On Friday, Bob Kohn filed with the US District Court indicating his intention to appear in opposition to final entry of the Federal ebook pricing settlements with Macmillan and Penguin. The new wrinkle to avoid being dismissed as not having standing in the matter is that Kohn objects as one of the many eligible consumers affected by the settlement. His primary intention is to reassert the simple but sensational argument that Judge Cote ignored the most important element of the entire ebook pricing saga: “Amazon’s below marginal cost pricing” of ebooks prior to the launch of the agency model. That […]
Archives for October 2013
People, Etc.
Bloomsbury will launch a new popular science imprint, Sigma, in October 2014 that will publish up to 15 titles per year globally and will be overseen by Jim Martin, previously an editor on the adult trade division’s natural science list. The first Sigma list include Sex on Earth by Jules Howard, The World’s Smallest Mammoth by Victoria Herridge, and additional titles by Amy Teitel, David Hone and Kat Arney. Martin said in a statement: “It’s very exciting to be able to bring new and dynamic authors to a broad audience with Sigma. The books will combine the very best writing […]
The Mysteries of Morrissey
After one of the strangest paths to publication we’ve seen, British musician Morrissey’s memoir AUTOBIOGRAPHY sold 20,000 trade paperback units in its first day on sale, Penguin UK reported. A spokesman for Waterstones Jon Howells explained to the AP, “In Britain, he is one of our icons. His is the great untold story from the ’80s generation of music heroes.” The author launched the book at a signing…in Sweden. Reviews in the UK newspapers have ranged from high to low. For a quick overview, the Daily Beast has already culled the “juiciest bits.” Though rights had not been sold previously […]
WH Smith Back Online, But Kobo CEO Says eBooks Won’t Return Until Weekend — As Kobo Launches in India
Kobo chief executive Mike Serbinis finally addresses their issues with self-published books personally, in an interview with the UK’s Telegraph. Meanwhile, WH Smith has managed to get their website back online and open for business — though it appears they are only selling print books and have not restored sales of Kobo ebooks yet. The Telegraph reports that “Kobo hopes that the majority of its catalogue – minus the offending titles – will be back online by Saturday 19 October.” As Serbinis indicates indirectly, part of the problem is that they look to technology to screen titles rather than direct […]
Macmillan Expands eBook Library Lending to Total of 11,000 Backlist Titles
A little more than 6 months after entering the digital library market with a pilot program including 1200 backlist Minotaur titles and other titles from romance imprint Entangled, Macmillan has expanded its digital library offerings to include an additional 9,300 backlist titles across all company imprints. That brings the total number of backlist Macmillan titles available for digital lending to approximately 11,000. The news was first reported on Twitter by 3M collection development coordinator Heather McCormack, and Macmillan president of sales Alison Lazarus told us in a statement that “as part of our ongoing evaluation of eLending we have decided […]
Amazon Tales: You Could Be Reading This On Your Fiona
Among the interesting stories in Brad Stone’s just-published THE EVERYTHING STORE: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon is the chronicle of the creation of Kindle. Initiated in 2004, by the end of that year the engineers at Amazon’s Lab126 (1 = A; 26 = Z) dubbed the project Fiona. It was named after a character in Neal Stephenson’s novel THE DIAMOND AGE. It wasn’t until 2007 that Michael Cronan (who also named TiVo) came up with Kindle, “But by then [Steve Kessel’s] team was devoted to the name Fiona and the group tried, unsuccessfully, to convince Bezos to keep […]