Andrew Duncan will join Grand Central on March 25 as associate director, online marketing, reporting to Emi Battaglia. Duncan was most recently senior marketing manager at Viking. Megan Perritt joins Crown as senior publicist. She was previously a publicist at F&W Media. In addition, Rebecca Marsh has been named publicist,…

Harper’s Magazine has revised its Folio section, printing the first chapter novelist John le Carré‘s A Delicate Truth. The magazine also published Afterword by the great spy novelist.

The series began in 1992 with “Pafko at the Wall” by Don DeLillo. In a publisher’s note, John R. MacArthur shared a bit of history about the Folio section, adding some editorial history about fears for long form writing in magazines. Check it out:

Like many things in the history of Harper’s, Folio was conjured from a mix of editorial vision and practical necessity. When Tina Brown was appointed editor of The New Yorker in June 1992, I assumed she would begin running much shorter pieces. Harper’s response, I told Lewis Lapham, Michael Pollan, and Gerry Marzorati at a hastily organized lunch, should be from time to time to run much longer pieces that might not only satisfy the cravings of frustrated New Yorker readers but also accommodate Harper’s contributors who simply needed more space to say what they wanted to say … We’re still committed to concision, of course, but in this age of web-driven snippets, we believe there’s all the more need for writers to be able to think in depth and at sufficient length to tell complex stories.

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London is brimming with creative digital talent that sits on the doorsteps of the country's publishing powerhouses... but many rarely meet to talk business, let alone work together. That’s why we’re starting “Off the Page”, a new event series that brings together the publishing, arts and creative technology sectors to look at ways that they can learn from each other.

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Proving that Canadians have an insatiable appetite for erotic fiction, L. Marie Adeline’s novel S.E.C.R.E.T. tops this week’s BookNet Canada bestsellers list.

For the two weeks ending March 10:

1. S.E.C.R.E.T., L. Marie Adeline,
(Doubleday Canada, $18 pa, 9780385679701)

2. Life of Pi (movie tie-in edition), Yann Martel
(Vintage Canada, $21 pa, 9780307363053)

3. The Painted Girls, Cathy Marie Buchanan
(HarperCollins Canada, $22.99 pa, 9781443412346)

4. February, Lisa Moore
(House of Anansi Press, $19.95 pa, 9780887849626)

5. The Imposter Bride, Nancy Richler
(HarperCollins Canada, $17.99 pa, 9781443404037)

6. The Demonologist, Andrew Pyper)
(Simon & Schuster, $29.99 cl, 9781451697520)

7. Why Men Lie, Linden MacIntyre
(Random House Canada, $22 pa, 9780307360878)

8. 419, Will Ferguson
(Viking Canada, $32 cl, 9780670064717)

9. Indian Horse, Richard Wagamese
(Douglas & McIntyre, $21.95 pa, 9781553654025)

10. Above All Things, Tanis Rideout
(McClelland & Stewart, $22 pa, 9780771076367)

11. Clockwork Angels, Kevin J. Anderson and Neil Peart
(ECW Press, $26.95 cl, 9781770411210)

12. Speaking from among the Bones, Alan Bradley
(Doubleday Canada, $29.95 cl, 9780385668125)

13. The Cat’s Table, Michael Ondaatje
(Vintage Canada, $22 pa, 9780307401427)

14. Away, Jane Urquhart
(M&S, $19.99 pa, 9780771086502)

15. Two Solitudes, Hugh MacLennan
(M&S, $22.95 pa, 9780771093586)

16. Inside, Alix Ohlin
(Anansi, $22.95 pa, 9781770892064)

17. The Lion Seeker, Kenneth Bonert
(Knopf Canada, $25 pa, 9780307362131)

18. The Age of Hope, David Bergen
(HarperCollins Canada, $21.99 pa, 9781443411363)

19. The Sisters Brothers, Patrick deWitt
(Anansi, $22.95 pa, 9781770890329)

20. Life of Pi, Yann Martel
(Vintage Canada, $21 pa, 9780676973778)

A computer hacker has been sentenced to three years of jail for hacking into AT&T’s database and exposing the email addresses of more than 100,000 iPad owners including New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg and film producer Harvey Weinstein.

The Chicago Tribune has the story: “Andrew Auernheimer, 27, had been convicted in November by a Newark, N.J., jury of one count of conspiracy to access AT&T Inc. servers without permission and one count of identity theft.”

Auernheimer’s group, which went under the name Goatse Security, shared the leaked data with the media blog Gawker, which broke the story. Gawker explained how the hackers got in:

Goatse Security obtained its data through a script on AT&T’s website, accessible to anyone on the internet. When provided with an ICC-ID as part of an HTTP request, the script would return the associated email address, in what was apparently intended to be an AJAX-style response within a Web application.

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According to a new report from Bowker Market Research, U.S. chain bookstores lost 13 percent of their share of book purchases in 2012.

Overall, chain booksellers saw their share decrease from 32 percent to 19 percent of volume. At the same time, Bowker recorded some dramatic gains in U.S. eReatailers and digital book growth. Check it out:

In the U.S., e-retailers accounted for 44 percent of book purchases by volume in 2012, up from 25 percent in 2010. In the U.K. the rise has been somewhat less dramatic but still significant, up from 25 percent in January-November 2010, to 38 percent in the same period in 2012 … In November 2012, 28 percent of all book purchases in the U.S. were in e-book format — a dramatic rise from six percent in November 2010.

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Some Penguins at the Aquarium of the Pacific were given a digital treat. The animals’ keepers had an old iPad to give them – preloaded with Game for Cat’s Chase the Mouse. One penguin in particular took a special affinity to the game’s fun, noisy mice.

Sure enough when Jeremy and Newsom noticed the iPad in the exhibit they both waddled on over. Jeremy was the first to try it out but Newsom was the one that really got into it. Stalking the virtual mouse intently he tried to pick it up repeatedly with his beak. Newsom especially seemed to like the squeak that the mouse made when he put his beak on the virtual critter. The mouse was self reinforcing for this penguin. Newsom set the penguin high score of 1600 for the game.

This video captures the penguin arcade in all of its cute glory. continued…

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Sony's 20p discounted price on select ebooks, a promotion that lasted for more than eight months, has ended after the company redesigned its ebookstore. In a statement to the Bookseller Sony said "Discounted 20p pricing is not currently offered on the newly relaunched UK Reader Store. However, pricing is always…

Craig Herman has joined Peanuts Worldwide as executive director for publishing, where he will work on expanding the global publishing program for the Peanuts brand as well as transition the business to the optimal blend of physical books, e-books, and hybrid digibooks and apps. Previously he was vp, associate publisher…

Do you read The Washington Post online a lot? Get ready to pay for it. The news organization said today that it will begin to charge people who read more than 20 articles a month beginning this summer. Multimedia pieces are counted among these.

The paper did not say how much it would charge, but there are reports that the company has plans to launch an app which could encourage growth in digital subscriptions. Here are more details from a report in The Washington Post: “Its home-delivery subscribers will have free access to all of The Post’s digital products, and students, teachers, school administrators, government employees and military personnel will have unlimited access to the Web site while in their schools and workplaces.”

Twenty articles is generous compared with The New York Times, which puts up a paywall after ten articles.

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Google will publish a series of eBooks based on its Ingress game, a game that interacts with the real world through an augmented reality app. Watch the video embedded above to learn more about the game.

AppNewser has more:

Niantic Labs, the startup that lives inside of Google and has produced projects like the Google Field Trip app, has plans to launch a line of eBooks based on the augmented reality game Ingress. Ingress is an augmented reality game that Google launched this past November and it is currently in the invite-only beta stage. Ingress’s website boasts,”the world around you is not what it seems,” and Nianticproject.com is full of cryptic messages and codes.

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Niantic Labs, the startup that lives inside of Google and has produced projects like the Google Field Trip app, has plans to launch a line of eBooks based on the augmented reality game Ingress.

According to a report in Publishers Lunch, the series, which is slated to launch next month, will be authored and co-published by Thomas Greanias and his @tlantis Books. The first title in the series will be called The Alignment.

Ingress is an augmented reality game that Google launched this past November and it is currently in the invite-only beta stage. Ingress’s website boasts,”the world around you is not what it seems,” and Nianticproject.com is full of cryptic messages and codes.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Hollywood screenwriter Stuart Beattie will write the script for the Daughter of Smoke & Bone film adaptation.

In the past, Beattie wrote the screenplays for Collateral (2004), 30 Days of Night (2007), and the forthcoming I, Frankenstein (2013). As we previously noted, Palak Patel and Joe Roth will produce.

Author Laini Taylor endorsed Beattie and the entire film-making team with this statement: “It’s been fantastic to delve into the world of the book with a screenwriter of such insight and experience. Between Stuart, Joe Roth and Universal Pictures, we’ve got a team with massive epic flair, and I can’t wait to see what unfolds as we move toward bringing Karou, Akiva, Brimstone and the world of Daughter of Smoke & Bone to the screen.”

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I gave a keynote at The Mobile Show in Dubai last May, where I emphasised the importance of an engaging narrative in almost everything we produce.

I made the point that narrative wasn’t the preserve of publishers, words had many routes to a page (be that paper or digital) and more options were opening up to connect authors, creatives and narrators of all shapes and sizes with their audience.

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Rovio’s Angry Bird Toons premiered over the weekend on iOS devices. To enjoy the videos on iOS mobile, just make sure you have the latest update to the Angry Bird App of your choice. There should be a new toons button next to the play button  for watching the videos.The series will include 52 weekly episodes of Angry Birds on Piggy Island where the birds will have to protect their eggs from the evil piggies.

 

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A controversial new Library and Archives Canada code of conduct warns its employees that “teaching, speaking at conferences, and other personal engagements” is considered “high risk to LAC and to the employee with regard to conflict of interest, conflict of duties and duty of loyalty.”

In an interview with Postmedia, Loryl MacDonald, president of the Association of Canadian Archivists, calls the code of conduct “chilling.” MacDonald says, “It is very disturbing and disconcerting to have included speaking at conferences and teaching as so-called ‘high risk’ activities.”

The 23-page document, which applies to all LAC full-time and contract employees, volunteers, and students, also identifies social media as a threat:

With the current proliferation of social media, public servants need to pay particular attention to their participation in these forums. For example, in a blog with access limited to certain friends, personal opinions about a new departmental or Government of Canada program intended to be expressed to a limited audience can, through no fault of the public servant, become public and the author identified. The public servant could be subject to disciplinary measures, as the simple act of limiting access to the blog does not negate a public servant’s duty of loyalty to the elected government.

A leaked LAC training presentation features a section on how to report “wrongdoing.” In the Postmedia story, Canadian Association of University Teachers executive director James Turk criticizes the policy and its intent, saying, “It includes both a muzzle and a snitch line.”

Hastings Entertainment reported fourth quarter and full year results Monday morning. For the quarter, the company reported net income of $1.2 million, compared to a loss of $8.4 million a year ago, with an overall loss of $9.3 million, nearly cut in half compared to the $17.6 million the company…

Here are some literary events to pencil in your calendar. To get your event posted on our calendar, visit our Facebook Your Literary Event page. Please post your event at least one week prior to its date.

Meet prolific thriller writter Harlan Coben at the launch party for his new novel, Six Years. See him on Tuesday, March 19th at Barnes & Noble (82nd Street & Broadway) starting 7 p.m. (New York, NY)

The 6-year anniversary celebration of the Mixer Reading & Mixer Series will take place at Cake Shop. Join the fun on Wednesday, March 20th starting 7 p.m. (New York, NY)

continued…

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With 14 political thrillers published, novelist Vince Flynn gets hundreds of reader requests every year for a character index–so the novelist decided to build the database online with help from his fans.

If you want to submit character names for the index, you can use this online form. Flynn will publish the database as a free eBook, including his readers inside the book.

I would like to create a character database for VinceFlynn.com and also offer the information in a free eBook, but I’m busy writing the next Rapp novel so I’m going to need to enlist The Rapp Pack. Together, we’re going to create the Ultimate Vince Flynn Database and have it online and in eBook form by this fall … We’ll do our best to keep the link updated so you can see who has already been suggested … I will make sure that everyone who contributes will be listed in the eBook version of the character index, so please send in your full names along with your suggestions-your names will live on forever in the US Library of Congress!

(Photo Credit: Peter Hurley)

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