, I did not feel encouraged or appreciated. Those were days of high theory in literary studies: it was naïve to be interested in realism, in emotion, in the human content of literature as I was. “Nobody came,” says Thomas Hardy of the plight of his own young idealist, “because nobody does.” (more…)

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Philip Davis professor of English literature at Liverpool University, author of Bernard Malamud: A Writer’s Life, and editor of The Reader is back with another fascinating blog post. This post originally appeared on Moreover.

It was 30 years ago in the bookish front-room of a house off the Chesterton Road in Cambridge, England.

It was the home of Muriel Bradbrook, a Shakespearian scholar, and I was the most junior lunch guest, literally sitting in the corner on a stool, chewing and chewing away on a piece of home-made liver-pate, with muscle. (In the end I found a flower pot, or else I might still be there, chewing and chewing.) I was among some of Cambridge’s finest golden-oldies of the literary-critical world. (more…)

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Last week we posted a series of articles by Philip Davis, author of Bernard Malamud: A Writer’s Life. Today is the final piece in the installation. To see the previous posts click here. This post originally appeared on Moreover.

In the beginning dogs, it is written, were the first creatures domesticated by human beings. And when the humans saw the difference between themselves and the dogs, they knew more about what being human meant. (This is the true Gospel of Otherness.) Then the humans, being more than their dogs, began to domesticate other animals, to lie amongst them. And so in time what became pastoral agriculture was born. (more…)

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Below Philip Davis, author of Bernard Malamud: A Writer’s Life, combines science with literature to convince us to read out loud more often. To read his other blog posts click here. This piece first appeared in Moreover.

I have just launched a new M.A. course in bibliotherapy—by which I mean to ask, What help can reading provide for people? But I am not allowed to call the course “M.A. in bibliotherapy” because some of scientists at my university were not too keen on the word, accepted though it is in the States. I think they confused it with aromatherapy, when in the great words of the poet Gray, on the neglect of lowly human worth:

Full many a flower is born to blush unseen
And waste its sweetness on the desert air. (more…)

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Philip Davis, author of Bernard Malamud: A Writer’s Life, is a professor of English literature at Liverpool University and editor of the Reader magazine. Davis has written the first full-length biography of Malamud, a self-made son of Jewish immigrants who went on to win the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Come hear Davis speak at New York’s 92 Street Y on October 31st at 7:30 pm. This post originally appeared in Moreover.

The academic conference season is ending here in England. If you ever have the misfortune to find yourself in such a setting, you only need one word to get by. The word is “Otherness”, and it has been in tarnished vogue for some time now. If you are feeling really out of place, then try saying Alterity as well. Means the same, sounds even better. You sit in a conference room and you hear so many of these notional terms replacing the reality they purport to describe. (more…)

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