Last month, Fast Company did a great story on bookstore co-op deals, in which publishers pay booksellers for inclusion on front tables, end caps, face-out placements, etc.

The deadline for ForeWord magazine's Book of the Year Award is January 15, 2010!

This week Jonathan Fields of the Huffington Post posted an e-mail exchange he had with a publicist from a major house who was pitching a new self-help book.

One of our favorite moments of last May’s BookExpo coverage was this one-liner from Bob Miller of HarperStudio: during a discussion on “Stupid Things Publishers & Booksellers Do,” he said, “No more Tuesdays with Marley?” He was, of course, referring to the hastily (and poorly) produced copycats that tend to follow breakout successes in the book world.

Assuming you haven't had the time, energy, or mental aptitude for legal matters to get to the bottom of what's going on with Google Book Search and the settlement reached last October, we highly recommend this helpful FAQ from Wired.

Over at a new blog called Follow the Reader, Bookish Dilettante Kat Meyer discusses the new IndieBound iPhone app, which, by the way, is very, very cool.

In a previous post on Fonts That Make You Look Lame, we included Comic Sans in a list of five typefaces that are either played-out or just downright atrocious. And who doesn't hate the goofy, amateurish font?

• Last weekend's Christian Book Expo flopped, with a reported 1,500 showing up, rather than the hoped-for 15,000–20,000.
• HarperCollins abandoned dead-tree catalogs and went all digital.

In the book industry, "pristine" is the word wholesalers and retailers use to describe books that are in saleable condition. If a book isn't pristine (which means “absolutely flawless” in this context), it's sent straight back to the publisher.

A book’s title is important. It’s a crucial summary of the essence of the content inside, and one of the key ways a book pitches itself to browsers when it’s all alone on the bookstore shelf. Get the title wrong and a book is crippled from the outset.