Given the keen interest and timeliness of the closing arguments presented Friday morning in the antitrust trial, we’re going against our usual practices here. What you see below is our version of something between live tweeting and live transcribing, trying to capture the major points and moments, without delving into the case law. As we’ve been doing the whole trial, we will update this post over the weekend with fact-checked quotes, and full transcripts so you can read the arguments in full. We apologize in the meantime for any typos or mistaken abbreviations as we fed these remarks back to […]
Archives for August 2022
Obituary: Liz Goulet Dubois
Children’s book author-illustrator Liz Goulet Dubois, 55, died on August 14 of cancer. Her books include What Kind of Rabbit Are You?, What Does a Seed Need?, and most recently, That Egg Is Mine! Eliza Swift, who worked with Dubois while at Sourcebooks, said, “She was such a funny, vibrant woman and an absolute delight to work with. I felt – and feel – so strongly that she had a unique voice and perspective and was destined to become a new classic author for kids.”
Four Hundred Fifty More Additional Minutes, How Do You Measure the Economics of Harm?
In auctions? In best bids? In GUPPIs whatever they are? In options? In Second Score? Better-best, too? How about books? Seasons of books…. OK, so we’re a little punchy: Thursday in court was filled with more fine-grain redirect of the two economics experts, as both sides revisited ground already covered. Defense expert Dr. Snyder’s asserted 23 percent of instances in which non-big-five publishers were winners (9 percent) or runners-up came up again and again — in part because of Dr. Snyder’s own confusion and overestimation on Wednesday about how many deals that comprised. It should have simply been in the […]
The Beginning of The End of The Beginning
Just three short but endless weeks after it started, the DOJ’s antitrust trial seeking to block Penguin Random House’s acquisition of Simon & Schuster ends Friday with closing arguments. (We’ll run as much as we can in today’s edition of Publishers Lunch; if there is more after our deadline we’ll post further over the weekend. Either way, we’ll share the full text when we can, as we have been doing throughout the trial.) Without pre-judging the outcome — since, as we have shown, Judge Florence Pan has been very much in charge of this trial from start to finish — […]
Booktopia Founder Calls for Removal of the Board Members Who Fired Him
Founder of Australian online bookseller Booktopia Tony Nash has called a shareholder meeting to remove board members who fired him as ceo, the Sydney Morning Herald reports. Nash, who owns 14 percent of shares, has proposed to remove two non-executive directors from the board, chair Chris Beare and Su-Ming Wong, as well as anyone else appointed since August 17. He also intends to appoint Abigail Cheadle to the board. “Tony Nash Enterprises Pty Ltd proposes to call, and arrange to hold, an extraordinary general meeting of the company for the purpose of considering, and if thought fit, passing the following […]
People 8/18
Katie Boni has joined as publicist at HarperCollins Children's. She was most recently at Little, Brown Books for Young Readers.