At Penguin Publishing Group, Lauren Monaco has been promoted to senior vice president, group sales director, for Penguin Random House sales. Carrie Swetonic moves up to the newly created position of senior executive director, nonfiction backlist.
Caroline Payne has been promoted to marketing coordinator at Dutton.
Vijay Seshadri has been named poetry editor of the Paris Review. He won 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for 3 Sections and a 2015 Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Giulia Rizzo joined HarperCollins Italia as children’s editor, reporting to editorial director Sabrina Annoni. She was previously with Terre di mezzo Editore and Mondadori Group.
Film/TV
Madeline Miller‘s Circe will become an HBO series. Chernin Entertainment and Endeavor Content will produce with Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver (Rise of the Planet of the Apes, Jurassic World) writing.
Library Ebook Embargo
Steve Potash, the CEO of Overdrive, the service used by many libraries for ebook lending, published a lengthy, indignant response to Macmillan CEO John Sargent’s explanation of the company’s new ebook policy. Writing on his blog, Thoughts from a Digital Advocate, Potash criticizes Sargent’s data as poorly substantiated and in some cases misleading. He demands Sargent retract his claim that 45 percent of US e-book reads are now library lends, unless he can produce data that shows how many books that are borrowed are actually read. He also argues that Macmillan’s revenue figure of $1.15 per title borrrowed is far from average. Based on public library data, “The average number of times a library loaned a Macmillan ebook during the 2-year term for each title was 11.5 times (far from 52 checkouts). Using this data, the average cost to the library to lend the title was $6.07 for every time a title is borrowed, 5 times the figure shared in the WSJ story.” Asked via email for response, Macmillan declined to comment at this time.