Wednesday night TechCrunch claimed to have obtained internal documents in which “Microsoft is offering to pay $1 billion to buy the digital assets of Nook Media LLC.” — and the stock market responded Thursday morning with a jump in Barnes & Noble’s stock. It opened up more than 25 percent or about $4.60 a share but has settled over the next 90 minutes, up about $3 a share. Prior to the report, BN’s entire market cap was just over $1 billion. But the TC piece is full of errors and oddities, starting with the belief that Nook Media “also includes […]
Archives for May 2013
Another Opaque Quarter for Harper With News Corp Spinoff Closer to Completion
News Corp. reported third quarter earnings after the close of the market Wednesday and once again the company disclosed nothing in particular about HarperCollins. Notably, this time around it didn’t even merit an adjective. (Harper itself characterized the previous quarters as “favorable”: before that, it was “solid,” “challenging,” and “terrific” — but this time they declined to comment.) At the larger newspaper publishing unit of which Harper is a small part, sales decreased $87 million to $1.938 billion, while operating income dropped $45 million, to $85 million. The declines owed to another $42 million in costs related to the phone-hacking investigations […]
Briefs: Court Hears Google Authors Guild Appeal, and More
For avid court watchers, this morning the Federal Court of Appeals was scheduled to hear oral arguments in the fight over whether to certify the author class in the long-running suit brought by the Authors Guild over Google‘s book scanning. Last year Judge Denny Chin approved certification of the class, and Google appealed that decision. We’re going to spare you further details until the court rules. Sony, which has sold its Reader devices in Australia for some time, has finally opened a Reader ebookstore there to go along with those devices. Price cuts on a variety of Nook devices — […]
Harlequin Cuts Jobs On Weak Quarter; Authors Appeal Royalty Lawsuit
Harlequin sales fell 4 percent in the first quarter, down $4 million to $102.5 million (CA) , with operating profit declining 27 percent to $14.9 million, falling $5.6 million in the period. Parent company Torstar had a similar weak overall quarter, and announced further restructuring in both the book publishing and general media divisions. They are cutting approximately 105 jobs companywide — with roughly 20 to 30 of those positions coming from Harlequin (a deduction based on the dollar figures provided). The book publisher took a restructuring charge of $2.3 million for the quarter, and expects to save $2.1 million […]
People: Twelve Adds An Editorial Director, As Does Knopf, and More
Following Deb Futter’s appointment as publisher of Grand Central’s Twelve imprint in April, Sean Desmond will join the line in the new position of editorial director, starting May 28. He is currently an executive editor at Crown. Futter says in the announcement, “When I became Publisher of Twelve, my first order of business was to hire a top-notch editorial director who would work with me to define the next era at Twelve. In Sean Desmond, I could not have found a more perfect fit in terms of acquisitions and vision.” Knopf announced two editorial promotions, both effective immediately. Robin Desser […]
Legal: More on Harper Lee Lawsuit; Hagar Cleared Over 2011 Defamation Suit
Updating our Monday story on the Harper Lee copyright lawsuit, the full complaint depicts the alleged depths of the scheme that Samuel Pinkus is said to have engaged in, along with Lee Ann Winick and Gerald Posner, to mislead Lee and her publishers about the copyright status of TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD. The suit alleges that “Pinkus created several different companies to handle the receipt of royalties and commissions and directed the payment of royalties to a continually changing series of bank accounts” as a bid to avoid the nearly $800,000 in commissions he and his company Veritas Media were required to […]