A little news from the publishing world — and design tips and ideas for those who are self-publishing or who have a new book to promote:

Barnes and Noble posted a $119 million loss in Q4 2013, and now B&N is hoping to “partner” with 3rd party for selling/developing future Nook tablets. This latter bit of news might very well slow down sales since no one wants to buy an ebook reader that might soon become obsolete. I suspect the chances of the Nooks being discontinued is actually quite slim. On the other hand, there have been some nifty ebook readers in the past that have fallen to the wayside.

I suppose the real winner in this is Amazon and the Kindle.

If you’re self-publishing, you can never know too much about typefaces (aka “fonts”). Here’s Jill Bell’s useful video: “The Top Ten Things Everyone Should Know About Fonts.”

If you’re involved with the process of laying out a book, magazine, or web site, you’ll likely enjoy this very useful typographical checklist from Ilene Strizver: Typographical/Page Design Checklist.

About to launch your new book? Then here are some Useful Tips for Your Book Launch Party.

For real diehard fans of type, typographer Martin Majoor offers some tips on mixing types in books, as well as revealing his experiences designing typeface pairs — and has some insights into what the sans italic should really look like.

Here’s an interesting study of how people view web pages — and I suspect print pages as well. Important for both web page design as well as book cover illustrations: A look at how people read web pages (and books, I suspect) with an eye toward designing to maximize impact: 10 Useful Findings About How People View Websites.

Finally, we’ve all heard that readers (and buyers) judge books by their covers. Well, here’s more evidence Mark Coker, the Founder of Smashwords.