O’Reilly will end its Tools of Change Publishing conferences after seven years of operating in several cities, including New York, Frankfurt, and Bologna. In addition, the companion website will also close, and TOC co-chairs Kat Meyer and Joe Wikert will leave the company. “The decision to discontinue a popular conference was not one we made lightly,” publisher Tim O’Reilly said in the announcement on the TOC blog, “But after TOC 2013, we realized that a conference was no longer the best vehicle for us to contribute to publishing’s forward movement…Seven years on, ‘digital publishing’ is well on its way to simply […]
Archives for May 2013
Search Better
We have been working for a long time now on a system to help PM members conduct better, faster and more revealing searches on our site–to find what you want, but also to reveal more of the depth and breadth of information from across the site. We’re calling it Super Search, and we’re ready for you to take the early beta for a spin. As you will see, for now it searches all at once across Contacts, Dealmakers, Deals and Member Pages–together some of the most frequently searched and visited PM features. Results are nested in four sub-sections. It searches […]
Meyer, Percy and Hosseini Among Monthly Bookseller Picks
The ABA named Philipp Meyer’s THE SON their No. 1 pick for June. That’s three No. 1s in a row for the Spring/Summer edition of our Buzz Books 2013 sampler (following Anthony Marra and Kate Atkinson). There are 4 other Indie Next June picks that you can preview right now in Buzz Books (Bulawayo, Miller, Disclafani, and Wascom). In all, nearly half of the 28 books we first featured and previewed in February have made “best of the month” lists from major booksellers over the past three months. Download it while you still can to read excerpts of these titles […]
People, Awards, Etc.
Longtime Author Solutions ceo Kevin Weiss is leaving the company for a new position (to be announced separately next week). President of Penguin International Andrew Phillips is taking over as ceo of Author Solutions, which Penguin acquired last July. Phillips led the launch of Partridge, the Penguin Author Solutions partnership in India. Penguin chairman and ceo John Makinson said in the announcement: “This is a bitter-sweet announcement because we shall be sorry to lose Kevin, who has provided the stability and clear leadership that Author Solutions needed in the year after our acquisition. But I always recognised that Kevin would seek […]
People, Etc.
As part of an expansion of HarperCollins’ global publishing program, Karen Davies has been appointed affiliate publisher of HarperCollins 360, working with the sales teams on both sides of the Atlantic to ensure the distribution, marketing, publicity and sales of Harper US books into the UK marketplace. “We are committed to ensuring that all books published by any division of HarperCollins around the world are available in print or digital format in all English-language markets,” said president and group publisher for the US and Canada Michael Morrison. “We see this as a great opportunity for our authors.” HarperCollins UK ceo […]
Simon & Schuster Overcomes BN Issues with Rising Profits and Small Sales Drop
Barnes & Noble’s negotiations with Simon & Schuster over terms continues unresolved, but the publisher’s first quarter results did not appear to suffer measurably as a result. Like the prior two quarters, sales fell but profits rose for S&S: At $171 million, sales declined by $5 million or less than 3 percent (after a 6 percent decline in the bigger holiday quarter). And profits rose, as adjusted OIBDA gained $2 million (or 20 percent) to $12 million, and adjusted operating income rose $2 million, at $10 million. The company attributed the sales decline to difficult comparisons to a year ago, when […]