Just after midnight EDT the opening chapter of Harper Lee’s GO SET A WATCHMAN was excerpted simultaneously in the Wall Street Journal, the Guardian, and the Sydney Morning Herald, accounting for the major English-language territories in which the book will be published July 14. Each outlet also included an audio transcript of Reese Witherspoon reading the opening chapter, which begins: “Since Atlanta, she had looked out the dining-car window with a delight almost physical. Over her breakfast coffee, she watched the last of Georgia’s hills recede and the red earth appear, and with it tin-roofed houses set in the middle […]
Archives for July 2015
RCS Weighing Formal Buyout Offer from Mondadori, As Three Italian Agencies Merge
Catching up on news from last week, Italy’s Mondadori Libri formalized their initial February offer to buy their biggest competitor, RCS Libri. The proposed price was not announced, but the Italian press says the offer was for 135 million euros (after a range of 125 million to 150 million euros had been tipped earlier this year). The RCS board issued a statement saying it “reviewed the offer received” while indicating it “reserved all its rights in regard to evaluating the offer, also taking into account wider considerations regarding the strategic outlook for the group.” For 2014, RCS Libri had sales of 222.6 […]
Best Boy by Eli Gottlieb Leads August Library Reads List
Eli Gottlieb’s new novel Best Boy is the No. 1 pick for the August Library Reads list. The list also includes The Marriage of Opposites by Alice Hoffman, an excerpt of which you can start reading right now in our Buzz Books 2015: Fall/Winter ebook. The rest of the list features: The Nature of the Beast, by Louise Penny A Window Opens, by Elisabeth Egan Everybody Rise, by Stephanie Clifford The Fall of Princes, by Robert Goolrick In a Dark, Dark Wood, by Ruth Ware Black-Eyed Susans, by Julia Heaberlin Lord of the Wings, by Donna Andrews Browsings, by Michael […]
Macmillan Adds More Titles to Subscription Services
Macmillan is expanding their program to “test subscription” services for ebooks. After starting with 1,000 titles available through both Scribd and Oyster in January, the publisher is adding “more than 1,000 additional titles” to both services, along with more than 300 children’s titles. While it moves Macmillan forward with both subscription operators, it still leaves them shy of the participation levels from HarperCollins (which offers substantial backlist, and had put the 15,000-title Harlequin backlist in before Scribd recently cut their romance title selection) and Simon & Schuster, which offers its entire backlist for subscription reading.
Six Months of M&A
It has been another busy year of mergers and acquisitions in the publishing space, though not with the same volume that we saw in 2014. But there have been billions of dollars of transactions already, with no shortage of deals of scale — including the sales of OverDrive and Scholastic’s educational technology and services business, along with Donnelley’s winning bid for Courier and the not-yet-revealed but surely sizable sum for Pearson’s Family Education Network, topped in value by the quiet, cashless merger of Macmillan Science and Education and Springer Science. The formal Mondadori offer we report on today to buy […]
People
At Crown, Annsley Rosner is being promoted to vp, associate publisher for Crown, Hogarth, Archetype, Tim Duggan Books, Broadway Books, and Three Rivers Press, as August 17, reporting to Molly Stern. Rosner is taking on many of the current duties and responsibilities of Figment.com co-founder and ceo Jacob Lewis, who is leaving his position as publishing director on August 14 to launch another start-up. Rosner will “partner” with Stern “on both the long-term development and day-to-day management of our front-list fiction and non-fiction programs, and “lead the trade paperback publishing programs for Broadway Books and Three Rivers Press with a mandate to grow this important part of our […]