Barnes & Noble’s latest quarterly filing unusually contained a few interesting nuggets that were not announced when the company first reported basic earnings information for the period. They “decided to shut down the operations of Tikatok,” the online children’s writing platform, and took an impairment charge of $1.97 million on the closure. BN bought Tikatok three years ago for $2.3 million “as part of its overall digital strategy, expanding the company’s reach to additional parents, educators and librarians.” On the plus side, after the quarter closed, in November they received their first operating payment from Microsoft as part of the new […]
Archives for December 2012
People, Etc.
The NYT now has a full obituary for literary agent Robert Lescher. As widely publicized elsewhere, Random House ceo Markus Dohle happily surprised staff at the company’s annual holiday party Wednesday night in announcing that all US employees who have been with the company for a year or more will receive a special $5,000 bonus. (Roughly “a few thousand” people qualify; people who have worked there for less than a year will receive a pro-rated bonus.) Dohle invoked the memory of recently deceased cfo Anne Davis and said the “thank you payment” was one of the last initiatives he and […]
Celona’s Novel Tops January Indie Next List
The novel from Free Press beats out Oprah pick The Twelve Tribes of Hattie to top the ABA’s Indie Next list for January: #1 Y: A Novel, by Marjorie Celona Tenth of December: Stories, by George Saunders Me Before You: A Novel, by Jojo Moyes The Twelve Tribes of Hattie: A Novel, by Ayana Mathis The Third Bullet: A Bob Lee Swagger Novel, by Stephen Hunter Finding Camlann: A Novel, by Sean Pidgeon The Death of Bees: A Novel, by Lisa O’Donnell Hikikomori and the Rental Sister: A Novel, by Jeff Backhaus The Intercept: A Jeremy Fisk Novel, by Dick […]
eNews: Brazil Gets Kindle Store, Google Play; Waterstones Upsets Customers With Kindle Screensaver Ad; And More
Within minutes of each other, Amazon’s Kindle Store and Google Play launched in Brazil Wednesday evening–just as Kobo’s previously-announced Brazilian offering formally launched. The Play store includes titles by Brazilian authors as well as translations of international bestsellers, while the Kindle store sells their low-end device for R$299 ($143 US), along with 1.4 million ebooks, including more than 13,000 Portuguese-language ebooks by authors such as Jorge Amado, Lya Luft and Martha Medeiros. In addition, Kindle Direct Publishing and the various mobile apps are also available in Brazil. “We are excited to launch this new Kindle Store for Brazilian customers, offering […]
Open Road Pairs with Ingram to Offer Full-Service Digital and POD Distribution
Starting in January, Open Road will offer a broad digital distribution service to individual authors, agents “with large catalogs of backlist books, and independent publishers who need help digitizing, formatting, and distributing their content digitally, putting them in direct competition with such players as Constellation and INScribe Digital. Open Road’s service is “powered by Ingram Content Group,” using the CoreSource platform for broad digital distribution and Lightning Source and Ingram Publisher Services for print-on-demand production and distribution. (Open Road has already been working with Ingram for manufacturing and distribution of their print titles). Open Road founder Jane Friedman says they […]
Bill Bryson Sues Former Agent For “Misconduct and Profound Neglect”, Including Years of Lost Royalties
Bestselling author Bill Bryson filed suit November 30 in New York Supreme Court against his former literary agent, Fred Morris of Jed Mattes Inc., alleging “misconduct and profound neglect” over a period of years, and charging that Morris “failed to perform some of the most fundamental duties of an agent” including royalty remittance and processing contracts for review and signature. The suit also claims the defendant “insisted that JMI is entitled to continue collecting a commission of fifteen percent of Bryson’s earnings on the very works Morris has neglected” and seeks to sever once and for all any connection between […]