Book News
Books for the busy.
The FT Press has introduced two series of short, digital- only titles for professionals who want quick advice for $2.99 or less.
The publisher, through a new imprint named FT Press Delivers, has begun selling what it is calling Elements and Shorts through the Kindle bookstore on and Barnes & Noble’s e-bookstore. The Elements, which the publisher has priced at $1.99, are stripped-down, 1,000- to 2,000-word versions of published books, while the Shorts are newly written essays of about 5,000 words, priced at $2.99.
Titles include “Reengineering the Rules of Management,” by James Champy, the co-author, with Michael Hammer, of “Reengineering the Corporation,” one of the business best sellers of the 1990s; and “Keeping It Honest, From Kitchen to Coca-Cola,” by Seth Goldman.
Timothy C. Moore, publisher of FT Press, said the company has already published 242 titles and plans to have 500 by the end of the year.
Champy, a consultant, said demand for longer books had fallen. “There are people who only want to access pieces of what you write,” he said. “I don’t think they have an appetite for reading a long, serious business book.”
First Lines
Too Much Money, by Dominick Dunne
A few years ago there was a rumor that I had been murdered at my house in Prud’homme, Connecticut, by a cross-country serial killer of rich older men. Of course, it wasn’t true, although it was a rumor that lingered for a while: Gus Bailey was dead. There was indeed a serial killer at the time, who was very much in the news. He had just killed a couturier in Miami who was so famous that Princess Diana and Elton John and his future husband attended the funeral in Milan. I confess now to having been the person who started the rumor. I couldn’t figure out how to finish a novel I was writing at the time, and I wanted desperately to leave the next day for the Cannes Film Festival with Stokes Bishop, my editor at Park Avenue magazine, who assured me in advance that I was to be seated between the French film star Catherine Deneuve and Princess Olga of Greece at the magazine’s party at the Hotel du Cap in Antibes. I didn’t want to miss that, so I just grabbed the headline news of the murder in Miami and added Gus Bailey to the killer’s list, thus ending the novel, and I flew to France. Do I regret having done that? Yes.
E-book Best Sellers
1. Dear John, by Nicholas Sparks
2. Shutter Island, by Dennis Lehane
3. A Reliable Wife, by Robert Goolrick
4. The Last Song, by Nicholas Sparks
5. The Help, by Kathryn Stockett
6. The Lovely Bones, by Alice Sebold
7. The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, by Stieg Larsson
8. The Lost Symbol, by Dan Brown
9. I, Alex Cross, by James Patterson
10. Eclipse, by Stephenie Meyer
