California Literary Review

The End: The book business as we know it will not be living happily ever after. With sales stagnating, CEO heads rolling, big-name authors playing musical chairs, and Amazon looming as the new boogeyman, publishing might have to look for its future outside the corporate world. [New York]

Why cowboys read: America’s libraries are faring surprisingly well in the internet era. Circulation has been rising steadily for the past few years, according to the National Centre for Education Statistics. Libraries are especially thriving in the conservative rural heartlands. The average Wyoming resident checked out nine books in 2005-06, compared with an average of five in California and two in Washington, DC. [Economist]

Attack of the Megalisters: Indeed, the state of the art in used-book selling these days seems to be less about connoisseurship than about database management. With the help of software tools, so-called megalisters stock millions of books and sell tens of thousands a week through Amazon, AbeBooks and other online marketplaces. [NYT]

Telegraph signs Alexander McCall Smith to write serialised novel: The website will publish the first of 100 successive episodes of his new novel, Corduroy Mansions, on Monday. In what is believed to be the first project of its kind on a UK website, the serialisation will include simultaneous daily podcast editions, narrated by Andrew Sachs, available to download through iTunes. [Guardian]

Carrie the Kid: Candace Bushnell, whose mid-’90s New York Observer column was the basis for Sex and the City, has signed a deal with the children’s division at HarperCollins to write a young adult novel about Carrie Bradshaw’s high-school years. [Observer]

The new wave of French urban fiction: This new trend first hit the headlines at the Gauloise-end of the nineties when Rachid Djaïdani – a small-time actor and Thai-boxing enthusiast from the deprived banlieues – published his debut novel (Boumkeur) to rave reviews. [Guardian]