Archives for May 2006

Deal and No Deal While pretending that they don’t mind seeing the company taken public to try and strengthen their negotiating position, Bertelsmann publicly acknowledged that it is “prepared for a buyback of GBL’s stake at a reasonable price, if the shareholders reach an agreement.” Reasonable price will be the sticking point; Bertelsmann is thinking $4 billion to $5 billion, while the folks at GBL are hoping for $6 billion. How deep will the debt-averse company have to dig to fund the buyback is the next big question. The company says that management and the Mohn family “were unanimously of […]

BEA from All Over USA Today picks expected hits from Mitch Albom, Charles Frazier and John Grisham as the most remarkable BEA books, adding reports of anticipation for novels The Interpretation of Murder by Jed Rubenfeld, The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield (which BN’s Bob Wietrak says will “be as big as The Historian and The Rule of Four”), After This by Alice McDermot, and One Good Turn by Kate Atkinson. The Washington Post’s long convention overview frames the convention as a “clash between what you might call the technorati and the literati. The technorati are thrilled at the way […]

So Long and Thanks for All the Books That could easily be the silent refrain of many convention attendees leaving Washington’s big Giveaway Festival today. The essence of BEA is that people come to see other people, and they come to get stuff. Some didn’t even carry their loot beyond the halls, while others surely pruned strategically in their hotel rooms. And as we know — underscored by a store owner tale of on a encounter last year with a “bookseller” in the women’s room with a stack of galleys, a laptop, and the free wireless connection — at least […]

Today at BEA: So Little Happened, So Much to Stay It’s very Washingtonian that, like the city itself, the new convention center is laid out with layered precision, and yet nothing about it is linear or simple to navigate. If you’re here you know what I mean, and if you’re not it’s hard to explain. Like an upside-down cake with no middle layer, there’s a small hall on the second floor at the culmination of a block-long entrance hall and an endless set of stairs, while the long skinny main hall is two flights down in the basement and has […]

Soft First Quarter for Barnes & Noble First quarter same-stores sales fell slightly at Barnes & Noble’s superstores, down 0.3 percent, and the company expects a bigger comparable drop of 4.3 percent for the second quarter given comparisons to last year’s release of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. (Potter had powered a gain of 4.3 percent a year ago.) Overall, Barnes & Noble stores had sales of $980 million, as BN.com sales were flat at $91 million, and B. Dalton continued its decline to $23 million (down 1.8 percent on a same-store basis). Net earnings of $10 million for […]

New Head for New Press; Veterans to Inkwell; and More Personnel News Following the resignation of Colin Robinson last December, the New Press has now named a new publisher: deputy director since 2003 Ellen Mastromonaco Adler has been promoted to fill the post. Marc Favreau has been promoted to editorial director, from senior editor, and Ina Howard has been hired as director of communications. She was previously publicity director at Nation Books and senior publicist at Avalon. Elsewhere, Ali Bothwell Mancini to has been promoted from associate editor to editor at Penguin and Plume. She started at the house in […]