The Most Popular Books at US Public Libraries
Happy day for Paula Hawkins: The Girl on the Train is the most frequently checked out book from eight of the 14 US public libraries surveyed by Quartz. Ron Chernow’s biography of Alexander Hamilton also tops the list (unsurprisingly), and books from mega-best-sellers James Patterson and Janet Evanovich. Marie Kondo’s The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up continues to fascinate American audiences, apparently.
Amazon Bookstore Coming to Manhattan
Amazon is opening a 4,000 square foot bookstore in Manhattan’s Time Warner Center, joining its existing brick-and-mortar stores in Seattle, Portland, and San Diego. Their foray into physical bookstore spaces is interesting–it seems to me that the things people value about local bookstores (keeping money in the hands of small business owners, author events, concerns about literary culture) will be absent in Amazon locations and therefore the people who shop at physical bookstores won’t care to visit the Amazon ones. We’ll see!
Simon & Schuster UK Declines to Publish Milo Yiannopoulos
The book world was sent into a tailspin when news that Simon and Schuster was paying Breitbart editor and vocal sexist and racist Milo Yiannopoulos $250,000 for a book about, well, sexism and racism, one assumes (does it really matter?). The company’s UK division has announced that it would not be following suit. Milo probably isn’t as well known in the UK and wouldn’t sell as well, but a publishing insider also said it would be a “toxic book to try and sell here.”