Today’s full catch-up Publishers Lunch Deluxe is packed with additional stories, the kind of extra coverage and analysis we provide every day. For those who were too busy during our first holiday free trial at PublishersMarketplace.com, we are offering a second chance before the year ends: Join now and check out everything the site has to offer for free through the weekend. (Please follow the posted instructions; trial memberships must be cancelled before midnight January 3 if you don’t want to remain as a member.) And for the discount-minded, if you’re putting our big three-day Digital Book World Conference on your calendar for […]
Archives for December 2015
Strong Christmas Sales Week Lifts 2015 Print Sales A Little More
The holiday sales season for print books ended with a strong final week, through December 27, with sales as recorded by Nielsen Bookscan up 4.5 million units (or 20 percent) over the same sales week last year. Per the trend already written about widely, for all of 2015 print book sales grew by 17.6 million units in all, or a modest 2.8 percent, moving over 652 million units in all. (In 2014, unit sales were up about 15 million units compared to the prior year.) Our sales trend analysis from a week or so ago still holds, except that in the end, […]
Justice Department Replies to Apple’s Supreme Court Brief
On December 23, well ahead of the deadline, the Department of Justice filed its 33-page brief in opposition to Apple’s petition asking the Supreme Court the hear an appeal of their ebook antitrust case. The focus of the government’s rebuttal is to argue that finding Apple guilty on a per se basis, rather than applying the rule of reason, was applied correctly under antitrust law because Apple was found to have participated in a horizontal conspiracy with the publishers. They say Apple’s argument to use the rule of reason incorrectly posits that their publisher agreements were “vertical” contracts, contrary to the prior […]
Some Pre-Holiday Job Cuts In A Penguin Random House Group
Just before the holidays Penguin Random House quietly laid off an unspecified number of people in the umbrella group comprising PRH Audio, Fodor’s Travel, and Living Language. Division spokesperson Katie Punia confirmed in answer to our query that “a number of positions are being eliminated,” but said she was “not able to comment further” on the layoffs. One source indicated the eliminated positions were largely on the print side, possibly numbering around 15 jobs.
Briefs: Amazon Holiday Stats, Printers Row Drops Print, and More
Amazon‘s annual holiday release featured a blizzard of whimsical non-statistics about all of the things they sold during the busiest shopping time of the year. Among the ebook-related bits, “the most popular Kindle book purchased on Christmas day was The Snow Child, by Eowyn Ivey.” The most gifted Kindle book during the holidays was the self-published Rath’s Deception by Piers Platt, and the most borrowed book all year in the Kindle Unlimited subscription program was No Ordinary Billionaire by J.S. Scott. The Chicago Tribune’s Printers Row Journal, a subscription-based supplement of book reviews and more, will drop the print version in the […]
People, Etc.
Former BEA director of education Mark Dressler died December 23 from cancer. Dressler also programmed sessions for the Frankfurt Book Fair, and was co-owner of a wine shop in his home of Traverse City, MI. USA Today named Girl on the Train author Paula Hawkins as their “author of the year.” They write: “Before 2015, no one had heard of Hawkins, 43, who previously wrote chick lit under the pseudonym Amy Silver. Then Train hurtled into bookstores on Jan. 13 and immediately clicked with readers desperate for the next Gone Girl.” Riverhead has sold over 4 million units in the US. But it […]