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Catch up with the most popular stories from this week’s editions of Today in Books.
Amazon Introduces First Color-Screen Kindle
Amazon announced this morning that its refreshed e-reader lineup will include the company’s first Kindle with a color screen. The Kindle Colorsoft, retailing for $279.99, is available for preorder now and will ship on October 30th. I’ve been waiting for this announcement since Amazon acquired digital comics distributor ComiXology in 2014 and ultimately folded its contents into the Kindle ecosystem. Kindles have been exclusively black-and-white since their introduction in 2007, but comics call for a full-color display. Better late than never, I suppose, since manga sales have quadrupled since 2020 and don’t look to be stopping any time soon.
South Carolina Public Library Stops Buying New Books for Minors
Regulations about library materials are vague for a reason: they allow people who want to ban and censor books useful flexibility in deciding what’s appropriate or not. They also make it damn near impossible for librarians to know how to comply with the law. And that’s why the York County Public Library in South Carolina has decided to stop acquiring new books for readers under the age of 18 until they get some clarification. As Book Riot‘s own Kelly Jensen notes, “leaning into a manufactured crisis now leaves those under 18 without much access to materials that would support their growth, learning, and acceptance of both themselves and those different from them. That is, of course, the point.”
Taylor Swift to Publish First Official Book
Retailers have been looking for a way to bring Black Friday shoppers back to brick-and-mortar stores, and Target has just hit the motherlode: Taylor Swift will release her first official book, Taylor Swift | The Eras Tour Book, exclusively in Target stores on Thursday, November 29th. Listed at $40, the 256-page hardcover will include more than 500 photos, including never-before-seen images, from every era and will be accompanied by Swift’s personal reflections. In the understatement of the century, Target notes that the book, which will be available for online purchase the following day, is “expected to sell out quickly.” Target will also be the exclusive retailer for the vinyl and CD editions The Tortured Poets Department: Anthology Edition hitting shelves on Black Friday. Consider those doors busted, folks.
Book Awards Season Begins
The winners of the 2024 Kirkus Prizes were announced last night, kicking off book award season with what I expect is the first of many wins for Percival Everett. Everett’s James, a reimagining (and then some) of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of enslaved person Jim, took the prize for fiction. It is also a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction, for which it is the clear frontrunner, and the Booker Prize. The Kirkus Prize for nonfiction went to Adam Higginbotham’s Challenger, about the 1986 space shuttle explosion that resulted in the death of seven crew members. Kenneth M. Cadow received the prize for young people’s literature for his novel Gather, which explores the opioid crisis through the lens of one family’s story.