Free Republic

Washington D.C., May 7, 2013 / 05:00 pm (CNA).- An Illinois-based Bible publisher has secured temporary relief from the federal contraception mandate after the Obama administration asked an appellate court to dismiss its challenge to a preliminary injunction. Matthew Bowman, senior legal counsel at Alliance Defending Freedom, which is defending the publisher, told CNA that the move indicates “that the government knows it is taking an extremist view against religious freedom, and it is afraid to defend that in court.” As a result of the court order, the Bible publisher will remain protected by a temporary injunction, and will therefore...

PORTLAND, Maine — Stephen King and his wife have made a donation to a Maine group advocating for stricter gun control laws. King says the gift was "five figures" but doesn't want to say more about it because "charity's supposed to be a private thing." The Coalition for a Safer Maine says King is a gun owner and a defender of the Second Amendment who supports expanded background checks on gun sales and a ban on the sale of high-capacity ammunition magazines.....

NEW YORK — Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin has a new book coming, this time about Christmas. The former Republican vice presidential candidate has a deal with HarperCollins for "A Happy Holiday IS a Merry Christmas," scheduled for November. HarperCollins announced Monday the book will criticize the "over-commercialism" and "homogenization" of Christmas and call for a renewed emphasis on the religious importance....

<p>In a bid to slash $465 million of debt, Reader’s Digest parent RDA Holding Co. filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy over the weekend for the second time in less than four years.</p> <p>The media company said it has reached a deal with its largest creditor, Wells Fargo (WFC), and more than 70% of its secured noteholders on a financial restructuring plan that includes the Chapter 11 filing.</p>

Searching Google Books for Poor Richard's has become somewhat of an exercise in frustration for me. Typically, what you will find are compilations. Authors who have looked at Franklins' works and decided what should be considered "greatest hits" quotations. Consider me uninterested. So I finally got my hands on a copy from the library which contained the original constructs of Poor Richards' as Franklin wrote them, that way I would know what to search for. Below, you will see where to find all of them online, in their original context. 1733, 1734, 1735, 1736, 1737 ,1738, 17391740 ,1741, 1742, 1743,...

LEWISTON, Maine — Geiger Brothers, the producer of the Farmers’ Almanac as well as pocket diaries and calendars, is divesting itself of its printing and manufacturing business after 135 years. The company’s decision, one influenced by changes in peoples’ behavior wrought by technology, will lead to 75 people losing their jobs, Peter Geiger, the company’s executive vice president and editor of the Farmers’ Almanac, told the Bangor Daily News on Tuesday evening. Geiger said the company, which was founded in 1878 and moved to Lewiston in 1955, told its employees of the decision on Tuesday. The company, which is also...

McGraw-Hill Education announced today it will layoff 63 employees from its Polaris offices as part of a move to reorganize and upgrade the digital quality of the kindergarten to high school products it offers. The Polaris offices are the headquarters of McGraw-Hill’s School Education division, which is part of the larger education operations. The cutbacks will reduce the number of employees at Polaris to about 510. Nationally, there will be 138 layoffs in the school education division...

Jerry Finkelstein, who made a fortune in business, real estate and newspapers, including The New York Law Journal and The Hill, and for many years was a self-styled Democratic power broker in New York City, died on Wednesday at his home in Manhattan. He was 96.

At Writer’s Bloc, I often talk about the marketing of books, because it seems so many authors still don’t understand the importance of it. That’s why, this week, I am going to touch on a couple points made by Michael Hyatt in his new book, “Platform.” To be fair, I’ve also reviewed it, but in this space, its contents are relevant. I wouldn’t agree with Hyatt about everything, of course, but frankly, his publishing knowledge is a resource that writers should use until there’s nothing left to wring-out. “Platform: Get Noticed in a Noisy World,” is a true insider’s account...

Campus bookstores hate the idea, and even some college students are skeptical of the new effort by a former California lawmaker to help them save money on textbooks for hundreds of classes on nearly every campus from Alabama to the Yukon Territory. It's a free price-check that lets students compare textbook prices and rentals, and buy from the source they like best. The new online tool comes from former state Sen. Dean Florez, president of the 20 Million Minds Foundation in Sacramento, which lobbies for low-cost textbooks and is behind legislation, SB1052, to create a low-cost digital textbook library in...

In June, 1776, with Richard Henry Lee’s proposal for independence from Great Britain awaiting a vote in the Continental Congress, a committee of five – Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, Robert R. Livingston, Roger Sherman, and Thomas Jefferson – selected one from among their number to be the key author of a formal Declaration of Independence. While the entire Continental Congress contributed to it, through their helpful editing, the principal author has long been known to be Thomas Jefferson, and he was rightly so proud of it that he wanted his authorship of this document to be on his tombstone rather...

I have started a new full service small press publishing company call The Stainless Banner Publishing Company. This press is dedicated to the preservation of Southern heritage and history. If you know a writer or have a non-fiction, biography, memoir, novel, or alternate history and are looking for a publisher, I hope you will consider submitting your manuscript to my small press. Let me tell you what The Stainless Banner Publishing Company can offer you: Professional editing Dynamic Covers Hard cover or paperback Competitively priced books High royalties paid monthly Your book on Amazon, Barnes & Nobel and many other...

Bookstore owner Barnes & Noble Inc (BKS.N) on Thursday said it is considering splitting off its Nook electronic reader business, which has been the main growth engine for the company.

Sci-fi writer Philip K. Dick's heirs battle Hollywood over the rights to the 2011 Matt Damon film "The Adjustment Bureau."Plot outline for a Philip K. Dick story: Hollywood buys film rights to obscure short story by famous author. Makes movie. Movie makes money. Producers then claim they never needed to buy rights in the first place. Demand their money back. Emblematic Philip K. Dick story elements: Attempt to turn back time and murkiness of reality. Extra mind-bending plot twist: Author of original story is named Philip K. Dick. As Laura Dick Coelho, one of the late author's daughters, told me:...

Penguin's security issue was not specified, although it likely refers to piracy concerns. But analyst Avi Greengart said he wondered how much of Penguin's objections have to do with security and how much with the business model of lending titles, especially new titles, through libraries. The growing availability of e-book titles for borrowing through public libraries has hit a bump. On Tuesday, Penguin Group USA announced it would no longer allow digital editions in any e-format of new titles to become available for library lending -- and it is disabling availability of all titles for lending in Amazon's Kindle format....

Sarah Palin used to pronounce Mitt Romney's name "M-I-L-T." In one of the many embarrassing anecdotes about the former Alaska governor, former aide Frank Bailey writes in a leaked manuscript that Palin actually argued with some of her staffers about how to correctly pronounce Romney's name. During her own 2006 campaign for governor, when Romney was chairman of the Republican Governors Association, Bailey writes that Palin didn't seem to know much about the then-Massachusetts governor. “During the campaign for governor, when Romney was in the background of our Republican Governors’ mess, Sarah didn’t even have a clear idea who he...

VATICAN CITY — The Vatican Publishing House is gearing up to distribute another blockbuster tome — this one the exclusive work of Pope Benedict XVI.Salesian Father Giuseppe Costa, director of the publishing house, told the Vatican newspaper yesterday, “This morning I sent the text to various editors; the aim is to present it in March.”Salesian Father Giuseppe Costa (CNS/Carol Glatz) The book is “Jesus of Nazareth. Part Two. Holy Week: From the Entrance into Jerusalem to the Resurrection.” And the texts sent out are Vatican-controlled translations into a variety of languages.The pope’s book could come out just four months after...

Writers are bypassing the traditional route to bookstore shelves and self-publishing their works online. By selling directly to readers, authors get a larger slice of the sale price. Joe Konrath can't wait for his books to go out of print. When that happens, the 40-year-old crime novelist plans to reclaim the copyrights from his publisher, Hyperion Books, and self-publish them on Amazon.com, Apple Inc.'s iBooks and other online outlets. That way he'll be able to collect 70% of the sale price, compared with the 6% to 18% he receives from Hyperion. As for future novels, Konrath plans to self-publish all...

WikiLeaks chief Julian Assange has said in an interview he had signed deals for his autobiography worth more than one million pounds(($A1.57 million). Assange told Britain's Sunday Times newspaper that the money would help him defend himself against allegations of sexual assault made by two women in Sweden. "I don't want to write this book, but I have to," he said on Sunday. "I have already spent 200,000 pounds for legal costs and I need to defend myself and to keep WikiLeaks afloat." The Australian said he would receive the equivalent of $A800,000 from Alfred A. Knopf, his American publisher,...

Sarah Palin's new book, "America by Heart," has logged unimpressive sales numbers, publishing sources say. Even so, the memoir, which went on sale in November, holds second place on the New York Times bestseller list, The Washington Post reported. Palin's first book, "Going Rogue," was released one year ago and became the second-fastest selling political book in history. It went into a second printing three days after its release and went on to sell 2.2 million hardcover copies. "America by Heart" (subtitled "Reflections on Family, Faith and Flag") had an initial press run of 1 million copies, suggesting its publisher,...

(RTTNews) - A prominent newspaper in Mexico's border city of Ciudad Juarez has published an editorial requesting guidelines on media publishing from drug cartels operating in the city after one of its employees was shot dead by suspected drug operatives last week. The unprecedented editorial carried by the El Diario de Juarez newspaper on its front page on Sunday was prompted by the killing of Luis Carlos Santiago, 21-year-old photographer working for the paper, last week. Santiago and a co-worker was shot by unidentified gunmen in Ciudad Juarez on 17 September when they were sitting inside a parked car outside a...

Is this a move to grab the influential under-12 demographic in the midterms? Barack Obama, New York Times bestselling author and President of the United States, is finally fulfilling the terms of his three-book, $1.9 million deal with Random House with the forthcoming release of the children's book Of Thee I Sing: A Letter To My Daughters. Obama's earlier books include the nonfiction hits Dreams From My Father and The Audacity of Hope. According to its publisher, the book (illustrated by Loren Long) will be "a moving tribute to thirteen groundbreaking Americans and the ideals that have shaped our nation."

Cairo - An Islamic publishing house in Egypt has published what is says is a 'forged' version of the Christian Bible, angering the local Coptic Church, independent daily al-Masry al-Youm reported Thursday. The owner of the Islamic Enlightenment Publishing House, Abuislam Abdullah, wrote in the introduction that the reason behind the book's publication was to prove that there are several versions of the bible and that Christians had forged theirs. Abdullah claims that the version he published was written before the Book of Genesis, the Christian Old Testament.

There is nothing unusual about political biographies aimed at young readers. (The lives of both Barack Obama and John McCain were both depicted in rather heroic terms in books intended for young readers during the 2008 presidential campaign.) But when the subject is Sarah Palin – whose own autobiography "Going Rogue" has sold more than 2 million copies – you can bet that reader interest will run particularly high. "Speaking Up: The Sarah Palin Story," expected in bookstores this fall, is part of the ZonderKidz biography series. Other books in the series tend to be inspirational rather than political, featuring...

High price, high sales, glossy ads, trebles all roundSaving the whole of the newspaper industry is a big ask, even for a "magical and revolutionary" device, but there might just be hope for the magazine business. The rapaciously-priced ($4.99 for this month's issue) iPad edition of Wired has comfortably outsold the somewhat cheaper print edition, and it's not even ad-free. On the contrary... It's a success for 'definitely not free', which you might reckon is a problem for Chris Anderson, editor in chief of Wired and King of Free. Anderson however has been tetchily protesting - in between tweeting the...

<p>The Canadian rock band Rush has sent a letter to Kentucky U.S. Senate candidate Rand Paul, saying his campaign is violating copyright laws by playing their music without permission.</p> <p>The Courier-Journal of Louisville reported that Rush's attorney, Robert Farmer of Toronto, had sent the letter to the Paul campaign. Farmer told the newspaper his objection is not political.</p>

Sarah Palin announced on her Facebook page that Joe McGinniss, author of the infamous book Fatal Vision that chronicled the story of Jeffrey MacDonald, has rented the house right next door to hers. It seems he's chosen her has the subject of his next book. Lucky her. While she keeps the tone of her post upbeat and positive, it's clear she is disturbed to know that someone so hostile and antagonistic toward her is watching her and her family's every move. Since Palin published her post, the blogosphere has been all atwitter about this development. Many people find it creepy....

At the beginning of March 2004, almost nobody outside the narrow world of Chicago politics had heard of Barack Hussein Obama. He was 42, a state legislator and the author of a well-received but by no means bestselling memoir, Dreams from My Father. Then he won the Democratic primary for the safe senatorial seat of Illinois. Four months later, he delivered his galvanising keynote address to the Democratic national convention (“there is not a liberal America and a conservative America; there is a United States of America”). That November he was duly elected senator: the only African-American in Congress’s upper...

NEW YORK (Reuters) – Enjoy $9.99 electronic books while you can -- for they soon may be a thing of the past. News Corp Chief Rupert Murdoch, who oversees a media empire than includes HarperCollins books, home to authors like Michael Crichton and Janet Evanovich, made clear on Tuesday his displeasure with the low price Amazon.com Inc has set for electronic books.

E&P will shut its doors this afternoon after more than 125 years in operation as "the bible of the newspaper industry" and one of America's oldest magazines. Staffers are vacating the offices in New York City, but we still hope to be back. We shipped our January issue on Monday and it will be mailed to subscribers next week. This Web site and our two blogs will remain alive but we will not be updating them after today. Office phone and email service will be suspended but staffers--a vast majority have worked here from 10 to 25 years--can be reached...

Ever since electronic books emerged as a major growth market, New York’s largest publishing houses have worried that big-name authors might sign deals directly with e-book retailers or other new ventures, bypassing traditional publishers entirely. Now, one well-known author is doing just that. Stephen R. Covey, one of the most successful business authors of the last two decades, has moved e-book rights for two of his best-selling books from his print publisher, Simon & Schuster, a division of the CBS Corporation, to a digital publisher that will sell the e-books to Amazon.com for one year. ... The move promises to...

Media: By now the decline of the newspaper industry has become, well, yesterday's news. Small wonder the industry's own trade publication would eventually close its own doors. But there's a little more to the story. Last week Editor & Publisher magazine, aged 125, finally ended its run as newspaperdom's principal trade pub when owner Neilsen Business Media announced it no longer fit in with the company's reformulated plans. Journalists who had long since ceased reading the print edition offered nostalgic tributes — online. That their posts appeared on the Internet itself tells much of the story. In recent years both...

While Sarah Palin is certainly making waves with her own best-selling book “Going Rogue,” the former governor and vice presidential candidate is also in the spotlight with a cameo appearance as a heroine in the recently released children’s book “Help! Mom! Radicals Are Ruining My Country!”In the book written by Katharine DeBrecht, “Governor Sarah” (a character based on Palin) attempts to help two young boys hold onto their dream of a swing-set business which is struggling as a result of high taxes, heavy regulations and 246 czars. “I am trying to let all Americans know that these radicals are killing...

Sarah Palin certainly turned heads when she made an appearance in springfield just weeks before the 2008 presidential election, and now she's turning pages locally too. Many people in the Ozarks seem to be "Going Rogue. In fact south Springfield's Borders was in the nation's top ten for most copies of Palin's new memoir reserved ahead of Tuesday's release. George Carlin's "Last Words" may very well be forgotten. "Yeah i'm going to get it," one Borders patron says. He's not talking about George, bur rather his shelf-mate- one-time vice presidential hopeful turned best-seller hopeful Sarah Palin's political memoir. "Since we...

Bloomberg is taking another step from the trading floor into the corner office. The company said Tuesday that it was the winning bidder for BusinessWeek, the troubled 80-year-old title that McGraw-Hill had put on sale this summer. Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but the price was said to be near $5 million, plus assumption of liabilities, which were $31.9 million as of April. The magazine will continue to be a weekly print publication, rechristened Bloomberg BusinessWeek. Decisions have not been made about BusinessWeek’s staff of more than 400 people; Bloomberg will select which of those employees it wants...

Conde Nast CEO Charles Townsend said Monday he was shutting down four magazines, including the awarding winning Gourmet, parenthood title Cookie and two of the company’s bridal magazines, Modern Bride and Elegant Bride. It was the biggest one-day bloodbath in the publishing company’s 100-year history. Hundreds of people will be tossed out of work. The company said it would keep the Gourmet cookbooks and television programming but shut the monthly magazine. Bride’s, the last surviving bridal book, will move to monthly from six times a year. Industry sources had estimated that Conde Nast could lose $200 million this year.

Yellow Springs company embraces niche and club publications YELLOW SPRINGS — In the summer of 2008, Benjamin Smith and Vicki McClellan spotted a small magazine out of Fort Myers, Fla., calling itself Patriots of the American Revolution. After seeing it, they knew two things. First, they liked the magazine, its exploration of a certain corner of history, its direction and feel. Second, they knew their company, Yellow Springs custom publisher Ertel Publishing, could make it better. The magazine’s owner, Three Patriots LLC, has hired Ertel Publishing to design and produce the magazine. But Three Patriots and Ertel Publishing aren’t exactly...

Last week, a group of Yale alumni (myself included) released an open letter protesting Yale University Press' decision not to publish the infamous Muhammed cartoons in a book about those very illustrations. "The Cartoons That Shook the World," by Brandeis Prof. Jytte Klausen - set for publication within weeks - details the 2005 events in which Muslim preachers seized upon 12 drawings in a Danish newspaper to orchestrate a global campaign of violence that led to the deaths of 200 people. Citing fears of further hostility, the Press, under the advisement of top university officials and unnamed outside "experts," chose...

A homosexual man is suing a third national Bible publisher for "mental anguish" after he says the company published Bibles with a negative connotation toward homosexuals. Bradley LaShawn Fowler of Canton, Mich., alleges Tyndale House Publishers manipulated Scripture when it published Tyndale's New Living Translation Holy Bible and the New Life Application Study Bible by using the term "homosexuals" in a New Testament passage, 1 Corinthians 6:9. "One Bible dictates homosexuals will not inherit the Kingdom of God, while the other is completely void on the issue altogether," Fowler wrote in a statement on his blog.

A homosexual man is suing a third national Bible publisher for "mental anguish" after he says the company published Bibles with a negative connotation toward homosexuals. Bradley LaShawn Fowler of Canton, Mich., alleges William Tyndale Publishing manipulated Scripture when it published Tyndale’s New Living Translation Holy Bible and the New Life Application Study Bible by using the term "homosexuals" in a New Testament passage, 1 Corinthians 6:9. "One Bible dictates homosexuals will not inherit the Kingdom of God, while the other is completely void on the issue altogether," Fowler wrote in a statement on his blog.

$10 million sought for 'negative connotation' toward homosexuals A homosexual man is suing a third national Bible publisher for "mental anguish" after he says the company published Bibles with a negative connotation toward homosexuals. Bradley LaShawn Fowler of Canton, Mich., alleges William Tyndale Publishing manipulated Scripture when it published Tyndale’s New Living Translation Holy Bible and the New Life Application Study Bible by using the term "homosexuals" in a New Testament passage, 1 Corinthians 6:9. "One Bible dictates homosexuals will not inherit the Kingdom of God, while the other is completely void on the issue altogether," Fowler wrote in a...

The New International Version of the Bible is by far the most preferred translation of the Scripture, according to a new survey of U.S. evangelical leaders. More than 65 percent of the participating leaders named the NIV as their preferred Bible in a survey conducted by the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) in light of the NIV’s 30th anniversary this year. “New Bible translations face large competition to gain a foothold in churches and homes but once established they have long staying power,” commented Leith Anderson, president of the NAE, which claims to represent 30 million evangelicals. “And, the NIV...

The top-selling Bible in North America will undergo its first revision in 25 years, modernizing the language in some sections and promising to reopen a contentious debate about changing gender terms in the sacred text. The New International Version, the Bible of choice for conservative evangelicals, will be revised to reflect changes in English usage and advances in Biblical scholarship, it was announced Tuesday. The revision is scheduled to be completed late next year and published in 2011. "We want to reach English speakers across the globe with a Bible that is accurate, accessible and that speaks to its readers...

With annual revenue of more than $2 billion, the Reader’s Digest Association may be the largest magazine publisher to ever file for bankruptcy. But it probably won’t be the last this year. The private-equity frenzy of the past decade, combined with the unprecedented downturn, has caught up with the industry. So far in recent months, supplier companies including distributor Source Interlink and printer Quebecor World filed for protection, and publishers including the newspaper giant (and owner of Connecticut magazine) Journal Register Co. and Cygnus Business Media have as well. Summit Business Media is said to be in the process of...

The New York Times is generally loathe to dignify conservative-leaning books with an official review. That stance is getting dicier these days, especially since the newspaper’s own nonfiction bestseller chart is chockablock with conservatives luminaries like Michelle Malkin, Dick Morris and Mark Levin. President Barack Obama has only been in office for roughly eight months, but he’s already inspired multiple conservative bestsellers. Malkin’s Culture of Corruption sits atop the list, followed by Levin’s Liberty and Tyranny in the two slot and Catastrophe by Morris and Eileen McGann at number four. Marji Ross, president and publisher of Regnery Publishing, isn’t surprised...

According to a Facebook status update on behalf of the restaurant, former Alaska governor Sarah Palin is here in New York and dined at Michael's last night. She's in town to visit with her publisher, HarperCollins, and has been doing "fun kids things" during her stay here with her family. It all sounds innocent enough, except for the Michael's part. Michael's is not only a Northeastern elite power-lunching spot, it is the very epicenter of the liberal media — the very men, women, and reporters who are out to get her.

In George Orwell’s “1984,” government censors erase all traces of news articles embarrassing to Big Brother by sending them down an incineration chute called the “memory hole.” On Friday, it was “1984” and another Orwell book, “Animal Farm,” that were dropped down the memory hole — by Amazon.com. In a move that angered customers and generated waves of online pique, Amazon remotely deleted some digital editions of the books from the Kindle devices of readers who had bought them. An Amazon spokesman, Drew Herdener, said in an e-mail message that the books were added to the Kindle store by a...

If the publishers force Amazon to raise prices on e-books, that's what will happen. The book publishers are in the process of picking a fight with Amazon and other sellers over the pricing of e-books. If the publishers are lucky, they'll lose. Here's why. Publishers generally sell e-books to Amazon and its competitors for the same price they sell paper books to retailers—about half the list price of the paper version. Amazon and the others insist on selling most e-books for about $9.99, which pleases the publishers when the e-book retail price is close to that of the paper edition:...

<p>Last week, an auction for a book by Capt. Richard Phillips, the merchant-ship hero who saved his crew from pirates, drew top bids of around $500,000—half the seven-figure advance it had been expected to fetch.</p> <p>At least that book had bidders. In February, the William Morris Agency failed to find any takers for a Britney Spears memoir.</p>

Does James Frey have embarrassing audiotapes of Oprah Winfrey? The upcoming paperback version of his best-selling novel, "Bright Shiny Morning," includes two passages omitted from the hard cover, which came out last year. The first passage is a triple X-rated story of an affair between a lawyer for the ACLU and the wife of a Republican senator who meet in a bar and proceed to have raunchy sex in bathrooms, alleys, seedy motels and the backseats of the cars. The sex scenes — deemed too racy for some readers — are included in the paperback. The second passage is more...