Ailah Ahmed has been promoted to publishing director at Little Brown UK.
Picks
Way to go, GMA! After announcing their first two Cover to Cover Book Club picks in the middle of the month, the program is on it for December — with an early announcement that Tomi Adeyemi‘s Children of Virtue and Vengeance is their December Book Club selection.
Bookselling
As Barnes & Noble faces a lawsuit from a veteran former California bookseller alleging age discrimination and claiming that the chain’s real strategy is “we’re no longer hiring book people. going forward, we’re only hiring sales people,'” ceo James Daunt spoke to the Futurebook conference in London about elevating whatever booksellers still work in his stores. “If you walk into any of the Barnes & Noble bookstores they are the most crucifyingly boring stores. Which is odd, because they know what people want, they have all this data and yet they can’t interpret it and they’ve been unable to manipulate that knowledge to in any way deliver decent bookstores to people.” He said both the physical stores and the website are boring: “I think the one thing that you can never be if you want to live in this new bookselling age of Amazon is boring.”
Daunt added, “We have to use our character and personality, the curation and the intellectual engagement that we have as booksellers with the titles that are published, an ability to seize the book that not many have noticed, to champion it, to spread it. If we can’t do that then we have no role and we’ll be destroyed.”
Corporate
CBS and Viacom announced that their pending merger is expected to close on December 4, after the close of financial markets. The new ViacomCBS expects to start trading on the Nasdaq on December 5. As previously announced, after the merger Simon & Schuster ceo Carolyn Reidy will report to ViacomCBS ceo Bob Bakish.
Separately, travel retailer Hudson Group has announced a new brand identity that explains a snappy new H logo, and renaming the company to just Hudson.
Legal
Cengage, Elsevier, Macmillan Learning, McGraw-Hill and Pearson — acting together as the Educational Publishers Enforcement Group — filed suit “against dozens of pirate eBook sites that sell illegal, unlicensed ebooks using Google ads” in the US District Court for New York’s Southern District. In what looks to be a significant early victory, the announcement says the court granted a temporary restraining order shutdown down the alleged activity. Claiming copyright infringement, the suit alleges that the pirate sites states “pay Google to place prominent ads in response to searches for the publishers’ legitimate content. The pirate sites’ use of Google ads to sell infringing content runs counter to Google’s own policies. These sites rely on legitimate payment processors, domain hosts and other internet services providers, all of whom are required by the Court’s injunction to stop facilitating the pirate websites’ illegal activity.”