Epstein’s career is illustrious within the publishing world, boasting an impressive breadth and impact. Unlike many of the famous writers with whom he’s worked, including Auden and Nabakov, Epstein is still around to enjoy his accolades.

While his touch can be seen on bookstore shelves in the form of the “quality paperback” and within the foundation of publishing, his professional memoir is encapsulated, appropriately, within a binding in Book Business: Publishing Past, Present and Future (W.W. Norton, 2002). While slanted toward the niche group of people interested in book publishing, this is also a wonderful tale of history and the way relationships with books have evolved throughout the 1900s.

This iconic career began when Epstein stumbled across an editorial position with Doubleday in his early 20s and stayed a decade. Within that time period, he was the man responsible for the invention of Anchor Books, which made literature more affordable for the masses as opposed to the superior quality, expensive hardcover novels.

After that success, Epstein moved over to Random House. At this time, Random House was a family-style business located within the wing of one New York mansion, which is a much different position than the company currently holds as the world’s largest trade publisher. At this point, the memoir is peppered with allusions to illicit affairs and famous authors delivering manuscripts in slippers and spending the night on couches (and not always alone).

Epstein is a big-picture businessman that is able to look at book publishing from the editorial and quality-of-literature angle, as well as having envisioned new venues for sales and marketing. Responsible for numerous advances in the publishing industry throughout his career, Epstein was among the first to embrace the online retail giant in its struggling years, Amazon.com (ironically, he found fault with Amazon’s business model, which has boomed since the publication of this memoir in 2001).

This enlightening book, surprisingly small in stature considering the wealth of information contained within, cited book publishing to be on the edge of a vast transformation. Originally published in 2000, it may seem as if Epstein had a glimpse of the current challenges.

Since publication of his book, Epstein has capitalized on some of his own visions mentioned, most notably having launched On Demand Books in 2004. With yet another invention on his repertoire, the “Espresso Book Machine” is available at limited locations throughout the United States, Canada, and England for on-demand, affordable printing of books. Though I don’t see this invention having quite the impact Epstein may have once predicted, he was on target with his assumptions that more and more people would be reading from a digital device.

I suggest this title to anyone interested in learning more of the behind-the-scenes tale from a publishing great. The time invested to read it is well worth the decades of information condensed within. Jason Epstein has shared a memoir of an accomplished career, and his entrepreneurial spirit just leaps from the pages.

“One of the advantages for readers is that Kindle titles never go out of stock,” said Steve Kessel, Senior Vice President, World Wide Digital Media at Amazon.com. “That’s good for readers, and it’s good for publishers too.”

“The Last Lecture” is based on what was in fact, Randy Pausch’s last lecture as a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon University. Mr. Pausch had recently been diagnosed with terminal cancer, so he took to opportunity to impart his wisdom as if he would never be given another chance. According to an editorial review on Amazon.com, “… Randy Pausch has combined the humor, inspiration and intelligence that made his lecture such a phenomenon and given it an indelible form. It is a book that will be shared for generations to come.”

Learn more about Amazon Kindle at http://amazon.com/kindle.

About Amazon.com

Amazon.com, Inc., (NASDAQ:AMZN), a Fortune 500 company based in Seattle, opened on the World Wide Web in July 1995 and today offers Earth’s Biggest Selection. Amazon.com, Inc. seeks to be Earth’s most customer-centric company, where customers can find and discover anything they might want to buy online, and endeavors to offer its customers the lowest possible prices. Amazon.com and other sellers offer millions of unique new, refurbished and used items in categories such as books, movies, music & games, digital downloads, electronics & computers, home & garden, toys, kids & baby, grocery, apparel, shoes & jewelry, health & beauty, sports & outdoors, and tools, auto & industrial.

Amazon Web Services provides Amazon’s developer customers with access to in-the-cloud infrastructure services based on Amazon’s own back-end technology platform, which developers can use to enable virtually any type of business. Examples of the services offered by Amazon Web Services are Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon SimpleDB, Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS), Amazon Flexible Payments Service (Amazon FPS), and Amazon Mechanical Turk.

Amazon and its affiliates operate websites, including www.amazon.com, www.amazon.co.uk, www.amazon.de, www.amazon.co.jp, www.amazon.fr, www.amazon.ca, and the Joyo Amazon websites at www.joyo.cn and www.amazon.cn.

As used herein, “Amazon.com,” “we,” “our” and similar terms include Amazon.com, Inc., and its subsidiaries, unless the context indicates otherwise.

Forward-Looking Statements

This announcement contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933 and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. Actual results may differ significantly from management’s expectations. These forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties that include, among others, risks related to competition, management of growth, new products, services and technologies, potential fluctuations in operating results, international expansion, outcomes of legal proceedings and claims, fulfillment center optimization, seasonality, commercial agreements, acquisitions and strategic transactions, foreign exchange rates, system interruption, significant amount of indebtedness, inventory, government regulation and taxation, payments and fraud. More information about factors that potentially could affect Amazon.com’s financial results is included in Amazon.com’s filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including its Annual Report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2007, and subsequent filings.

CONTACT:
Amazon.com
Media Hotline, 206-266-7180

SOURCE: Amazon.com, Inc.

Thanks to TV and the Internet, poker is perhaps the fastest-growing game in the world. On college campuses, poker has replaced video games as the diversion of choice. An estimated 50-80 million Americans — many of them women — now play poker. Poker has not only been embraced by the mainstream (like cigars and tattoos), but, in its rarefied version requiring thousands of dollars just to sit at the table, it has also become something of a status pastime reserved for 21st century “Masters of the Universe.”

Most observers say the poker boom began in 2003, after the World Poker Tour was broadcast on the Travel Channel. But it was not as simple as “film it and they will watch.” It took a completely new approach to televising poker.

Back in 2001, Steve Lipscomb, the current C.E.O. of World Poker Tour Enterprises Inc, had a revelation while producing a documentary film on poker. He realized that the only way to make watching poker on TV exciting and engaging was to let the viewers see each player’s hands (including the two face-down cards in the Texas Hold ‘em version of the game).

He put the cameras right on the rim of the table (an idea borrowed from a British TV program) and added some nifty editing to create a fast-moving human drama. He pitched his idea for a new kind poker TV to cable. The Travel Channel was interested, and two years later the World Poker Tour made its debut. It was an immediate success, and ESPN followed with the World Series of Poker. Needless to say, both shows had big paydays for the winners.

If shows like World Poker Tour, World Series of Poker, and Celebrity Poker Showdown made the game glamorous and exciting, it was the Internet that made it accessible. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of poker “rooms” open to anyone, operate offshore to avoid the reach of those annoying U.S. gambling laws. The largest sites have millions of registered users. At peak playing times, hundreds of millions of dollars are wagered by tens of thousands of people playing at thousands of virtual “tables.”

The Internet sites act as the minor leagues for the cable TV competitions. While poker is a relatively simple game to learn, it requires experience to gain the skills necessary to compete at higher levels. Online poker is a fast game. Since there is no shuffling and dealing, people can play as many as 30 hands in an hour. Annie Duke, the best female player in the game (and tutor to actor Ben Affleck), said before the Internet, “it would take 20 years to get the amount of experience that it takes in a year now.”

It is also possible to win a seat at the World Series of Poker by winning an online tournament. This was the case with the now legendary Chris Moneymaker (that’s his name), a Tennessee accountant who won a seat at the World Series of Poker and came away with $2.5 million.

Books about poker have been published by all of the large trade houses, but the category leaders are New York City-based Cardoza Publishing and Henderson, Nevada-based Two-Plus-Two Publishing. Each has sold millions of copies of their respective catalogs. All told, 113 new books about poker were published in the U.S. in 2006, according to Bowker’s Books In Print database.

The number of new poker books has increased every year since 2002, when only a fraction of today’s output was published. Below is a graph showing the output of new poker books since 2002:

The bestselling poker books at Barnes & Noble include:

• Hold’em Wisdom for All Players: 50 Powerful Tips to Make You a Winning Player, by Daniel Negreanu. (Cardoza Publishing)
• Bringing Down the House: The Inside Story of Six MIT Students Who Took Vegas for Millions, by Ben Mezrich. (Simon & Schuster)
• Harrington on Hold’em: Expert Strategy for No-Limit Tournaments: Volume I: Strategic Play, by Dan Harrington and Bill Robertie. (Two-Plus-Two Publishing)
• Poker Nation: A High-Stakes, Low-Life Adventure into the Heart of a Gambling Country, by Andy Bellin. (HarperCollins)
• The Professor, the Banker and the Suicide King: Inside the Richest Poker Game of All Time, by Michael Craig. (Grand Central Publishing)
• Doyle Brunson’s Super System 2: A Course in Power Poker, by Doyle Brunson and Crandell Addington. (Cardoza Publishing)
• Harrington on Hold’em: Expert Strategy for No-Limit Tournaments: Volume 2: The Endgame, by Dan Harrington and Bill Robertie. (Two-Plus-Two Publishing)
• Phil Gordon’s Little green Book: Lessons and Teachings in No Limit Texas Hold’em, by Phil Gordon. (Simon & Schuster)
• The Full Tilt Poker Strategy Guide: Tournament Edition, by Michael Craig. (Grand Central Publishing)
• Harrington on Hold’em: Expert Strategy for No-Limit Tournaments: Volume 3: The Workbook, by Dan Harrington and Bill Robertie. (Two-Plus-Two Publishing)

If you don’t like puzzles, you probably haven’t.

Not only is Sudoku the biggest thing to hit the puzzle world in years–perhaps ever–it is also a bona fide book publishing phenomenon.

Iin 2005, there were seven crossword puzzle books on Nielsen BookScan’s list of the 50 bestselling adult game books. A year later, there were none. Sudoku books had taken over the category, accounting for 40 of the top 50 spots. In 2004, according to Bowker’s Books In Print database, there were no Sudoku books published in the U.S. Last year, 233 were published in the U.S. and more than five million were sold.

What is Sudoku, and how did it take the publishing world by storm?

Sudoku is a logic-based, number placement puzzle. The object is to fill a 9-by-9 grid – and a 3-by-3 sub-grid — with digits from 1 to 9 without using a number more than once. The name “Sudoku”, in fact, means “single digits” in Japanese. Numbers are used as a convenience. They possess no inherent arithmetic value and derive none from relationships with any other numbers on the grid. You could just as easily use alpha characters, shapes or colors to achieve the same effect.

The story of how Sudoku became a worldwide sensation bears repeating because it is a textbook example of how the chain of events leading up to an idea’s tipping point only begins with the original act of creation. If the Sudoku pandemic shows us anything, it’s that the inventor is the least important part of the puzzle.

Howard Garns–a retired 74-year-old architect and freelance puzzle constructor from Indiana–designed a new kind of numbers puzzle in the late 1970’s. In 1979, Dell Magazines published Garns’ puzzle as “Numbers Place.” It’s safe to say that it enjoyed a modest success at best. Garns died in 1989, years before his Numbers Place would take over the world as Sudoku.

In 1984, Garns’ puzzle was introduced in Japan by Maki Kaji, the publisher of Nikoli magazine. Numbers Place became “Suuji wa dokushin ni kagiru,” which roughly translates to “the digits must be single.” A couple of years later, Kaji shortened the name to “Sudoku,” and modified the rules to create a more symmetrical grid. The importance of the name change cannot be overstated. It gave the puzzle an exotic cache that, years later, would make it irresistible to Westerners. Kaji trademarked the name “Sudoku,” and to this day carries a business card that says, “Father of Sudoku”.

If the story stopped here, Sudoku would probably have been one of a number of popular Japanese puzzles, while Garn’s Numbers Place would have likely disappeared in time——except that in 1997, a retired (I guess only retired people have the time to think up these things) Hong Kong judge from New Zealand named Wayne Gould, stumbled on a partially completed Sudoku puzzle in a Japanese bookstore. Gould became obsessed with Sudoku, and spent the next six years developing a computer program to generate puzzles on the quick. He then pitched Sudoku to The Times of London, who published Britain’s first “Su Doku” puzzle in November 2004. Soon after, the U.K., and then continental Europe, fell to Sudoku.

Gould’s computer program was essential to Sudoku’s viral-like growth. Before Gould, crossword and other puzzles were hand-crafted by freelance “constructors” and then vetted by puzzle gurus before they were published. What Gould did was make it possible to quickly produce an unlimited number and variety of Sudoku puzzles that would eventually support the rapid global expansion to any newspaper in the world, regardless of whether they had a puzzle expert on staff. In recent years, this has also made it possible to produce Sudoku puzzles and games for mobile phones and other portable entertainment devices.

The Conway Daily Sun in New Hampshire was the first newspaper in the U.S. to publish a Sudoku puzzle by Gould. In April, 2005, the New York Post became the first major American daily to run Sudoku. In short order, every other major newspaper in the U.S. followed suit — except for the New York Times. Ironically, in spite of its crossword snobbery, it was the New York Times that gave Sudoku the credibility it needed to grow beyond the readers of daily tabloids and entertainment magazines.

In June of 2005, after Sudoku began to take off in the U.S., St. Martin’s Press was worried that they would be left behind, and they called their star crossword author, Will Shortz, to beg him to deliver three Sudoku books of 100 puzzles each in ten days. Working with a computer programmer in the Netherlands, Shortz gave St. Martin’s what they wanted. Shortz’s first book was an immediate bestseller, as were every one of his Sudoku books since. According to Publishers Weekly, by the end of 2005 Shortz’s books accounted for 30% of all Sudoku titles that sold at least 100,000 copies; by the end of 2006, Shortz had authored an astounding 59% of all Sudoku bestsellers on the PW list. St. Martin’s was now trying to keep up with demand, printing a million copies of Shortz’s books every month.

In case you didn’t recognize his name, Will Shortz is the crossword editor of the New York Times. He is worshiped by millions who hunger for his wit, elegance, and erudition — and can’t function without tackling his puzzle in the Times every day, especially the monster published in the Sunday magazine section. Once Will Shortz lent his enormous prestige and standing (and that of the New York Times, in a way) to Sudoku, it became okay for legions of educated “word nerds” to surrender to it.

There you have it. The recipe for success is short and simple:

1. a great idea
2. an even greater name
3. a mindless machine to produce a never-ending supply of engaging, addictive content
4. a revered prophet to come down from the mountain to give his blessing

Now you try it.

In 2004, the year “Reading At Risk” was published, dollar sales of classic fiction actually grew, as it has in 2005 and 2006. In fact, Simba Information, which tracks these things, estimates that sales of classic fiction last year exceeded those of the mystery category (as well as biography, computers, gardening, how-to, and travel). It’s no accident, I think, that The New York Times has just introduced a new online forum for their book review section devoted to the discussion of the great books. There has even been some thought given to compiling a separate New York Times bestseller list for classics. This doesn’t sound like a category in crisis to me.

According to Simba Information’s Business of Consumer Book Publishing, classic literary fiction generated an estimated $448 million in 2006, an increase of 4.2% over 2005, and 28% over 2002. The five leading publishing companies accounted for $273 million last year, or 61% of total category revenues. The top five companies were Penguin Group, Oxford University Press, Random House, Houghton Mifflin, and Simon & Schuster.

Penguin is the leading publisher of classic literary fiction, generating sales of $89.7 million in 2006, primarily through its Penguin Classics and Signet imprints. Penguin Classics, which celebrated its 60th anniversary in 2006, has a backlist of 1,300 titles. Random House generated an estimated $64.1 million in sales of classic literary fiction through its Modern Library and Bantam imprints. Though lacking a marquee classics imprint, Oxford University Press has still managed to sell an estimated $71 million in 2006.

According to Bowker’s Books In Print database, 7,601 books classified as literature (including literary criticism) were published in the U.S. in 2006, a 21% increase over 2005, but 5% less than the peak year of 2004, when 7,972 were published. Below is a graph representing new classic literary fiction titles published since 2002:

Classic fiction sales are largely driven by school curriculums. The bestselling classic fiction titles at Barnes & Noble stores and website are a perfect example of this. Books by John Steinbeck, Arthur Miller, Jane Austen (who is, to be fair, also enjoying a renaissance that extends beyond the nation’s high school English classrooms), Nathaniel Hawthorne, Charles Dickens, and George Orwell. Sometimes there are odd omissions due to misclassification. Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird, for example, was classified as “Crimes-Fiction” by Barnes & Noble (or Bowker, who is Barnes & Noble’s data provider) instead of “Fiction & Literature – Classics.”It should be noted that most of the bestselling classics at Barnes & Noble stores are the ones published by Barnes & Noble itself as part of its Barnes & Noble Classics Series. They are hard to miss. Borders Group also publishes classics in the public domain under its house imprint. As of this writing, the current slate of bestselling classics from Barnes & Noble include:

• Candide, by Voltaire. Translated by Henry Morley. (Barnes & Noble)
• Odyssey, by Homer. Translated by W.H. Rouse. (Signet Classics)
• Beowulf. Translated by John McNamara. (Barnes & Noble)
• Of Mice & Men, by John Steinbeck. (Penguin Group)
• The Art of War, by Sun Tzu. Translated by Lionel Giles (Barnes & Noble)
• Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen. (Barnes & Noble)
• Grapes of Wrath, by John Steinbeck. (Penguin Group)
• A Tale of Two Cities, by Charles Dickens (Dover Publications)
• Death of a Salesman, by Arthur Miller. (Penguin Group)
• Anna Karenina, by Leo Tolstoy. (Barnes & Noble)
• Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain. (Barnes & Noble)
• The Scarlet Letter, by Nathaniel Hawthorne. (Bantam Books)
• Wuthering Heights, by Emily Bronte. (Dover Publications)