Archives for December 2005

Amazon Pushes Textbooks Amazon Connect, the e-tailer’s fake “blogs,” struck me as a non-story (or at least a missed/late opportunity), but another new initiative not fed to the media is potentially much more significant: The company has launched a “new and used textbooks store.” Amazon Hershey Settles Hershey settled their lawsuit against and Simon & Schuster in expected fashion: the jacket of HERSHEY: Milton S. Hershey’s Extraordinary Life of Wealth, Empire and Utopian Dreams will be modified to indicate that the book is not authorized by the candy maker. Press release E-verything Old is New Again 2006 is already looking […]

Monday, December 26 Our Reminder If for some reason this has reached you even though you are not a paying member of PublishersMarketplace, please visit the link below to join us all the time for complete deal reports and more. Click to register http://www.publishersmarketplace.com/register.shtml Deal Reports Just e-mail to deals@PublishersMarketplace if you aren’t using the online form linked below. Report a deal using the online form The Key As usual, the handy key to our Lunch deal categories. While all reports are always welcome, those that include a category will generally receive a higher listing when it comes time to […]

Updates on the Waterstone’s/Ottakar Deal The heads of a number of UK houses held meetings recently with top management at HMV and Ottakar’s to underscore — in case their feelings were not already known — “in the strongest possible terms that the proposed merger of Waterstone’s and Ottakar’s was ‘against the wishes of the industry,'” PN reports. PN adds, “one industry insider suggested that both chains are deliberately ‘talking down’ Christmas sales to persuade publishers to support the merger on the basis that if it doesn’t happen, one will go under.” Meanwhile, the Office of Fair Trading has released its […]

Schedules You would think that waves of the autoreplies from all those people who started their two-week vacations last Friday would have been a hint, but it still feels as if the holiday has snuck up on us. With the added help of the transit strike there’s considerably less news day. If there’s not enough of note to make it worth mailing you tomorrow then our next dispatch will be the weekly deal round-up. Next week’s regular Lunches will be very light or non-existent, though we are working on some holiday treats, including our now traditional wildly inaccurate predictions for […]

NYT Staffer Says Book’s Timing Drove Bush Spy Story An unidentified NYT journalist tells the LA Times that the imminent publication of James Risen’s embargoed book by the Free Press is what compelled the paper of record to finally run with their story on President Bush authorizing eavesdropping on US citiznes. “When they realized that it was going to appear in the book anyway, that is when they went ahead and agreed to publish the story. That’s not to say that was their entire consideration, but it was a very important one of them.” The LAT says their report is […]

State of Spying Revelations If you’re a Democrat, you’re wondering why the NY Times agreed to wait a year to let James Risen report on President Bush’s post-9/11 secret order to allow eavesdropping on American citizens without court approval. If you’re a Republican, you’re wondering why the newspaper ran the story the day the Patriot Act was up for a vote on reauthorization, and why they neglected to mention in the story that the Free Press will release Risen’s embargoed book STATE OF WAR: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration on January 16. AP story on […]