Simon & Schuster’s “larger public responsibility as citizens” will be tested yet again over the book by Senator Josh Hawley — since Regnery Publishing “is proud to stand in the breach with him” and intends to publish THE TYRANNY OF BIG TECH on May 4. S&S is the distributor for Regnery. Distributors generally have no control over the lists they service, and those contracts usually do not allow the distributor any selectivity over working on particular titles. (Update: We originally reported, incorrectly, that S&S also sells the Regnery list. Regnery handles their own sales in the US, while S&S sells their […]
Archives for January 2021
People, Etc.
Emily Meehan joins Sterling Books as chief creative officer & publisher, leading what Barnes & Noble calls a “relaunch” of their publishing division. She was most recently publisher at Disney Book Group. She takes over from Sterling president Theresa Thompson, who is apparently excused from duty. Meehan calls it an “exciting new chapter not only for me, but for Sterling and Barnes & Noble. There is a lot of opportunity to publishing in bigger, forward-thinking ways with a keen eye for the best quality in editorial, design, and production.” Avideh Bashirrad has been promoted to senior vice president, deputy publisher […]
2020: The Year In Deals
We are working on a broad piece looking at sales trends in 2020 and shifts among various sales channel but before we get to that, we are long overdue for an analysis of Deal trends from the year. (As always, our analysis is based on deal reports at PublishersMarketplace.com. Like all book industry datasets it is not complete; such a thing does not exist. But it’s the only comprehensive dataset on book deals, and is consistent over time.) Overall Stats Broadly speaking, the data aligns with US book sales reports, in that deal volume was up measurably, in all major […]
eBook Player Glose Is Acquired by Medium
In its ever-ambitious search for a business model and clear expression of why it exists at all, website Medium has acquired Paris-based Glose — an ebook platform and store, perhaps best known in the trade as the ebook vendor HarperCollins switched to for selling their ebooks directly to customers, after BookShout went of out of business. Glose and their roughly 20 employees will remain based in Paris, their ceo Nicolas Princen becoming vice president of books at Medium. Glose claims 1 million readers worldwide, and their separate Glose Education “serves as the ebook provider of choice for over a dozen […]
Hagens Berman Files Class Action Lawsuit Against Amazon Over eBook Monopoly
Following news of a longstanding investigation of Amazon’s control over the ebook market by the Connecticut Attorney General, class action law firm Hagens Berman sued Amazon in the US District Court of New York’s Southern District. They allege antitrust violations of the Sherman Act. The filing is both fascinating and bizarre, a kind of deja vu all over again that also sees the law firm now complaining about what they themselves helped wrought. Hagens Berman was the first mover in the earlier lawsuits against book publishers and Apple over the introduction of the agency model for pricing ebooks, filing the […]
Mug Shots
Last year we quietly added a Screenshot View to every new deal to help make it easy to capture and share individual reports — but as usual, creative authors (and their friends) are leading the way in innovation. So far, we have seen at least three of these deals as mugs: