MJ Franklin will move over from social editor at the NYT to join the NYT Book Review this summer as an assistant preview editor. Franklin will help cover literary fiction, memoir and essays, and he will lead their young adult coverage.
Aubrey Poole, former editor at the Jimmy Patterson imprint, has joined subscription box service Literati as Acquisitions Editor and Curator for children’s books ages 0-12.
Rhodes Murphy has joined the publicity agency Books Forward team as a publicist, and Rachel Hutchings has been hired as a digital marketing strategist.
Quarto joined the growing list of publishers making clear they will not attend the Frankfurt Book Fair this year.
In Memoriam
Simon & Schuster will host a virtual memorial to honor and celebrate the life of Carolyn Reidy, on July 8 at 4 p.m. Details for joining the event will follow soon.
Forthcoming
Don DeLillo‘s novel THE SILENCE, “completed just weeks before the advent of Covid,” will be published by Scribner on October 20 (and by Picador in the UK). The 128-page novel is about five people gathered in a Manhattan apartment on Super Bowl Sunday 2022, when an unknown catastrophic event renders the digital world silent. DeLillo says, “I began writing the novel in 2018, long before the current pandemic. I started with a vision of empty streets in Manhattan. The idea of the silence grew from sentence to sentence, from one chapter to the next.”
Acquisitions
KKR’s Overdrive — formally acquired earlier this month — has quickly acquired the assets of the library business of KKR’s RBmedia.
Counterfeits
It’s been well documented the extent to which Amazon is filled with fake, illegitimate and counterfeit editions of books as well as other merchandise. (Last year, a WSJ investigation wrote, “In practice, Amazon has increasingly evolved like a flea market. It exercises limited oversight over items listed by millions of third-party sellers, many of them anonymous, many in China, some offering scant information.”) While regularly telling people what a great job they do — as well as blaming the limitations of software, or the publishing ecosystem for not having a universal catalog of every right for every book around the world — the company has conceded more work is needed.
A press release announces the creation of a Counterfeit Crimes Unit that “will investigate cases where a bad actor has attempted to evade Amazon’s systems and listed a counterfeit in violation of Amazon’s policies.” The process still sounds data focused — the unit “will mine Amazon’s data, cull information from external resources such as payment service providers and open source intelligence, and leverage on-the-ground assets to connect the dots between targets.” It will also help the company “more effectively pursue civil litigation against bad actors, work with brands in joint or independent investigations, and aid law enforcement officials worldwide in criminal actions against counterfeiters.”