Late last week, a filing with the SEC revealed that Roseland, NJ-based investor Harsha Gowda has acquired a little more than one million shares of Books-A-Million stock through his five-year-old investment firm Blueshore Capital Management. The acquisition gives Gowda a 6.38 percent stake in BAMM, accumulated over the past year with a “big increase during the recent sharp price drop,” he said in an interview with us Thursday morning. (The stock has been as high as $6.10 a share during the year, but it now trades at $2.30 a share.) Gowda’s fund focuses on buying stock in companies “that we […]
Archives for December 2011
Remembrances
Caldecott winner for Joseph Had a Little Overcoat, Simms Taback, 79, died on Christmas day. SLJ Co-founder of the Moby Dickens Bookshop Arthur J. Bachrach died on December 19.
eNews: Kindle Has “Best Holiday Ever”; 100K Xmas Downloads for Harper UK; and More
Restating the obvious and continuing its tradition of trumpeting nonspecific success, Amazon announced that 2011 “was the best holiday ever for the Kindle family as customers purchased millions of Kindle Fires and millions of Kindle e-readers,” while Christmas day was the “biggest day ever” for Kindle book downloads. Building on their earlier press release, they say that “throughout December, customers purchased well over 1 million Kindle devices per week.” Despite straining to celebrate and overplay the success of KDP authors, the etailer admits that the top ebooks for the holiday sales period were The Hunger Games and Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins […]
Nicholls, Oliver and Pratchett Top UK 2011 Charts
The Guardian has printed their annual look at the Nielsen UK sales charts, this time with more depth and transparency than ever. The presentation includes downloadable files of the top 5,000 or so selling books and data about the leading genres across the market. We’ve simplified some of the highlights below, but you can get the full data here. As in the US, Nielsen only tracks print book sales in the UK and does not currently capture ebook data (though ebooks comprise somewhere between 8 to 10 percent of the UK market right now). Nielsen UK does capture nearly all […]
eNews: Kobo in Holland, UK Kindle Sales, and More
Kobo has soft-launched in the Netherlands, selling ebooks from Bruna, Querido and De Bezige Bij beginning December 17, at about a 10% discount compared to leading Dutch online bookseller Bol.com. They started selling their Kobo Touch ereaders via Dutch electronics retailer Redcoon as of October 1. Kobo’s official launch in Holland is expected by March 1, 2012. Amazon announced that Kindle device sales in the UK more than doubled during the Christmas holiday. As in the US, an unspecified “millions of UK customers have already discovered the benefits of Kindle.” Though the announcement came a little late for the holidays, Smashwords said […]
Many More “Best of 2011” Selections
Recent days have brought many more Best Books lists from major newspapers and magazines. Among those that we are adding to our aggregated Best of the Best of 2011 tabulation are lists from: Chicago Sun-Times critics Houston Chronicle Men’s Journal Miami Herald New York Daily News Pittsburgh Post-Gazette San Francisco Chronicle (top 10) San Francisco Chronicle (top 100)