The latest step in a process that has been underway for a while, the UK’s Intellectual Property Office published their proposals for changes to the country’s copyright law to provide “greater freedom to use copyright works such as computer games, paintings, photographs, films, books, and music, while protecting the interests of authors and right owners…. These form part of the Government’s response to creating a modern, robust and flexible copyright framework.” Trade publishers will be most focused on the “private copying” rule “to permit people to copy digital content they have bought onto any medium or device that they own, […]
Archives for December 2012
More 2012 Tops: USA Today, People and Google
USA Today agrees with a good part of the consensus on some of the best books of the year, though they add some other contenders in their list of favorites for 2012. 1. Flight Behavior, by Barbara Kingsolver 2. Bring Up the Bodies, by Hilary Mantel 3. Are You My Mother?, by Alison Bechdel 4. Gone Girl, by Gillian Flynn 5. The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, by Rachel Joyce 6. The Patriarch: The Remarkable Life and Turbulent Times of Joseph P. Kennedy, by David Nasaw 7. The Fault in Our Stars, by John Green 8. What It Was, by […]
People
In the UK, Rosie de Courcy will join her former husband Anthony Cheetham at Head of Zeus as senior editor, acquiring fiction. Most recently, she helped establish Preface at Random UK’s Cornerstone. Constable & Robinson has purchased self-help publisher How to Books, which has a list of over 500 books.
Scholastic Sales and Profits Fall, As Forecasted
Scholastic reported results for the second quarter ending November 30, and as the company warned a month ago, overall sales fell 10 percent to $616.2 million, and profits declined further. The company reported a net profit of $61.8 million (or $1.89 a share) as compared to $82.8 million (or $2.62 a share) a year ago, in part because of declining Hunger Games trilogy sales as well as declining book club revenues and lower sales of higher margin educational technology products. Revenue in the children’s book publishing and distribution division was also down almost 11 percent to $350.1 million, and trade […]
Macmillan Voluntarily Adopts Their Version of Agency Lite, But Declines to Settle; Library eBooks Are Coming Soon
With trademark candor, Macmillan ceo John Sargent’s year-end letter to authors, illustrators and agents presents more than the usual amount of updates. Counteracting any year-end punditry, Sargent says they “have completed the court-ordered mediation process with the DOJ without any progress toward settlement” and will proceed to trial. He held his letter after Penguin’s settlement was filed yesterday, but :after some long thought, I’m sending you the letter I wrote unchanged. That is because our position has not changed.” Sargent forsees another suit coming, saying that “now even our friends in Canada are taking a look,” and clarifies that their […]
And A Launch of Our Own: Publishers Lunch Bookateria
We are excited to open the virtual doors to our latest innovation: Publishers Lunch Bookateria. It’s a big online book discovery zone and store connected in all kinds of ways to Publishers Lunch and PublishersMarketplace.com. The fulfillment of a longtime goal of ours, it lets us connect the books and authors we talk about and cover all the time directly to informational pages about the books themselves (with easy links to purchase from a variety of major stores). In the same way that connecting deal reports to email addresses 12 years ago helped turn announcements in actionable pieces of business […]