With the April sale of 3.7 million shares of Barnes & Noble common stock by chairman Len Riggio — and the sale earlier in the month of nearly all of Liberty Media’s convertible preferred shares in the bookseller — there were bound to be disclosures on the way about new major holders in the company. On Friday, investor David Abrams and associated hedge funds operated by Abrams Capital Management disclosed ownership of a total of 3.746 million shares in the bookseller, or 6.26 percent of the common stock. Separately, a scan of large holders on Bloomberg indicates that other hedge […]
Archives for May 2014
People, Etc.
Sandy McCormick Hill has left her position as ebook rights, contract manager, at Harper Collins. She can be reached at smchill@gmail.com. Simone Garzella Literary Scouting has been appointed US literary scout for the Lira Publishing Group in Hungary. Correcting from Friday, Liesa Abrams‘ new title is associate editorial director of Aladdin and Pulse. Linda Leavell‘s HOLDING UP UPSIDE DOWN: The Life and Work of Marianne Moore won the Biographers International Organization’s Plutarch Award for the best biography. The closing in April 2015 of the California Princeton Fulfillment Services in Ewing, NJ that we reported on Friday — part of the […]
Weekend Reading: Over 50 BEA Discoveries to Start Now
It’s been rewarding to see readers responding enthusiastically to our new free ebook samplers, now presenting substantial excerpts from over 30 general trade books in Buzz Books 2014: Fall/Winter, plus for the first time a separate collection of over 20 excerpts in Buzz Books 2014: Young Adult. Twenty seven of the authors featured in the two collections will be appearing at BEA and BookCon later this month, and of course for people not attending the shows our Buzz Books are a great way of sampling many of the big discoveries from home. To download the trade editions for your weekend reading, go to this page for […]
Amazon/HBG: Deaver and Patterson Comment; Bonnier Reports the Same Situation
At least two prominent Hachette Book Group authors have written to fans on Facebook about what is happening between their publisher and Amazon. Jeffery Deaver, whose new book just released, writes: “I’m afraid that those of you who buy my books on Amazon will find getting the novel a more expensive proposition than normal. Because of a dispute with Hachette Book Group, which publishes THE SKIN COLLECTOR, Amazon has chosen to attempt to intimidate publisher, authors and readers alike by significantly reducing purchase price discounts of my books and those written by other Hachette authors. Equally troubling to me personally Amazon […]
NYT Publishes Book On Innovation, Inadvertently
As a tangential part of the still-emerging story of the unceremonious firing of top NYT editor Jill Abramson, a fascinating internal NYT report has appeared online. Ironically for a report that bemoans how disruptive competitors such as BuzzFeed and the Huffington Post can “regularly outperform the NYTimes in terms of traffic simply by aggregating & repackaging Times journalism,” the report itself was not published by the NYT — rather, it was posted by BuzzFeed, which put the entire report on Scribd (thought it’s missing 5 pages). Titled INNOVATION and dated March 24, the 96-page book was prepared by an eight-person […]
Perseus to Launch Client Services Division for Academic Publishers
Perseus is launching a new client services division, Perseus Academic, dedicated to university presses and other scholarly publishers, under the direction of Sabrina McCarthy. The service, set to begin in May 2015, has already signed on Princeton University Press and University of California Press as new clients, joining such current Perseus Distribution clients as Columbia University Press, among others, which will move into this new division. Perseus Academic will also offer a menu of other service options including the Constellation digital services platform (which comprises print on demand, short print runs, ebook distribution, and various marketing tools). Princeton and the University […]