Look, up on the interweb: it’s a video book, it’s a v-book, it’s a digi-novel. No, it’s a Vook, or rather four of them, in the first co-publishing partnership between entrepreneur and Turn Here founder Brad Inman’s new start-up Vook and Atria Books. Releasing Thursday and priced at $6.99, the two fiction and two nonfiction titles are meant to represent a range of experimentation with the form, which embeds original video clips within a browser-based version of a digital book. Titles will be sold through a dedicated section of S&S’s web site and Vook’s site, though the primary driver–and most […]
Archives for September 2009
BN Completes BN College Acquisition
Barnes & Noble announced after the close of the market that they completed their acquisition of privately-held Barnes & Noble College Booksellers from Len Riggio. The purchase price was reduced from $596 million to $514 million, “reflect $82 million in cash bonuses paid by College to 192 members of its management team and employees” (not including Riggio.) The original purchase price acknowledged that BN College had about $136 million in cash on hand, making the effective price $460 million, which presumably has not changed materially. The company did say that the refinancing of their lightly-used $1 billion revolving credit facility […]
Sales Stats, the Week After
According to Nielsen BookScan numbers released yesterday for sales through last Saturday, September 26, in the outlets tracked by the service Dan Brown’s THE LOST SYMBOL sold another 401,000 copies. (NB that BookScan does not currently include ebook sales. And in the UK, Symbol sold another 175,040 copies, reported by The Bookseller.) Diana Gabaldon’s AN ECHO IN THE BONE had the best opening sale for a new book last week, moving approximately 94,000 units. Second-week sales for Ted Kennedy’s TRUE COMPASS were approximately 69,000 copies, and the first full week of sales for the Oprah edition of Uwem Akpan’s SAY […]
People and Awards: New Head for RH Mondadori, Harper's Chief Digital Officer, Also on the Gallery Editorial Team, and More
Following the previous announcement of the elevation of Random House Mondadori ceo Riccardo Cavallero to general manager of trade publishing at Mondadori (which is a joint venture partner in RH Mondadori), the owners have jointly named Nuria Cabuti, 42 as the unit’s new ceo, effective January 1, based in Barcelona. She has been publisher and editorial director of the Random House Mondadori Children’s and Paperback divisions. A letter from Random House ceo Markus Dohle and Mondadori Group chief executive Maurizio Costa notes that “as a publishing leader she has significantly improved our children’s books results, and increased our paperback revenues […]
S&S Creates Gallery Books As Pocket Returns to Mass-Market Only
Simon & Schuster is taking their successful Simon Spotlight Entertainment line and merging it with Pocket Books’ hardcovers and trade paperbacks to create a new imprint, Gallery Books. Pocket itself will return to focusing entirely on mass market publishing, as partner for all of the S&S imprints and continuing with paperback originals for “rising authors” such as Kresley Cole and Thomas Greanias. The new line is expected to launch in spring 2010. CEO Carolyn Reidy writes to employees that “as a company we need to insure that each of our imprints has sufficient strength and support, especially in this difficult […]
Stanford Closes Publishing Course, and Studies Possible Successor
The venerable Stanford Publishing Course for Professionals, serving book publishing and magazine professionals since 1978, has closed, a victim of both the economy and larger transitions in the program’s core fields. Longtime director Holly Brady is leaving Stanford–saying she “expects to continue the conversation from another vantage point here in Silicon Valley”–and her staff has been dismissed. This move comes admits broad cost-cutting at Stanford University, with the school recently disclosing a 27 percent drop in their endowment capital over the last fiscal year, with investment losses of approximately $3.5 billion. They reportedly cut over 400 positions earlier in the […]