Wiley announced second quarter results Tuesday morning, with sales of $477 million up $28 million from a year ago, a 6 percent gain. Adjusted earnings per share grew more, up 8 percent, to $54 million, or 90 cents a share. Book sales declined across their major segments, however. In the professional development segment, combined print and ebook sales were down 9 percent in the quarter to $67 million; in the education segment, book sales were down 7 percent to $50 million; and in research, books and references declined 9 percent to $37 million. CEO Steve Smith says in the release, […]
Archives for December 2014
HBG Tries Selling within Twitter
Hachette Book Group is the first book publisher to partner with Gumroad on selling books natively from within Twitter. Their initiative will launch starting December 11 with limited-time promotions for three print books, by Amanda Palmer, Chris Hadfield, and The Onion. Separately, the Digital Reader discovered left-behind tracks for an initiative HBG never launched during their standoff with Amazon over terms. The publisher registered ebooksforall.com and was reportedly working with Australia’s eBooks.com and social DRM-provider Booxtream on a site that would have sold ebooks readable on Kindles as well as standard EPUB devices. Asked about the report, HBG spokesperson Sophie Cottrell told […]
Doerr and Hobbs Top iBooks Lists
There was another wave of “best books of the year” lists over the weekend — from Entertainment Weekly, the Boston Globe, Newsday, the St. Louis Post Dispatch, the Guardian and others, with Apple’s iBooks Store posting their lists as well. Apple picked top 10s in ten categories, with Anthony Doerr’s All the the Light We Cannot See as their fiction favorite of the year, and Jeff Hobbs’s The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace as their favorite nonfiction book. Among their lists: Fiction All the Light We Cannot See, Anthony Doerr The Bone Clocks, David Mitchell Bark, Lorrie Moore […]
People
At Doubleday, Melissa Danaczko has been promoted to senior editor, reporting to Bill Thomas. She has been at Doubleday since 2006. Penguin Random House announced senior management for their unified publishing operations group. Sue Malone-Barber is svp, director, publishing operations; Kirk Bleemer is vp, director, production strategy, operations, and vendor management; Patty King is vp, director, production for the Berkley Publishing Group and vp, director, strategic production spend management for Penguin Random House; Sue Driskill is vp, director, inventory management, Penguin Random House; and Chelsea Vaughn is vp, director, publishing operations business process and support. In other PRH news, the […]
People, Etc.
The Crown marketing department announced a number of promotions. At Clarkson Potter, Kate Tyler has been promoted to vp, director of marketing and publicity, while Carly Gorga moves up to assistant director of marketing. In addition, Julie Cepler, director of marketing for Crown Archetype and Three Rivers Press, will be taking the same role for Harmony Books. Norton will take over distribution of Tin House Books as of July 1, 2015. Tin House is currently distributed by PGW, an agreement which will end in June 2015. Trafalgar Square Publishing will distribute Penguin Australia, Penguin UK, Penguin New Zealand, Penguin Books […]
Notably, The Best of The Best Books of 2014, to Start
With a number of “best books of the year” lists landing this week, we are ready to begin our own tabulation of the consensus very best books of the year. As in the past, we aggregate a wealth of selective lists from a broad selection of sources to produce what always turns into a collection of indisputably worthy books. We have factored in 30 lists so far; going by previous results, we’ll have 50 to 60 “votes” counted by the end of the year. Our collection includes retailers (Amazon, BN, Indigo, Hudson News, Indie Next No. 1s); awards nominees; major […]