After an exhilarating Digital Book World, the next big event on publishing’s calendar is the ABA’s Winter Institute 9, which begins next Tuesday in Seattle. Founded as an educational and networking event for enthusiastic independent booksellers, it has also grown into a major launch event for spring and summer books and authors. We are helping to amplify that launch effect throughout the trade and beyond to passionate readers with our free Buzz Books 2014: Spring/Summer ebook sampler, packed with substantial pre-publication excerpts from 40 books to watch from the season ahead. It includes 10 authors will be appearing at WI9: […]
Archives for January 2014
Quercus Shares Fall By Half On Unexpected “Significant Loss”
Quercus said in an interim trading update that “sales in the final quarter were lower than expected” and the company now expects “a significant trading loss for the financial year.” The news was a particular surprise since their half-year results reported in September showed a profit of £0.52 million and the company said “we have one of our strongest-ever publishing programs in the second half of this year.” As a result, the publisher’s shares have fallen by almost 50 percent, down 25 pence to 28.5 pence a share. Quercus said it “is in constructive discussions, which are on-going, with its […]
Bookstore News: A Closing In Toronto, An Opening In Vallejo, and Rizzoli’s Pledge
Toronto’s Book City store group announced that they will close their flagship location (in the Annex) when the lease expires this spring, after 38 years in business. General manager and son of the group’s founder Ian Donker tells Quill & Quire, “we agonized over the decision, but sadly it didn’t make much economic sense to continue.” Their three other locations “have been strong and maintained their sales” and will remain open. Vallejo, CA has a new downtown bookstore, Koham Press, opened Wednesday by Rar Farmer (with a grand opening on January 25). A former manager of Half Price Books in Berkeley, […]
People
President of Baker & Taylor’s Library & Education division since 2000 George Coe has been promoted to ceo of the wholesaler. He takes over from Arnie Wright, who retired after 34 years with B&T. Wright will work as a consultant for the company, and will take the role of non-executive chairman of the board. Nicole Melander has joined Houghton Mifflin Harcourt as svp, digital strategy, reporting to ceo Linda Zecher. Melander was previously chief technology officer at Achieving the Dream, a national reform network dedicated to community college student success and completion. At HMH she will work closely with the […]
As Expected, Judge Cote Denies Apple’s Motion to Stay
On Thursday morning Judge Cote issued an order officially denying Apple’s motion to stay her ruling in last summer’s ebook pricing trial, also keeping the disputed court-appointed monitor Michael Bromwich on the job. The 64-page order goes through all of Judge Cote’s reasons for denying the stay and chronicles the escalating conflict between Bromwich and Apple, but it essentially boils down to this: First, “many of the arguments which Apple once made (and is no longer pursuing) have been waived or are moot.” Second, Judge Cote said Apple “has access to a dispute resolution mechanism which has and will be […]
The Truth About 2013’s Top 100 Books: Not A Single, Self-Published Title
In today’s fragmented world of incomplete sales data — largely because we do not have any public disclosure of ebook unit sales on a title-level basis — USA Today’s annual list of the top 100 bestsellers performs a more important function than ever. That’s because they are the only compiler of bestseller lists to issue an annual chart that combines both ebook and print sales data from most major sellers. More particularly, their dataset includes Kindle sales but puts them in the context of the overall market, so you can differentiate between the storyline Amazon popularizes about what’s selling in […]