Oprah’s Semi-Annual Book Club 2.0[.3] will promote Sue Monk Kidd‘s Indie Next No. 1 pick THE INVENTION OF WINGS, set for publication on January 7. She says in the announcement, “These strong female characters represent the women that have shaped our history and, through Sue’s imaginative storytelling, give us a new perspective on slavery, injustice and the search for freedom.” Winfrey’s last selection was The Twelve Tribes of Hattie a year ago, and her post-broadcast book club started with Cheryl Strayed’s WILD in June 2012. (Prior to that, her last selection while her syndicated talk show aired was Charles Dickens’ GREAT […]
Archives for December 2013
Court Dismisses Bookseller DRM Suit
Fast on the heels of our round-up of a busy year in court for publishing, Judge Jed Rakoff has cleared the docket of one of the strangest cases of 2013. In a 19-page opinion he swatted away the “threadbare allegations” by independent booksellers Book House of Stuyvesant Plaza, Posman Books, and Fiction Addition against the largest trade publishers and Amazon and dismissed the lawsuit. On the vague idea that publishers’ acceptance of Amazon’s proprietary DRM “suggests that there may have been oral agreements or discussions” among the publishers, Judge Rakoff notes “the evasiveness of this allegation is remarkable.” Then there […]
Strategies and Data for Children’s Publishing, and the Biggest Week In Digital
In January we kick off “Digital Book World week” with our third annual one-day Launch Kids event — the biggest trade conference focused specifically on children’s publishing and digital evolution. The most successful of our many standalone Publishers Launch events, Launch Kids provides deep focus on the complex and nuanced issues and opportunities specifically for children’s book publishers and the start-ups doing business with them. We’ll have detailed new datasets including sales figures from both Nielsen and Readerlink; and analysis of how children and families engage with digital media from Insight Strategy Group and PlayCollection. Looking broadly across mobile, social […]
2013: The Year We Gaveled On
We don’t usually play the game of making broad simplistic declarations about players of the year, but in our newsroom 2013 was truly the “Year of the Gavel.” New York Southern District Court Judge Denise Cote — recently the focus of a scathing editorial in the WSJ calling her “a disgrace to the judiciary” — was the dominant Publishing Person of the Year, and no matter what the OED claims, the “word of the year” was certainly not “selfie.” It was “spiderweb,” a term that speaks volumes about the DOJ’s winning trial against Apple on ebook price-fixing charges that was the […]
BN Faces Follow-On Investigations
After we called attention on Friday morning to Barnes & Noble’s disclosure of two SEC investigations, market reaction was swift (and by most standards excessive). The stock fell by approximately $2 a share on heavy volume of over 7 million shares, closing down about 12 percent for the day, at $14.43 a share. You could posit that investors are worried that the investigations might pose a distraction to management — but that’s where the beauty of a company that runs itself with no ceo to be distracted ought to help out. Almost as swift as the sell-off was a wave […]
People
Ken Fultz has joined Bookmasters as general manager. Most recently he was vp of operations at book manufacturer Thomson-Shore after 33 years with The Mazer Corporation in Dayton, OH. where he led their printing services division. Among his responsibilities, Fultz “will work closely with David Hetherington, Baker & Taylor’s vice president of academic library and higher education merchandising/publisher services, to continue to strengthen the strategic partnership that was forged between Bookmasters and Baker & Taylor in July 2013.” Both companies are owned, separately, by private equity firm Castle Harlan. Margaret Milnes will join Running Press on December 11 in the […]