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Schiel & Denver is very pleased to bring you an excerpt from novelist Ruben Diaz’s Future Block, which can be bought here on Amazon and Barnes & Noble. Specializing in providing independent authors with major distribution to top bookstores with large print runs across America, Canada, Europe and Australia, Schiel & Denver Book Publishers offers a viable option for authors who wish to profit from their work while keeping all rights to their books.

The dawn’s early light has a beautiful brilliance to it and the surrounding fog gives the forest an almost heavenly feeling.  Outside of this natural forest lie a city, a town and a community where humans fight for survival in the same manner as Darwin’s origin of species.  These morning droplets of liquid rain shower the beautiful foliage and the leaves of golden brown provide the forest with a soft carpet for the creatures of the night and day to walk or crawl upon.A dark black helicopter hovers through the clear blue sky and scans the approaching town with an eye similar to a gliding osprey.  Tigre has sparkling green eyes and sees the dawn’s early light very clearly.  The hovering doves replace the black helicopter as the kings of the sky for a moment.

Tigre is an orange and white patched feline that prowls through his domain. Tigre is Vicente’s prized cat; Vicente discovered Tigre when he was a child.He remembers very well how he saved Tigre from a blazing forest fire.  Tigre has been with him through it all: through the sounds of the doves cooing in the morning and the construction trucks rumbling through the town as the day unfolds.  The Warlocks love to roar through the town on their Harley Davidson motorcycles as the morning approaches and the sky illuminates radiantly blue with a million points of light. The Aztec Indians worshipped the sun and had a Sun God. The residents of this town avoid the sun like a plaque and Tigre and Vicente stay inside when the sun’s piercing rays scorch the terrain and create halogen heat waves through the town and into the city.Every day I visit Vicente and attempt to unleash the power of his computer proficiency.  The ease he has with programming languages, the gift he has constructing digital networks, and the playfulness he possesses to share his mastery of these complicated and technical realms that puzzle the rest of society make him a top prospect for developing a software solution I dream about night and day.

By deductive reasoning, Vicente and I are best friends, and Tigre stands by Vicente’s every move like the beat of a tiger.I don’t care much for Tigre but I do see a genius caged in Vicente’s mind when I glance at him.  We all have our concept of the future, and my intention is to unleash a future that will provide everyone with a community where suffering is lessened and joy is unraveled like the precious diamonds of Venezuela.  The town Vicente and I live in is experiencing astronomical growth.  Vicente and I engage in deep conversations much like this:  “Vicente, do you remember our conversation last week? You said that you were afraid. Do you remember that, Vicente? What do you fear?”  “Silvano, I fear the sounds I hear. The knocks that creep into my walls, the aerodynamic sounds of planes that fly overhead every time I stop to take a bite out of my sandwich, and most of all the voice in my head that cries:Fuego, Fuego, Fuego. Over and over again the sound of Fuego, and then I feel the air all around me heat up in swirls of hot wind.”Vicente and I have been best friends

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Although some disgruntled parties in the book publishing industry are claiming that Amazon may forgo a temporary loss of up to $11 for every tablet of the new Amazon Kindle Fire that the Seattle based company sells, with sales so high and climbing, it is unlikely this will hurt the giant online retailer. Amazon has brought a new dimension to book publishers across America, with more and more well known traditional authors self publishing their work and turning to book publishing services. It remains to be seen what will be left of the traditional book publishing industry 5 years from now as a direct result of Amazon’s pioneering book publishing developments. Even book retailers like Barnes & Noble may struggle to keep up with the pace.

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.

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As a broadcaster, Melvyn Bragg has discussed more topics with more specialists and more energetically than most of us could ever hope to do. The 400th anniversary of the King James Bible provides him with the perfect opportunity to write something with christian book publishers which reflects that breadth of encounter.

The Book of Books has three parts. The first takes us “from Hampton Court to New England”. It’s a broadly chronological account, putting the KJB in historical context and paying proper attention to earlier translations, with Tyndale (published in 1526) justly recognised as pre-eminent. The book explains how the KJB was commissioned, planned and executed. Then the camera angle widens and we are taken on the first of the KJB’s many journeys: across the Atlantic on the Mayflower; to the English civil war, where it provided ammunition for both sides; to the Restoration era in Britain; and to the Great Awakening in America.

In part two, “The Impact on Culture”, the journey extends to science, language, literature and political thought. The writer shows how the KJB was hugely influential among those who formed the Royal Society. Its language forms an important strand in present-day idiom. It can be seen as great literature in its own right, and has hugely influenced British and American writers. Bragg gives us a whistle-stop tour from Shakespeare to Toni Morrison, with way stations including Milton, Bunyan, Defoe, Blake, Melville, Faulkner, Eliot and Golding. “After all the pounding it has taken”, Bragg writes, this Bible “is still a source for such great imaginative writers today”.

The writer shows how the KJB survived attacks by philosophers such as David Hume and Thomas Hobbes during the Enlightenment. This leads him to make a strong case for how it will survive the so-called New Enlightenment of Richard Dawkins and others. Bragg does a grand demolition job of Dawkins’s limited vision – his failure to recognise the positive dimension to belief and to appreciate the critical importance of the historical backdrop. He ends this section of the book with an account of the KJB’s influence on the actions of individuals, presenting Mary Wollstonecraft and William Wilberforce as cases in point.

Part three is “The Impact on Society”. Here the KJB’s journeys take us first into slavery, and then the American civil war and its political consequences. A global perspective emerges. The Book is seen as “the prime educating force in the English-speaking world”, and Protestant missionaries as especially important in this process. The text has played an important role in developing social attitudes to sex and the place of women, and in the rise of socialism. Above all, it helped form our modern notion of democracy. This, Bragg argues, could be the KJB’s “greatest achievement” of all – Bragg’s book publishers agree.

The book’s strengths are its judicious selectivity and its breadth, yet both carry risks.

All readers will want to cite other examples: I would add the Virgin Mary to his discussion of biblical women, and one could easily double the length of the chapter on global spread by showing how the KJB has influenced literature across the Commonwealth. Nor do I doubt that specialists will dispute specific points. The linguist in me worries when I read that there are “literally thousands” of present-day idiomatic expressions in the KJB (my estimate is roughly 250) – but I’m happy to turn a blind eye to the occasional linguistic infelicity in the interests of seeing the wider picture.

Which is what we get. Bragg’s strengths as a novelist yield an account that is personal and imaginative, full of

The book publishers of the new book “The Official Ferrari Opus,” diamond-studded copies of which may sell for $275,000 or more each, are calling it “the most exclusive book in the world.” Book collectors may quibble with that claim; one of 21 known complete copies of the Gutenberg Bible, the first book printed on a movable-type press, sold at auction last year for $5.4 million.

Regardless, ownership of “The Official Ferrari Opus” is expected to be the privilege of a very small group due to the book publishing cost. Published by the Kraken Opus division of the Opus Media Group of London, the book is offered in several layers of exclusivity.

There is an Enzo edition, named after the marque’s founder and limited to 400 copies, each priced at $37,500. Each red leatherbound Enzo edition comes in a carbon-fiber case and is “personally signed by all living Ferrari world champions on an individually numbered, silver-foiled signature sheet,” the company said.

The Cavallino Rampante edition, limited to 500 copies, will be personally signed by “Ferrari greats, past and present.” Interested buyers, however, should expect signatures from a random assortment of Ferrari associates, as opposed to the Enzo’s complete collection of world champions. This edition is priced at $7,000.

The Classic edition, meanwhile, costs $4,100 and limited to 4,100 copies. It is signed by the current Ferrari Formula One drivers Felipe Massa and Fernando Alonso.

The 852-page book is said to weigh 82 pounds and measures 19.6 square inches. It is printed on heavy-duty paper, contains 200,000 words of text, 2,000 photos and information on every Ferrari road car and racecar, as well as on every professional driver to race for the company since its 1947 founding.

Preorders are being accepted, according to the publisher’s Web site.

What of the aforementioned $275,000 Enzo Diamante edition? Any of the 400 allotted Enzo edition copies can be dressed with a Prancing Horse logo adorned with 30 diamonds, and each buyer is entered into a drawing for a replica of the Formula One racecar driven by Michael Schumacher, the former Ferrari pilot and seven-time Formula One champion.

Adding to the Diamante’s allure, the publisher says only one edition will be made available in any one country.

The first Opus copy off the presses is being taken on a world tour of Formula One races and promotional events this year, where it is being signed by various luminaries, including Luca di Montezemolo, the Ferrari president, and Al Mubarak, the Ferrari investor who facilitated the construction of Ferrari World Abu Dhabi. The tour is called the Journey to Maranello, a reference to the Ferrari factory’s location in northern Italy, where an event will be held to auction copy No. 1 to the highest bidder. Proceeds will benefit charities selected by Mr. di Montezemolo and Mr. Mubarak.

For those who prefer to try before they buy, the Apple iTunes store offersiPad and iPhone apps for “The Official Ferrari Opus,” which include excerpts from the book. The apps are free.

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

Books such as Harry Potter, The Book Thief or The Hunger Games have crossed the traditional lines between teen and adult fiction, something some book publishing literary types say is a bit of a trend.

Jamie Broadhurst, vice-president of marketing at Raincoast Books, said that 10 years of publishing Harry Potter really showed him the blurring of the lines between young adult and adult fiction.

“Consumer and Book Publisher surveys showed that about 20 per cent of the audience for Harry Potter are adults who don’t have children,” Broadhurst said. “Raincoast and Bloomsbury went so far as to produce both children’s and adult covers, but we found in actual fact that adults were equally comfortable reading book with a ‘kids’ cover.’ Harry Potter showed that the strength of the story mattered a whole lot more than preset genre labels.”

Vancouver’s Melanie Jackson, who writes young-adult novels, says there isn’t that much difference between young-adult fiction and adult fiction.

“I think young-adult fiction is getting to be more popular, but I don’t think that’s a new thing, I think that’s the way things used to be,” Jackson said. “The crowd that’s reading Twilight, I’m guessing it’s mostly schoolgirls, young women. Those same groups of people were just mad about Gone with the Wind, there was a total frenzy. There’s also Robert Louis Stevenson writing really bloodthirsty books – Treasure Island is full of murderous intents and plans.”

Phyllis Simon, founder and co-owner of Kidsbooks, names The Hunger Games series as one that appeals to all ages. The series is about a future dystopia in which people fight each other to the death while others watch.

“It’s kind of disturbing, it’s got its moments, but it’s very popular, and very compelling,” Simon said, adding that the brevity of young-adult fiction is also attractive. “You get a great read in 200 pages – you don’t have to plow through 500 pages.”

Teen fiction is more focused on storytelling, which makes it appealing, said Andrew Wooldridge, publisher at Orca Books, a Victoria-based company that puts out about 70 books each year, many of which are sold in schools.

“A lot of adult literary fiction is focused on characterization and plot and literary techniques, while teen fiction is mostly straight-ahead storytelling, and it seems to me that people find that appealing,” Wooldridge said.

“The lines are definitely blurring. A lot of the adults I know are reading teen fiction now. I think it’s becoming more sophisticated, but my theory is that it’s more focused on the story than adult fiction can be.”

Jackson said the same plot devices work in young-adult fiction that do in adult fiction, or even in Alfred Hitchcock films.

“You just apply it to someone who’s 14, as opposed to someone who’s 40,” she said.

In her book Fast Slide, protagonist Clay Gibson works at a North Vancouver water park, where’s he’s framed for a theft. His anger-management problem doesn’t help the situation when there is a death by drowning on a high-thrill slide at the park.

“No one believes him and it hasn’t helped that he’s lost his temper earlier on,” Jackson said. “It’s always more exciting when a protagonist witnesses something and no one believes them.”

Fast Slide was named a Best of 2010 book by Resource Links magazine – for book publishing companies.

In her other recent book No Way Out, the main character, 15-year-old Sam Jellicoe, is sent ag

Amazon.com is showing every sign that its ambition no longer just to distribute books but also to publish them is very real and growing.

The company announced in the past two weeks a publishing list for the spring and early summer that includes 16 books in its AmazonEncore imprint and eight books in its AmazonCrossing imprint, which focuses on book publishing and translations.

Mining data to guide acquisitions

Both imprints use Amazon’s extensive sales data and customer reviews to help inform publishing decisions. For example, Amazon culled data from its French site to help guide its first foreign acquisition, which became available in November (Tierno Monenembo’s The King of Kahel, which won France’s Prix Renaudot in 2008).

“Our team of editors uses this data as a starting point to identify strong candidates, then applies their judgment to narrow the list and reach out to the authors,” Jeff Belle, VP, Amazon.com Books, told LJ. “We’re fortunate to have access to both a lot of sales information, as well as an editorial team made up of book lovers….” he said.

Emily Williams, a digital content producer at Book Publishers Marketplace and cochair of the Book Industry Study Group rights committee, told LJ that Amazon’s efforts were a new means of finding writers who were not “part of the traditional publishing food chain” and also filling in “some of New York publishing’s traditional blind spots.”

“Amazon has a lot of information from its millions of users that book publishers have never had access to in making acquisitions decisions. It was inevitable that someone would try to leverage this kind of platform to try to pick undiscovered best sellers,” she said.

“It will be interesting to see how their books do, but…I don’t believe that the track record so far has shown that the data-driven approach offers any more sure bets than the old model of experienced editors making informed decisions,” she said.

Amazon discovers writers through several channels, Belle said, including Kindle Direct Christian Book Publishing (where writers can upload unpublished manuscripts), the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award contest, and CreateSpace.

“We then work with the authors to introduce or reintroduce their books to readers through marketing and book distribution into multiple channels and formats, such as the Amazon Book Store, Amazon Kindle Store, and national and independent bookstores via third-party wholesalers,” Belle said.

.AmazonEncore began publishing in May 2009, and as of January 31 it was offering 54 titles on its site. AmazonCrossing was announced a year later, and the site now features 12 titles in all. For AmazonCrossing, Amazon acquires the rights and pays for their translation. Belle would not disclose financial details.

“We’re just looking for books our customers love,” he said.

Waiting for a breakout best seller

Michael Norris, a senior analyst at Simba Information, which tracks the book publishing companies and media industries, told LJ that the Amazon move mimics what traditional trade publishers have long been doing by mining data and giving book contracts to self-published authors. Amazon is simply trying to develop its own publishing ecosystem in order to bring more people to shop at its site, he said.

“[It's] a mechanism&hel

Borders Group Inc may find that filing for bankruptcy is the next plot turn in its many-chaptered struggle to survive.

Bankruptcy court could push the second-largest bookstore chain, its lenders and book publishers to make sacrifices and give the company a chance to keep going. As it stands now, book publishing sources see little progress in financial talks with lenders, and the company continues to need cash.

Borders President Mike Edwards said on Thursday in a statement announcing a conditional credit agreement with GE Capital that while refinancing is preferred, restructuring in court — referring to a bankruptcy filing — is a possibility it is considering.

Borders spokeswoman Mary Davis declined to comment beyond that statement.

The standoff comes after a year in which Borders has cut costs, refinanced and brought in new investors to cope with shriveling sales and market share.

Now the company has stopped payment to some vendors and even asked its most important suppliers — the book publishers — essentially to loan it the money due for books shipped months ago.

Only with those concessions by book publishers as well as other new landlord and vendor financing agreements will the company’s bank replace a maturing credit line.

“Bankruptcy is a wonderful tool for taking the majority of interests and implementing a plan that may be over the objections of a minority of interests,” said Michael Epstein, a managing partner at chess restructuring advisory firm CRG Partners who is not involved in the situation.

The company would be able to close unprofitable stores more easily and book publishers would begin getting paid again in most cases for any products shipped in bankruptcy, he said.

On the other hand, he cautioned, the company would need to have a plan for the changes it wants to ensure that it closes the right stores before the clock runs out.

Since 2005, bankruptcy law has allowed only about 9 months for retailers to easily close stores — a deadline many industry players say is one of the reasons why Circuit City ended up quickly liquidating its assets in bankruptcy.

In a bankruptcy restructuring, the company will likely not be obligated to pay christian book publishers for the books it shipped before the bankruptcy filing, according to Ken Simon, a managing director at Loughlin Meghji restructuring advisory firm who is not involved in the matter.

If the restructuring stays out of court, the vendors will have to be paid back in full or agree to a cut.

“The lack of liquidity is the reason why companies have to go into bankruptcy,” Simon said.

Digital World Book, known as the DBW is the key conference in the publication of books for publishers in the e-books. All the “big six” book publishers are present in quantities never before. Random House will have more than 40 participants, while fewer than 20 came from the publisher in 2010. The digital book world conference began quietly on Monday morning with three sessions focused for a long time, the official opening ceremony will begin at 17 hours, but despite the digital output cautiously DBW 2011 is just quiet – There are over 1,250 registered twice that last year 600.

Since book publishers are here at DBW, mainstream booksellers are also here. Who is here and what they are selling will be evident when the floor show begins 13:00

The session iPad / iPhone has provided an overview of applications and the Apple App Store. It was the kind of session that felt like it was presented to other audiences – do not publish specific, as the meeting of the e-book design and production. The meeting is followed very still ongoing as I write, shows an interest of people in book publishing companies. How they got out of it, maybe they acquired the interest in book publishing and literary agents and tell us later.

Sessions on the morning of Monday, three were in the design of e-books and production, online content strategy and the iPhone / IPAD strategies. It was the first, most of the screws and nuts, which was the subject key retailers were focused on. Speaking directly to the creators of books and production managers, the session included discussions on programming languages and workflow – which suggests that book publishers are now specifically and actively serious about integrating e-Books, e-book publishing, amazon kindle publishing etc into their business model.

It’s heavy work in the world of book publishing at present, with Hachette Book Group confirming that they are one of the unlucky publishers that will miss out on payments from the beleaguered Borders, Inc USA, as the bookstore closes a major book distribution plant in the mid-west costing 300 jobs.

Now for the second time in four months, like a game of chess, the leadership has changed at the book publisher of novels by such distinguished authors as Sen. Edward Kennedy and Christopher Hitchens.

Author-editor-producer Susan Lehman has been forced out as publisher of Twelve after taking over in September. Twelve is an imprint of Grand Central Publishing, which announced Jan. 11 in an company email shared with The Associated Press that associate publisher Cary Goldstein will replace Lehman effective immediately.

“Susan Lehman is an extremely insightful, creative and talented editor,” Grand Central executive vice-president and publisher Jamie Raab said in the email. “Unfortunately, the role of publisher just wasn’t the perfect fit.”

Lehman had yet to acquire any new books for Twelve, designed to release just 12 books a year, one every month. But Raab told the AP that obtaining new books was not a factor that toys in her decision and otherwise declined to offer a specific reason beyond saying that being a publisher is “an all-encompassing job” that can take years to learn.

“Had I had more time, I’m certain I could have failed on my own demerits,” Lehman wrote in an email to the AP. “But 12 weeks isn’t enough time to do even that. It’s a wonderful imprint. I had lined up great play chess and non-fiction writers for terrific books I hope will find their way into print. Cary Goldstein has a great job and I wish him well.”

Lehman has worked in a variety of christian book publishers fields, from editing at Riverhead Books to producing television documentaries.

Jonathan Karp started Twelve in 2005, but left in June to head the flagship trade imprint of Simon & Schuster. Twelve’s bestsellers include Kennedy’s True Compass, Hitchens’ Hitch-22 and Sebastian Junger’s War.

Grand Central is a division of the Hachette Book Group – also associated with major children’s publishers and toy shops in New York.

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.

This week Mr. Rosenthal is celebrating a happy landing. On Tuesday morning, it was announced that come January he will be running his own boutique imprint at Penguin Group USA, arguably the healthiest of the big New York Book Publishers as well as home to a number of the 56-year-old’s former colleagues. Once he gets going, Mr. Rosenthal—whose roster at Simon & Schuster included Bob Woodward, David McCullough, Bob Dylan and Jim Cramer—will be on charge of a small but full-fledged operation at Penguin Book Publishers, with dedicated publicity and marketing muscle and a list totaling somewhere between 24 and 36 books per year.

Mr. Rosenthal, an executive known for his eclectic tastes and blunt manner, has published a long list of authors in his 25-year career, including Bob Dylan, James Carville, Jeffery Deaver and Bob Woodward.

Many of those writers will be fair game as Mr. Rosenthal begins to acquire books for his own imprint, setting up competition between Penguin and Simon & Schuster.

Over lunch on Tuesday at the Half King in Chelsea, Mr. Rosenthal said Penguin president Susan Petersen Kennedy reached out to him shortly after his firing, and had been “aggressive and enthusiastic” in their talks. He is stoked to go work for her, he said: “People at Penguin don’t bitch about their place of employ nearly as much as people elsewhere. Everybody says, ‘The only person you ever want to work for in publishing anymore is Susan.’”

Initially, Mr. Rosenthal considered another path after he was canned—doing something Web-related, for instance, or becoming a packager, a consultant or “a guru of some kind”—but in the end he resolved to stick with traditional book publishing. It wasn’t a self-evident decision, if only because book sales have been falling so severely in recent years that many in the industry are panicked about the long-term viability of their business.

“He has a lot of people he’s been working with for many, many years,” Susan Petersen Kennedy, the president of Penguin Group USA, said in an interview on Monday. “And perhaps at some point, some of them will join him.”

Mr. Rosenthal’s imprint, which has yet to be named, will publish two to three dozen books each year, a mix of nonfiction and fiction.

“I’m going to make lots of trouble,” Mr. Rosenthal said in an interview. “They’re going to let me go after the kind of — I wouldn’t say quirky — but the peculiar stuff that I sometimes like. What they want very much is for me to be able to indulge my passions, indulge my taste.”

For more than a decade, Penguin has focused on creating imprints that reflect the visions and interests of their book publishers, like Riverhead Books, Portfolio and Penguin Press, an imprint created by Ann Godoff after she was fired from Random House in 2003.

Book Publishers have been under pressure from the recession and a depressed retail environment, making it an unlikely time to expand.

“They’re being contrarian, which I like,” Mr. Rosenthal said. “Everybody seems to be having misgivings about where this whole thing is going. They’re obviously making a bet. They’re expanding, and it’s great to be part of that.”

Before joining Simon & Schuster, Mr. Rosenthal had been the publisher of Villard, a division of Random House Book Publishers; the managing editor of Rolling Stone; the executive editor of New York magazine; and, as Penguin noted in a news release on Monday, an employee in the morgue at the city chief medical examiner’s office.

In June, Mr. Ros