In a letter to employees last week, Perseus president David Steinberger said that despite earlier efforts to reduce costs, including a pay freeze, "it has become clear that we need to take additional steps now in order to be financially prudent and pursue opportunities to grow." Those steps include sharpening the company's publishing program, and Steinberger said that most of the 20 jobs being eliminated are in the publishing operations, with a few touching the distribution side.

The Global Language Monitor today announced that Web 2.0 has bested Jai Ho, N00b and Slumdog as the 1,000,000th English word or phrase. added to the codex of fourteen hundred-year-old language. Web 2.0 is a technical term meaning the next generation of World Wide Web products and services. It has crossed from technical jargon into far wider circulation in the last six months. Two terms from India, Jai Ho! and slumdog finished No. 2 and 4. Jai Ho! Is a Hindi exclamation signifying victory or accomplishment; Slumdog is an impolite term for children living in the slums. Just missing the top spot was n00b, a mixture of letters and numbers that is a derisive term for newcomer. It is also the only mainstream English word that contains within itself two numerals. Rounding out the final five were another technical term, cloud computing, meaning services that are delivered via the cloud (or Internet), and a term from the Climate Change debate, carbon neutral. At its current rate, English generates about 14.7 words a day or one every 98 minutes.

• 1,000,000: Web 2.0 - The next generation of web products and services, coming soon to a browser near you.
• 999,999: Jai Ho! - The Hindi phrase signifying the joy of victory, used as an exclamation, sometimes rendered as "It is accomplished". Achieved English-language popularity through the multiple Academy Award Winning film, "Slumdog Millionaire". 999,998: N00b - From the Gamer Community, a neophyte in playing a particular game; used as a disparaging term.
• 999,997: Slumdog - a formerly disparaging, now often endearing, comment upon those residing in the slums of India.

Zama is the first man to win the award, and was the only male author on a shortlist of six. His debut, written in 300-word chunks on his laptop during his 40-minute commute to work, traces the travails of Mr Ali who, bored with his retirement, sets up a marriage bureau in the Indian coastal town of Vizag. "It's a little bit unusual that a man is writing in this genre," said Zama, who grew up in Vizag, moving to London in 1990. "But my book is not a typical chick lit book. It's set in India, and deals with reasonably serious topics – but at heart it is a romantic novel."

His co-workers were surprised, to say the least, to discover his sideline in novel writing – he's already written a second book, and is onto a third. "My boss and his boss are very supportive," said Zama, who is a director in the investment bank's technology division. "But all my colleagues are amazed – they'd expect me to write a C++ guide, not a romance novel."

The Melissa Nathan prize is the only one in the UK for comedy romance writing, and was set up as a tribute to bestselling author Melissa Nathan, who died of cancer in 2006 having already drawn up the criteria for the award. "Melissa wanted recognition for the writers of brilliant comedy romance. Why do people look down their noses at these books? Jane Austen wrote comedy romances; so did PG Wodehouse. Nobody gets sniffy about their work," said Nathan's husband Andrew Saffron.

Publishing has been in trouble for some time, with massive layoffs and sales numbers in decline. One reason is the industry's blockbuster mentality, in which big books -- " Harry Potter," "Twilight" -- are expected to play a savior role. At BookExpo, Dan Brown's forthcoming "Da Vinci Code" sequel, "The Lost Symbol," was advertised on two enormous banners in the Javits Center lobby, but it was the only book to get that kind of play.

Otherwise, evidence of cost-cutting was everywhere, beginning with the convention itself, which occupied 21% less floor space than last year's show in Los Angeles. As for giveaways, once a hallmark of the show, they were almost nonexistent; even advance reading copies were in short supply.

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Yet there were many at BookExpo who see this state of affairs as an opportunity, a charge to reinvent the book -- and publishing -- for a new century. Using print-on-demand technology, PublicAffairs -- a division of Perseus -- edited and published a 134-page paperback in 48 hours. Called "Book: The Sequel," it featured hundreds of first lines for prospective sequels to classics such as "Gone With the Wind" and "The Catcher in the Rye." Work began at 4 p.m. Thursday; finished books were distributed Saturday afternoon.

"It is not often that someone comes along who is friendly and tasty. Wilbur was both," wrote Liz Frame, identifying one possible future for E.B. White's iconic pig. Lauren Gilbert imagined " Facebook of Common Prayer," a sequel to the "Book of Common Prayer." Its first line? "You have a friend request from God. Confirm as Friend or Ignore?"

Ann and I have traveled the world and visited many a great bookstore, but none, not even the Strand, can compare to Chamblin's, in Jacksonville, Florida. "Bookmine" is an apt title because it's the only bookstore I've ever gotten lost in-it's that big. You could literally fit anywhere from four to eight other used bookstores inside of it. (David Moles, can I get a "Hallelujah!"?)

Publishers sold 3.08 billion copies in 2008, down 1.5 percent from the 3.13 billion copies sold the previous year, according to Book Industry Trends 2009, an annual report that analyzes sales in the United States. Higher retail prices helped to lift net revenue just 1 percent, to $40.3 billion from $39.9 billion.

The numbers confirm a litany of dreary news that has emerged from the publishing industry since last fall, when booksellers began seeing significant declines in store traffic. The trend has not abated this year, as publishers have continued to report double-digit sales declines. Borders Group announced Tuesday that first-quarter sales dropped 12 percent.

Against this backdrop, publishers, authors, booksellers and librarians are gathering in New York for BookExpo America, the industry's annual convention, which runs through Sunday.

The show won't go on in Dallas. The Christian Book Expo, an innovative consumer-focused book show, won’t be repeated next year. The board of Evangelical Christian Publishers Association, show sponsor, decided not to stage another event in 2010. Attendance at this year's show, held March 20-22 at the Dallas Convention Center, was 1,500; organizers had hoped for 10,000 to 15,000. The show left the organization with a $250,000 shortfall, according to ECPA president and CEO Mark Kuyper. "We want to clean up the debt before we consider future options," Kuyper told PW in an e-mail.

His agent Margaret Hanbury said the author had been ill "for several years" and had died on Sunday morning. Despite being referred to as a science fiction writer, Jim Ballard said his books were instead "picturing the psychology of the future". His most acclaimed novel was Empire of the Sun, based on his childhood in a Japanese prison camp in China.

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Director David Cronenberg brought Ballard's infamous book about the sexual desires stimulated by car crashes to the screen in the film Crash. The film caused a media stir, adding to Ballard's reputation for courting controversy. In later years he wrote other acclaimed novels such as Super-Cannes and Millennium People.

Howe, a professor emerita of writing and literature at the University of California San Diego is renowned for her experimental writing. She has written 21 books of poetry; her most recent poetry title, The Lyrics, was published by Graywolf Press in 2007. Howe has also written 13 fiction titles, and two collections of essays. Graywolf has just released her memoir, The Winter Sun. Besides this most recent honor, Howe was the recipient of the 2001 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, 2005 Griffin Poetry Prize, a Guggenheim fellowship, and an award from the Academy of Arts and Letters.

The Lilly Prize, established in 1986, is presented annually by the Poetry Foundation to a living U.S. poet of extraordinary achievement. A total of more than $1 million has already has been awarded to 23 poets, including Adrienne Rich, Lucille Clifton, Donald Hall, John Ashbery, and Richard Wilbur.

Bookstore sales, which were bolstered somewhat in January by back-to-school buying at college stores, declined 10.8% in February, to $1.02 billion. Sales for the full retail sector fell 11.5% in the month. For the first two months of 2009, bookstore sales were down 3.2%, to $3.32 billion. Sales for all of retail tumbled 9.9%.

CNN: Did you approach this book differently than you did when you were writing the Easy Rawlins mysteries?

Mosley: Yes and no. All books are different, so each of the Easy Rawlins books I wrote I approached differently. [Leonid] is a new character and he has a unique life that I had to begin to learn. I knew Easy very well, but Leonid I had to learn who he was.

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CNN: What do you like about McGill?

Mosley: This is the first time in my experiments in crime fiction that I've written a hard-boiled detective character. This is going all the way back to the beginning of the genre in the '30s, where you have a guy who gets thumped upside the head a lot and he's just as bad as the people he's after.

In the old style, you never knew what was going on inside the hard-boiled character's head, but in these stories I am actually discovering the underlying character of the hard-boiled detective, and for me that's been a great deal of fun.