McGraw Hill reported fourth quarter earnings Tuesday morning, with an abundance of measures of adjusted, diluted, continuing operations that seem designed to conjure victory from accounting and confuse reporters. The big excluded items are a $66 million restructuring charge related to severance for about 800 employees laid off during the quarter and another $10 million in “one-time separation expenses necessary to complete” the plan to split the company in half by the end of the new year. Adjusted net income from continuing operations–the measure Wall Street will look to, apparently (and one that excludes the $76 million in charges)–was $184 million, up […]
Archives for January 2012
People, Etc.
Emily Williams has joined Barnes & Noble as international content manager for digital products, reporting to Patricia Arancibia, who was recently promoted to director, editorial & publisher relations for international content. She was most recently digital content producer for Publishers Marketplace, and we wish her the very best of luck in her new endeavors. At Triumph Books, Adam Motin has been promoted to managing editor, Noah Amstadter moves up to senior acquisitions editor, Jess Jordan has been promoted to associate editor, and current editorial director Don Gulbrandsen will move into an at-large role focusing on strategic initiatives, acquisitions and management […]
Everyone Wants to Write About Barnes & Noble
Towards the end of the NYT business section article that follows the standard narrative, they note that in BN’s 300-person Palo Alto division, “engineers were putting final touches on their fifth e-reading device, a product that executives said would be released sometime this spring.” The story also says that ceo William Lynch “plans to experiment with slightly smaller stores.” Meanwhile, Amazon offers another nebulous growth statistic to the paper. For the nine-week holiday sales period, ending December 31, “Kindle unit sales, including both the Kindle Fire and e-reader devices, increased 177 percent over the same period last year.” (Amazon will […]
eNews: ProPublica Expands eBook Line; Goodreads Drops Amazon API
Online investigative journalism site ProPublica is the latest publication to produce an expanded line of ebooks, now in a “digital publishing partnership” with Open Road. (The journalism organization issued four titles as Kindle Singles last spring.) The new line of ebooks, priced at $5 or less and available as of the end of February, will be based on previously published material in expanded form, including “Presidential Pardons” (a series that ran in the Washington Post) and “Post-Mortems,” an investigation of coroner and medical examiner offices ProPublica did in conjunction with NPR and Frontline. Each ebook will also include additional material […]
DBW: Looking at Publisher-Author Relations
One fascinating if unresolved Digital Book World panel was Wednesday’s session on Changing Author-Publisher Relationships, moderated by Simon Lipskar at Writers House. It provided an update on various publishers’ efforts to engage more actively with their authors on a regular basis and better communicate the value that large-scale organizations bring to representing authors’ work in the marketplace. The financial aspects of the relationship were addressed only briefly. Random House president of sales, operations and digital Madeline McIntosh said that in a review of their “actual effective payout to authors” looking at a five-year set of their fiction lines, a range […]
More DBW: Learning How to Sell eBooks All Over the World
Kobo executive Michael Tamblyn provided a look at some of the challenges of taking ebooks global quickly. Among the biggest challenges has been Japan, home of their new parent company Rakuten. “We’ve learned a lot working in Japan,” he said. “They have everything there–it’s just evolved completely differently” than in the rest of the book publishing world. They have no metadata standards, two competing ebook standards, very little simultaneous release in print and digital, file conversion challenges, and very few centralized repositories. In many countries, as Tamblyn underscored, “we see a lot of vertical integration once we get outside of […]