BEA show director Lance Fensterman expands in a blog post on the projected statistics for the upcoming convention that we wrote about earlier. Exhibition square footage is running 20 to 25% smaller than the last show in LA. In attendance, ABA registrations are “almost flat (100 or so down)”; librarians are down “about 25%, which is disappointing”. Miscellaneous industry professionals who did not fit into new, more target categories have been slimmed by about 1,350, which was intentional, to eliminate “attendees that our exhibiting customers told us were not of high value to them.” Overall registered attendees are down by […]
Archives for May 2009
Your Daily Amazon News
Amazon has sued Discovery in a Delaware court, alleging infringement of search engine and recommendation patents, and the etailer has also countersued over Discovery’s claim of infringement on their ebook patent.WSJ Amazon has also released a new version of their Kindle iPhone app, which adds some of the basic functionality suspiciously missing from the first version (leading some to view it is a crippled reader). The new version allows reading in landscape mode, and lets users “pinch to zoom images in books” and “tap on either side of the screen or flick to turn pages.”
People and More
Anna Stein will join London-based Aitken Alexander and start a New York office for the agency as of June 1. Gillon Aitken is quoted in the Bookseller: “As our markets grow ever closer, we believe this is an auspicious moment to expand our presence in the US, and we are delighted that Anna is joining us.” Jacqueline Flynn has joined Joelle Delbourgo Associates as an agent. Formerly executive editor at Amacom Books, she will represent a wide range of nonfiction including business and career, technology, science, psychology, self-help, and parenting. Carrie Cantor is heading up the agency’s new editorial services […]
On Demand Books Overtake Traditional Titles for the First Time
Bowker’s preliminary data for books published in the US in 2008 shows that output from traditional publishers declined by about 3 percent to 275,232 new titles. But they project that the number of “on demand” books grew 132 percent to 285,394 books, now exceeding the traditional titles. The biggest declines for traditional publishers came in travel (down by 15 percent, with 4,817 new titles), fiction (down 11 percent, with 47,541 new titles the largest of all categories), and religion (down 14 percent, at 16,847 titles).Release
Little, Brown Fills In Missing Pieces of THE LINK
The publisher has announced details about their closely-guarded book set for release on May 20, THE LINK, written by biologist Colin Tudge. It focuses on what they call “the astonishing new discovery that could change everything”–a previously-secret, perfectly fossilized early primate, “older than the previously most famous primate fossil, Lucy, by an astonishing forty-four million years,” held in a vault “deep within the heart of one of the world’s leading natural history museums.” Called Ida, they say this fossil “rewrites what we’ve assumed about the earliest primate origins” and the book offers “exclusive access to the ï¬rst scientists to study […]
Legal News: No Steinbeck Appeal; Larsson Estate Fight; Judge to Decide on TrumpNation Trial
Yesterday the Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal from John Steinbeck’s son Thomas and grandson Blake Smyle of last year’s Second Circuit Court of Appeals ruling that left control of the author’s copyrights with his widow Elaine and publisher Penguin under the terms of a 1994 agreement. In a statement, Thomas Steinbeck expressed “profound disappointment,” adding that “the Supreme Court could have protected all the authors and artists in America from a future of intellectual bondage to big corporate publishers.” He insists the denial does “not mean that the Second Circuit was correct, it only means that the Supreme […]