Does the announcement that Waterstones is to sell Amazon's Kindle mean that bookshops are giving up, asks John Walsh

Waterstones unveiled a partnership with the internet giant Amazon today in a move that will see it offer Kindle e-reading devices through its shops.

Research is being jazzed up too much in the dash for the bestseller lists, says Wolfson judge

Music and film retailer HMV offset anticipated annual losses of £16 million today by predicting a surprise return to profit in the following year.

When she realised the mark-up on an array of Erasmus first editions she knew she had to become a dealer

Notebook

The online giant has already conquered most of the retail world – now it's moving into industrial supplies. Mark Piesing asks what that means for the rest of the industry.

A million books, 25 titles, one big giveaway

While our image of Notting Hill today may be of a wealthy person's retreat, the area had a more bohemian and radical reputation when I was growing up. A combination of West Indian culture and a punky vibe made it irresistibly glamorous and edgy to me and my friends. It was the land of sound systems, skateboarders, the Clash, the Westway, the Mutoid Waste Company, the carnival and head shops on Portobello Road. It was home to Rough Trade (where I worked for a year when I was 21), Whole Earth foods, second-hand clothes shops and stalls on Portobello Green run by artists. It was the Notting Hill of Jimi Hendrix and of John Michell, the celebrated late cosmologist and author. I suppose it represented creative freedom.

WH Smith is stepping up the expansion of its travel shops overseas to places as far flung as Fiji after the division helped to raise its half-year profits and dividend.

Beneath the lavish pavilion devoted to the Chinese publishing at the London Book Fair, Dame Margaret Drabble is discussing the super-power's cultural heritage to approving nods from Beijing officials.

A new book which promises to expose the connections between Rupert Murdoch's British newspaper group and senior politicians and police officers is to be published this week.

JK Rowling was not joking when she said her next book would be "very different" to the magical world of Harry Potter. Yesterday it emerged her first novel aimed at adults would follow parish council elections in an English market town. The celebrated British author's first book in five years will be called The Casual Vacancy, and will be a "blackly comic" tale of an idyllic English town at war itself, the publishers revealed.

It called for soul-searching and sacrifice but, after much impassioned debate, the shortlist for this year's Independent Foreign Fiction Prize took the shape that you see here. If anything, the panel of judges – Xiaolu Guo, Jon Cook, Nick Barley, Hephzibah Anderson and myself – had to contend with an embarrassment of riches. Whatever our perennial regrets about the limited quantity of fiction brought into English from other languages, the quality of translations felt as bold and bright as ever. In Britain, we owe so much of our view of global fiction to independent publishers of various shapes and sizes. Responsible for around two-thirds of all submissions for the Independent prize, they contribute five out of the six titles on this list – although I ought to stress that neither commercial nor geographical provenance ever sways the decision.