On Thursday, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in Texas upheld part of preliminary injunction returning some banned books to a local library, ruling that “Government actors may not remove books from a public library with the intent to deprive patrons of access to ideas with which they disagree.” The suit was brought by seven patrons of the Llano County, TX library system, who asserted that the government’s 2021 removal of books based on their content “violated their First Amendment right to access information and ideas.” Seventeen books were removed from the library, including “‘butt and fart’ books,” “young adult […]
Archives for June 2024
James Beard Awards
The James Beard Awards announced winners, including book winners across a variety of categories.
Introducing The New List
Backlist titles increasingly dominate the publishing landscape, comprising approximately 70 percent of all print book sales. The same statistic is true for top selling titles—of the top 200 books in 2022 and 2023, about 70 percent were published more than a year prior. Those older titles monopolize media bestseller lists, including the New York Times, leaving unrecognized many of the books that publishing staff are working on right now. But the original purpose of bestseller lists was to help readers recognize the hot new titles in the market. To help highlight which new titles are selling, we’re proud to announce […]
People 6/7
Barnes & Noble Education Completes Share Offer
The company formally completed their “rights offering,” with existing shareholders buying about 642 million of the 900 million shares of stock offered, at 5 cents a share. That leaves the “backstop” buyers — primarily Immersion Corporation/Toro 18, plus Outerbridge Capital Management and the Selz Family 2011 Trust — on the hook for only $12.9 million to buy up the remaining shares. The company expects to issue the new shares on June 10. Separately, Greenhaven Capital, which had built a 9.9 percent position in the company and flirted with putting together a competing buyout offer, took advantage of the weird interest […]
On the Growing Sales of English Editions In Europe
European publishers have been sounding the alarm about increasing sales of English-language import editions of books by popular authors for some time now — particularly in Holland and across Scandinavia, where publishers have been lobbying to acquire rights to produce English editions of their own alongside their translations to blunt the effect. Now the NYT explains the popularity of those English-language editions to readers, focusing on the effect of social media: “Booksellers in the Netherlands said that many young people prefer to buy books in English with their original covers, even if Dutch is their first language, because those are […]