Peter Jackson and Guillermo del Toro just announced that their upcoming adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Hobbit” will span two films.  It was previously thought that the film adaptation of Tolkien’s book would comprise one film, and a second film would be made that would span the 60 years or so that separated the end of “The Hobbit” with the beginning of “The Fellowship of the Ring”, the first book in the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy.

Jackson, who is producing the films, and del Toro, who is directing, decided that one film simply would not provide enough time to tell the whole story as they wanted it:

“We’ve decided to have The Hobbit span the two movies, including the White Council and the comings and goings of Gandalf to Dol Guldur,” says Del Toro.

“We decided it would be a mistake to try to cram everything into one movie,” adds Jackson. “The essential brief was to do The Hobbit, and it allows us to make The Hobbit in a little more style, if you like, of the [LOTR] trilogy.”

1. Steven Johnson of the Wall Street Journal writes a lengthy piece on the changes he believes e-readers like the Kindle will bring to books and reading.  Johnson pulls no punches, claiming that
   

   2009 may well prove to be the most significant year in the evolution of the book since Gutenberg hammered out his original Bible.

2. A few hundred miles from Wall Street, The Baltimore Sun blog “Read Street” offers 10 reasons to hate the kindles. Making the list: “I can’t use my collection of random bookmarks”, and my favorite, “The battery never dies on my paperback of The Big Sleep.” Follow the link for the full list.
3. Over at “PC Magazine” (or is it PCMag now? I’m so un-hip), Lance Ulanoff offers a fairly level-headed and balanced list of 10 things you need to know about the Kindle.  Or, at least level-headed until you get to #10:
   

   E-books will kill books, publishing, and reading.

   Did I say level-headed? My mistake.

4. Venture capitalist Tom Alberg of Seattle reads the tea leaves differently.  Instead of thinking that a Kindle will kill reading, he believes that Kindle could save the newspaper industry.
5. So you could be reading the newspaper on a Kindle, but you’d be doing it all alone.
6. Still, there’s comfort in reading even alone, right? Well, maybe not with a Kindle, according to Freida Marie Crump of the Journal News:
   

   New books smell good. A Kindle smells like a telephone.

7. Not that Amazon will care anyways. They’re making a killing off the Kindle, with Seeking Alpha estimating that before they even sell you the first book for your Kindle, Amazon has already raked in a 40% profit from just the sale of the device.
8. Well, there’s always alternatives to the Kindle if you want to read e-books.  For example, there’s Lexcycle, makers of Stanza, a cool desktop and iPhone application that allows you to download and read ebooks in multiple formats. Currently Stanza supports Adobe PDF, EPUB format, the XML-based standard format and support for Adobe’s eBook content protection technology, allowing you to purchase commercially published eBooks. So if you’re interested in e-books but not necessarily in Amazon’s Kindle you have optio–
   Aww, crap.

This is a play that I had to read for one of my classes. It was a very short play and a very easy read, if not a comfortable object for reflection. The action revolves around the arrival of a new lector in a traditional cigar factory who chooses to read the novel Anna Karenina to the cigar rollers that work there. The main female characters, Ofelia, Conchita, and Marela are all taken in by the story. Marela and Conchita are especially enamored of the novel and imagine themselves as Anna-like characters. Read the rest of this entry »

1. Publisher’s Weekly jumps on our bandwagon, and dedicates its 4/20 cover story to problems in publishing companies, and comes up with 12 things they must change to survive. Among the list are revolutionary ideas like “Tell the truth”, and “Downsize”.
2. Right now, this quarter, how much do you love me? Well, If I’m Stephenie Meyer, and you’re my publishing company, you love me oodles.  For the first three months of the year in the world of book sales, there was Stephenie Meyer, and then there was everybody else, with the “Twilight” author accounting for fully 16% of all the book sales, including the first four spots. Full list from USA Today.
3. While Book Publishers are torn on whether Amazon’s Kindle 2 book reader is good news or bad news, Joanne Kaufman puts on her investigative reporter hat, and asks the tough question no one is asking:  How will the Kindle affect literary snobbism?

Empire Magazine has published an exclusive first picture for the upcoming Peter Jackson film, “The Lovely Bones”an adaptation of Alice Sebold’s haunting book of the same name.  Click on the thumbnail for the full size picture.

We recently covered an interview that Peter Jackson had with USA Today.

Hello World

1. Terry Pratchett’s Discworld comes alive in Wincanton, UK.  Fans of the comedy sci-fi series travel from all over the world to visit Wincanton, which is twinned with Discworld’s fictional city of Ankh-Morpork and includes a Discworld Emporium shop. Now, developer George Wimpey has named two streets in its new Kingwell Rise development after Discworld locations – Peach Pie Street and Treacle Mine Road.
2. On this side of the pond, Amazon.com held a contest to crown the “Harry-est Town in America” that coincided with the publishing of “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows”.  The winner was Falls Church, Virginia. Actually, three out of the top 4 cities were located in Virgina.  There’s a joke to be made there.
3. The state of Washington is using the international release of the movie version of “Twilight” to attract foreign visitors to Forks, Washington, where the book is set.  “We’ve used Twilight as an opportunity to get people over to the Olympic peninsula, to Port Angeles, to Forks, and La Push, and we’ve coupled that in working with the foreign media,” says Marsha Massey, Executive Director of Washington State Tourism.  Only one problem:  The movie was shot in the neighboring state of Oregon, so the locations featured on the tour in Forks are those that served as the “inspirations” for the book.

News and tidbits from the world of books today:

1. Movie Studio Columbia Pictures is moving quickly to acquire the movie rights to Dan Brown’s upcoming book, “The Lost Symbol”, Variety reports. As we mentioned here yesterday, Brown’s latest novel starring Robert Langdon has received a September 2009 release date from its publisher, but the fact that the story still has to see the light of day hasn’t stopped Columbia Pictures from planning a third movie based on the Brown Novel.  They previously released a film adaptation of “The Da Vinci Code” in 2006, and the adaption of its prequel, “Angels & Demons”, is slated for a May 15, 2009 release.
2. Nanny McPhee, the movie based on the popular Nurse Matilda childrens’ books is about to get a sequel. Executive producer and star Emma Thompson is writing the script, which will be titled  “Nanny McPhee and the Big Bang”.
3. And to close our “Film Adaptation” edition of The Daily Preface, we bring news that Twilight: New Moon has begun production in Canada and Italy.  Joining the returning cast are Dakota Fanning, Cameron Bright, Noot Seer, and Michael Sheen, among others.  Release date is set for November 20, 2009.

Author Dan Brown will publish “The Lost Symbol”, his follow-up to “The Da Vinci Code” on September 2009, after 5 years of research. Knopf Doubleday Publishing, a division of Random House Inc., has stated that the book will have an almost-unheard of initial printing of 5 million copies when it first goes on sale on September 15.  It will be the largest first-printing in Random House history.

“The Da Vinci Code” sold a staggering 81 million copies in its hardcover incarnation alone, and spent 144 weeks on The New York Times Hardcover Fiction bestseller list.  The prequel to “The Da Vinci Code”, “Angels and Demons”, considered by many to be a far better book, was reviewed by NeoLibrarium in late 2007.

“The Lost Symbol” will continue the saga of Robert Langdon, but, in a “24-esque” move, will only encompass a 12-hour period as he (what else?) rushes to uncover a conspiracy in Washington DC.

Brown’s longtime editor, Jason Kaufman, Vice President and Executive Editor at Doubleday said, “Nothing ever is as it first appears in a Dan Brown novel. This book’s narrative takes place in a twelve-hour period, and from the first page, Dan’s readers will feel the thrill of discovery as they follow Robert Langdon through a masterful and unexpected new landscape. The Lost Symbol is full of surprises.”

Items of interest on this morning of April 22, 2009:

1. Publisher’s Weekly releases its Favorite Reads for the summer.  Its only qualification apparently is if the book can be carried.
2. Entertainment Weekly links to an early clip from Season 2 of HBO’s series “True Blood”.  True Blood is based on the Southern Vampire Mysteries book series by Charlaine Harris.
3. Mania.com attempts to create a list that narrows down the Top 20 Greatest Fantasy Writers of All-Time.  Rowling made the list, along with Gaiman and Pratchett.  But, with only 20 slots, I bet at least one of your favorites got snubbed. Which one(s)?