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According to book publishers, US Talk show host and actress Ricki Lake has signed with Atria Books for a book about herself which is due to be released in the spring of 2012. The 42-year-old Lake is expected to appear on the small screen again in the fall of 2012 with a new talk show – that has now been confirmed by memoir and poetry book publishers.

The plans of writing her book publishing memoir are however at the very beginning. Atria’s representatives stated that the book doesn’t even have a title yet, but the story will be like an emotional rollercoaster ride “through the glum and the glamour”. It will include the actress’s career life in detail as well as aspects of her personal life.

Born in September 1968, Ricki Pamela Lake comes from a Jewish family. Her mother was a common housewife and her father was a pharmacist. She grew up in New York and attended Ithaca College.

Her professional acting career debuted with the role in the original Hairspray movie in 1988, where she got the role of Tracy Turnblad, the lead character. She then starred in numerous movies, such as Working Girl in 1988, Cookie, Baby Cakes and Last Exit To Brooklyn in 1989, Cry-Baby in 1990, Inside Monkey Zetterland in 1992, Skinner in 1993, Serial Mom in 1994, Mrs. Winterbourne in 1996, Park in 2006. She got a role in the 2007 version of Hairspray ( w. John Travolta), where she was the talent agent. She was executive producer of the movie “The Business of Being Mom” in 2008.
She won an Independent Spirit Award for Best female Lead in Hairspray in 1989 and a Daytime Emmy Award for Outstanding Talk Show Host in her talk show, Ricki Lake, in 1994.

Despite her success as a career woman, Ricki Lake opened up about her abusive childhood. “I was a victim of childhood sexual abuse” she said back in 2007 while talking about her weight problems. She said she had been in therapy and had worked on her personal problems for years. “I didn’t talk about it for, like, 15 or 20 years.” She continued, explaining that she wanted to pretend it didn’t really happen to her. After the abuse she started gaining weight and was once 260 pounds. Lake said she never confronted her abuser but when she told her parents about what had happened, the abuser disappeared rapidly from her life.

These days a heavy weight has lifted from her body and hopefully, it will be lifted from her chest, too, when he will get to put on paper all the things that she has been through.

When Borders opened its first outlet in Pittsburgh in 1990, the book-selling world including that of many New York book publishers was a far different place than it is in 2011, the year that store and two other Borders in the region are preparing to close in April, dropped by the bankrupt chain.

Started in Ann Arbor, Mich., by the Borders brothers, the young chain was pushing its book “superstore” concept coast to coast in the 1990s, getting a head start on Barnes & Noble, then a smaller competitor.

Launching the takeoff was the brothers’ sale of their name and idea to Kmart. In 1988, there were five Borders; there are now more than 600.

The company will abandon 30 percent of the outlets, including the pioneer Bethel Park spot and the Monroeville and East Liberty stores.

Kmart dropped Borders in the late 1990s but the chain managed to thrive and expand on its own in the new century, but it made one fatal mistake: It hired Amazon to handle its online book and music sales while B&N established its own website. Dumb.

After Borders launched its own online sales operation, it was too late to make headway as Amazon and B&N soon moved into the e-book world with their digital reading devices.

Other business decisions aside, the decline of this almost iconic book chain reflects a subtle shift in minds of readers after years of “bigness” — in stores, sales numbers and the franchising of “big” authors.

Dedicated readers are a sensitive bunch; whether they are pushing the book publishers buttons on a digital screen or turning the page in a well-used paperback, they crave that quiet one-on-one with the book.

But, for some time now, they have been getting books and authors shoved in their faces, not because they’re good, but because publishers flog them so hard. And the superstore concept is a willing partner in this relentless marketing.

Exhibit No. 1: James Patterson. He’s the Little, Brown franchise, a mediocre writer at best who churns out formula thrillers like a movie popcorn machine with a similar stale, greasy fake butter taste. The publisher signed a 17-book contract with him in 2009, with 11 titles to be turned in by 2012.

These demands prompted him to farm out the writing to a stable of typists, coming up with the idea and giving them credit as “co-author.”

Mr. Patterson’s financial demands then forced the publisher to market the books strenuously, blanketing those superstores with books and displays, paying extra to get good “floor” position, exiling more interesting books to the shadows of these 15,000-square-foot boxes.

Further exhibits include Stephen King, Patricia Cornwell, Dean Koontz, Kathy Reichs and Lee Child.

Turn back the clock to 1990 when Borders wooed the media with images of an intimate experience inside a clean, well-lighted place with more than 100,000 separate titles and a coffee shop and comfy chairs.

The chain stuck its first Pittsburgh outlet in suburban Bethel Park by wedging it into an awkward chess space in a strip mall with cramped parking.

Then the marketing team smoothed over the physical problems with promises of a busy author-visit schedule and other community events staffed with knowledgeable workers.

Even though the region had several well-established independent booksellers at the time, the Borders “experience” promised the hand-selling of independents with the wide selection of Kmart.

As the landscape evolved in the digital age, that cozy, caffeine-scented solicitude gave way to the uniformity of all national chains and Borders lost its distinctiveness.

Economics played the major role in Borders’ bankruptcy, but it’s cl

The iPad 2 release date remains inexact pending an announcement from Apple but in the mean time the world continues to shift from paper and ink books to e-books and are investing in e-book publishing readers like the Kindle, Nook and potentially iPad.

While many iPad users make use of the device as an e-reader, its 1.5 lbs. and somewhat cumbersome shape does not make it the ideal choice for someone who wants to relax with a book. In its quest to be the ultimate book reading machine the Kindle has resisted “features” like a touch screen that adds to screen glare, color that so far requires an LCD screen that shines in your eyes and a range of applications that might be useful but take away from the phenomenal 1 month battery life.

Because of Amazon’s single minded e-reader focus the Kindle has remained the premier tool for its main job, comfortable book publisher reading.

But budget constraints, the desire for fewer devices, users who are not devoted to reading but do it occasionally, make a place for those who want to forgo the Kindle and use an iPad as their exclusive gadget. It’s not completely exclusive of course because they still need a mobile phone and probably a camera and probably a real computer or laptop, but hey, who’s counting?

So Amazon provides its Kindle e-reading applications on virtually all book publishing platforms and christian book publishers‘ platforms  including tablets, computers and smartphones. Serious readers should not rely on the iPad or iPad 2 for that matter. Pick up a Kindle first for a few bucks, curl up with an eBook and consider whether you really need a tablet too.

Google aims to use its position as the world’s most popular search engine to erode Amazon’s dominance of e-books in the book publishers industry, while Apple Inc harnesses the iPad tablet and iTunes online store to make its own inroads. The competition means Amazon’s share of digital books will decline to 35 per cent over the next five years from 90 per cent in early 2010, New York-based Credit Suisse Group AG estimated in February.

With Google’s effort, each publisher is negotiating different revenue-sharing arrangements, though all of them will keep the majority of the money from each sale, the person said.

Michael Kirkland, a spokesman for Google, confirmed the company’s plan to start an online bookstore this year. He declined to comment further about the project.

Google Books, a separate initiative to scan books and offer publishers ways to sell them online, has been held up in court until a settlement with publishers is approved.

Fair advantage?

An accord between Google, the Authors Guild, and other authors and book publishers would resolve a 2005 lawsuit that claimed Google infringed copyrights by making digital copies of books without permission. In February, the US Justice Department recommended altering the agreement. The agency argues that Google will gain an advantage over competitors.

Amazon.com, Microsoft Corp, AT&T Inc, and the governments of Germany and France also objected to the agreement, saying it would give Google unfair control over digitised works.

Google fell $26.40, or 4.5 per cent, to $555.71 yesterday on the Nasdaq Stock Market, following an announcement by the European Commission that it’s probing the company’s business practices. The shares have declined 10 per cent this year.

The Wall Street Journal reported on the e-book store yesterday.