* Twelve will release a deluxe $1,000 edition of Ted Kennedy’s memoir TRUE COMPASS, limited to 1,000 numbered leather-bound copies. They will reproduce an electronic signature by Kennedy, and include “rare family photos” that will not appear in the trade edition. But the special edition will follow the trade release by “several weeks.” It’s being sold directly through the HBG web site.
* Graphic novel and comic book publisher Boom! Studios has signed with Simon & Schuster for sales and distribution, effective immediately.
http://www.boom-studios.com
* The Stanza reader, now owned by Amazon, wished itself a happy first birthday via a press release. The company says the app has been downloaded more than 2 million times.
Release
* In a post commenting on the story about Sourcebooks delaying the ebook release of YA novel BRAN HAMBRIC, Forrester previews “some new data that we’re just about to publish on the demographics of current owners and future prospects for eReaders. One notable insight is that the profiles of early and later adopters of eReaders look a lot like the split between hardcover and paperback book buyers. Early adopters of eReaders, similar to hardcover book buyers, tend to be male tech-optimists who buy books from a primary source, whereas later waves of eReader adopters will be less tech-involved women who read a lot and buy books from multiple sources, which echoes the demographic of paperback bookbuyers. Anyway, the point of this is to say that yes, a portion of people who buy hardcover books are the same likely buyers of eReaders, especially Kindles, so in this sense they ARE cannibalizing hardcover book sales.”
(Naively not understanding that this is all about Amazon’s subsidized price points, and that the potential cannibalization strikes hardest at a small set of hardcover fiction releases, the Forrester poster is trying to build the opposite case–the traditional publishers are idiots acting in “denial and anger,” etc. etc. Woe to the company that followed Forrester/Jupiter’s forecasts from, say, 2000: “digital delivery of print-on-demand books, textbooks, and eBooks will total $7.8 billion” by the end of 2005.)
Forrester