A research paper for the National Bureau of Economic Research prepared by three professors at Ohio State’s Fisher College of Business documents the finding that when states adopt sales on online purchase, “households reduce Amazon exenditures by 9.5 percent.” At least their direct Amazon purchases — since at the same time, purchases from other online sellers, go up 20 percent. Overall physical retailers picked up 2 percent in sales as a result of level playing field on sales tax. As you would also expect, the team found “the effect to be more pronounced for large purchases.” Consumers “decrease their spending […]
Archives for April 2014
People
Maria Ribas and Paul Lamb have joined the Howard Morhaim Literary agency as literary agents. Ribas was an associate editor at Adams Media and will continue to focus on cookbooks, self-help, health, diet, parenting, and humor. Lamb was most recently senior marketing manager at Viking, and will focus on representing non-fiction in the areas of business, memoir, political science, sociology and sports, as well as crime, mystery and literary fiction. Gypsy da Silva will retire from Simon & Schuster on April 30 after more than 47 years in publishing, the last 26 as associate director of copy editing for the […]
David Foster Wallace Trust Objects to Forthcoming Film
In a joint statement, the David Foster Wallace Trust, along with the late author’s relatives and his publisher Little, Brown, indicated their disapproval of the movie-in-progress “The End of the Tour,” based on David Lipsky’s 2010 book ALTHOUGH OF COURSE YOU END UP BECOMING YOURSELF. The film, which stars Jason Segel as Wallace and Jesse Eisenberg as Lipsky, wrapped principal photography in March. The estate said in the statement it was “given no advance notice that this production was underway and, in fact, first heard of it when it was publicly announced.” They add that “for the avoidance of doubt, […]
People
Kensington publisher Laurie Parkin intends to retire on May 30 after 15 years in the position, and 30 years in publishing. Company ceo Steven Zacharius says: “Laurie’s love of publishing and selling books has been a driving force behind Kensington’s success during a period of immense change in the industry. Laurie’s leadership, perspective, creativity and enthusiasm in all areas of the publishing program will be greatly missed.” Parkin notes, “I’ve certainly been lucky to share these last fifteen years with Kensington’s incredibly talented family and our very special authors. It’s been a wonderful adventure.” Nancy Inglis will retire as Simon & Schuster’s director […]
Taste Barnes & Noble College’s New Yuzu
A yuzu is a hybrid citrus fruit with curiously high ratio of seeds to juice — which makes it the perfect name for Barnes & Noble College’s new textbook app: “Yuzu is a next-generation digital education platform that enhances the everyday learning experience and makes college the rewarding journey it’s meant to be.” It has launched as an iOS app and web reader (but for now it only works in iOS 7, and the latest versions of Safari). A replacement for Nook Study, this is the “higher education digital product” that the company touted on their last earnings call, and […]
New Tracking: Self-Published Bestsellers
With self-published ebooks regularly claiming at least some positions on major bestseller lists, we wanted to move past random data points to some kind of regular monitoring. After weeks of private experimentation, we are ready to make our new process transparent. Tapping our existing stream of aggregated bestsellers lists at PublishersMarketplace (which cover multiple lists from 9 sources), we have added tagging to identify self-published titles. The new output is viewable in a couple of ways. The new PM Self-Published Bestsellers list shows all of the self-published titles to make at least one list we track — and applies a […]