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How is the publishing business going in the App Store?

Today's Top Grossing iPhone book is Marvel Comics, charting at 46. The Comics app is 64. There are no single edition book apps in the Top 200.

The iPad’s Top Grossing chart is...

The recent announcement that Microsoft have bought a 17.6% sha

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In digital publishing no sooner do we reach one milestone than another slaps us in the face. The figures released this week by Hachette UK are the first to truly demonstrate the step-change in e-book consumption since the beginning of the...

From the despair of nuclear bombs to the hope of nuclear technology, the environment journalist picks out green books that are both positive and negative about our planet's future

I am not a tree hugger. Nor a people hater. For me, as an environment journalist for 30 years, the story is about people and how they work, live and dream on planet Earth. And how we – seven billion of us, and counting – can keep up the mad dance of civilisation in an ever more crowded and resource-depleted world. Luckily, I...

A strictly biological view of human relationships leaves too little scope for monkey business

I'm an expert. Many of us are. My first wife never said the word "love" without a sneer; my present wife is a true believer. So I've looked at love from both sides now. But if Robin Dunbar is to be believed, I really don't know love at all.

Remember those PG Tips ads where they dressed chimpanzees as human beings and made them drink tea? This book is rather like those ads in that it confuses the animal and the specifically...

Study shows Amazon reviewers more likely to look favourably on debut authors, while professionals prefer prizewinners

Amazon reviews are just as likely to give an accurate summary of a book's quality as those of professional newspapers, according to a study from Harvard Business School.

Professor Michael Luca and his co-authors analysed the top 100 non-fiction reviews from 40 media outlets, including the New York Times, the Guardian and the Washington Post, between 2004 and 2007 for their paper What Makes a Critic Tick? The academics used data from reviews aggregator metacritic.com,...

For the benefit of anyone who has spent the past decade or so on a different planet, the most frequently asked questions about climate change on this one are as follows. Is it getting warmer? Yes, surface temperatures have risen by 0.8°C from pre-industrial levels. Are humans causing it? Almost certainly. The gases produced by industrialisation and agriculture are known to have an insulating effect, and their concentration in the earth’s atmosphere has increased in line with rising temperatures, while natural causes of global warming have remained constant. Will it get warmer still? Very probably, though no one can accurately...

‘Welcome to Assad’s Syria,’ the signpost at the Lebanese-Syrian border still says, letting the visitor know who owns the country. The ceasefire had just been announced, but few Syrians I knew held out much hope that three hundred UN observers could keep an eye on the whole army. The journey from Beirut to Damascus by shared taxi takes less than three hours. For years I’ve come this way to visit the Syrian side of my family. It was clear that things had changed. Political talk among the passengers used to be limited to hushed complaints about the border police.

The letters page from London Review of Books Vol. 34 No. 10 (24 May 2012)