One of Watermark Publishing’s authors, Frances H. Kakugawa, started a dialogue with Charles Pellegrino, author of The Last Train from Hiroshima, a book which earlier this year received a great deal of attention for not-so-good reasons. Think James Frey-Oprah Winfrey-A Million Little Pieces-attention.

Frances, a former Hawaii public school educator, felt a very personal connection with Pellegrino’s Last Train, which chronicles the experiences of some of the survivors of the Hiroshima atomic bomb—her parents’ families perished at Hiroshima. When she discovered that there was some controversy over whether the survivors’ accounts were true or not (one of Pellegrino’s sources turned out to have duped the author), she posted an open letter to the author on her blog expressing her dismay.

To her surprise, Pellegrino wrote back to her.

Price, speed, and convenience will probably determine how information that is carefully argued and presented in book form will be distributed.

For several months, all eyes in the world of books—authors, publishers, librarians, and a great many readers—were trained on the district court for the Southern District of New York and Judge Denny Chin, because a seemingly small-scale squabble over copyright looked likely to determine the digital future for all of us.

Who says books are going to be replaced by ebooks? The millions of Twitter(TM) users now can save their “tweets” as a permanent printed and bound BOOK!

There will always be festivals around their creative use — storytelling in its many forms and nonfiction in it many categories. The word “book” may need to be reconsidered sooner rather than later.

How do we marry traditional book publishing to various online and digital media in a way that makes sense to readers?

What ultimately determines the publishing success of a book? It’s the bookstores that now control the national publishing industry.

A recent trading day resulted in a 27% jump in Amazon.com (AMZN) ….In short, Amazon.com is selling an enormous (but secret) number of Kindle e-book readers.

A breakout can be the result of mysterious magic of word-of-mouth, or an outstanding performance. Breakouts often look obvious in retrospect, but they usually require extraordinary luck or skillful strategy.

Houghton will be providing a computer-based teaching system it developed with Microsoft Corp. that will connect teachers, students, and administrators. It’s a radical shift away from the classic textbook publishing model and represents an industry transformation, as technology supplants textbooks.