On January 27th, the reclusive author J.D. Salinger died of natural causes in his home in New Hampshire, according to a statement from his representatives. Salinger penned the famous 1951 novel The Catcher in the Rye, a staple of American literature.
 
Salinger wrote four books and several short stories after the publication of The Catcher in the Rye, but then went into self-imposed isolation in Cornish, New Hampshire. The author's last published piece of writing ran in a 1965 issue of the New Yorker.
 

Last week, technology and software company Apple introduced its new e-book sales platform iBooks, based on the company's popular iTunes software. iBooks will operate on Apple's new handheld computing device, the iPad. Both the iPad and iBooks were introduced at an Apple event held in San Francisco on January 27th.
 

Kirkus Reviews, a publication devoted to early book reviews—the future of which had been in jeopardy—has posted a message on its website stating that the journal will continue publication while in talks with an acquiring company.
 
The message, from January 1st, says that Kirkus will publish a second January issue while talks with the unnamed company continue. After that the future of the journal will be reviewed, the message says, with more news coming in the next few weeks.
 

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Technology blog Gizmodo has posted several images of the as-of-yet unannounced Barnes and Noble e-reader device. The blog reports that the e-reader will be officially unveiled at a special event held by Barnes and Noble in New York City on October 20th.

Gizmodo reports that Barnes and Noble's e-reader will have both a black and white e-ink display (akin to Amazon's Kindle), as well as a smaller, color multi-touch display for browsing and purchasing e-books.

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This week, Boston-based design company Font Bureau filed a lawsuit against television network NBC for copyright infringement. Font Bureau says that NBC violated trademark and copyright law when it used fonts for which it did not hold licenses in its Fall marketing.

Font Bureau alleges that while NBC paid for one license, meaning the company could only install the fonts on a single computer, the network used the fonts on many computers. NBC is also said to have used fonts for which it never paid, according to the suit.

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Various outlets, including the Wall Street Journal, are reporting that book retailer Barnes & Noble will announce the launch of a digital book-reading device designed to compete with Amazon's popular Kindle. The device is rumored to have a 6-inch color touchscreen.

Though no details have been officially announced by the retailer, Barnes & Noble launched an online digital-book store in July. In September, the Federal Communications Commission approved Barnes and Noble's application to create a mobile e-reader device.

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This week, author Herta Müller was named winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature. Müller, 56, is part of Romania's German minority, and has spent much of her career writing about her time living in Romania under the dictatorship of Nicolae Ceauşescu.

The Nobel Committee praised Müller's commitment to depicting the hardships in her homeland, writing that, "with the concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose, [Müller] depicts the landscape of the dispossessed." She will receive $1.4 million as part of the prize.

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Two weeks ago, in response to a September 23rd request by authors and publishers, Judge Denny Chin delayed an October hearing scheduled to address the dispute over the settlement between Google and the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers.

According to the New York judge, the authors and publishers groups are expected to make "significant changes to the current settlement agreement." As a result, Judge Chin decided that holding the scheduled hearing would not be necessary.

On September 25th, Amazon settled a lawsuit filed in a Seattle court by 17-year-old Justin Gawronski over the online retail giant's July deletion of two works by author George Orwell—1984 and Animal Farm—from its customers' Kindles.

Gawronski, reading 1984 for school, had been making notes using the Kindle's keyboard, just as readers might make notes in the margins of a physical copy. The Michigan student found his notes useless, however, after Amazon remotely deleted 1984 from users' Kindles.