Welcome to the tape-delayed coverage of BEA (for those who love NBC’s television coverage of the Olympics, for example) instead of the second-by-second hashtag-heavy stream you’ve come to expect and love. Perhaps I should attribute my tardiness to the general confusion about whether the show floor was open yesterday, or the open bar on tap just outside of the 7x20x21 panel. Or to my annual amnesia about technological frustrations. None of that matters. On to the reports. The audience for the social media panel – aka where Gutenberg meets Zuckerberg – was chock full of publicity and marketing types, but […]
Archives for May 2010
Larsson Windfall Finally Kicks In As Quercus Sales Rise 75%
Sales at the UK’s Quercus rose 75 percent in the past year, now up to 19.13 million pounds as they finally enjoy the river of cash from holding world rights to Steig Larsson’s trilogy. That said, the company–and market–has been troubled enough that they still wrote down a chunk of author advances, impairing profits. Operating profit before tax was 1.19 million pounds. Creditors are nearly getting paid on time now, down from 126 days to 74 days, and with luck that means authors are getting paid on a more timely fashion, too. With the Larsson revenue stream growing constantly, preliminary […]
Streisand Plays BEA
Barbra Streisand got a standing ovation just for showing up at the BEA keynote session, before an appreciative audience glad to be in her presence. She made it clear that she brings the same exacting sense to her passion for design–and for the book creation process–that she brings to all of her other artistic endeavors. Unfortunately for Viking, that means she’s continuing to revise the book on a regular basis. “I will be changing it until they rip it out of my hands,” she said, and it sounded like she meant it. (We’re mindful that last year’s celebrity speaker in […]
Bezos Tells Shareholders No Color Screen Soon
Amazon ceo Jeff Bezos told the audience at the company’s annual meeting that their strategy for competing with Apple is the company looks to surge past Kindle in devices on the market is to stay focused on “serious reading households.” That strategy is said to drive the excuse for not adding a kolor Kindle any time soon. “Bezos said it would be easy to add a color LCD screen to the Kindle, but that it provided an inferior reading experience to the reflective E Ink Corp. technology that the device currently uses. As for color reflective screens, Mr. Bezos said […]
Data Says Most eReader Owners Will Pay More
Do consumers mean it when they say “I’ll never more than $9.99 for an ebook”? “That’s only half bullshit,” Michael Norris, senior analyst for Simba Information, told a full room at BEA. More than a third of people said they’d never pay more than $9.99 for an ebook, though three-quarters of people said they would if they “absolutely had to,” Norris said, quoting a survey on Kindle Nation Daily. If people invest in ebook readers, said Norris, they are not going to stop using them because the price of ebooks goes to $12.99 instead of $9.99. “Kindle users are very […]
The Buzz Begins Here
Every year we struggle with how to cover, and evaluate, the books angling for attention that fairgoers haven’t read yet. This year’s experimental solution was to commission to critical assessments of some of the high-profile would-be buzz books from established reviewers. We’re pleased that so many well-known critics were happy to join us in this adventure–and a big thanks to Buzz Panel reviewers Edward Champion, Michele Filgate, Scott McLemee, Bob Minzesheimer, Jacob Silverman, and Sarah Weinman. The reviews are all highlighted on the PublishersMarketplace home page, and you can click through for the full text–or else the reviews are all […]