If Reed Exhibitions stages a Book Expo and Book Con in late July, it will happen without any of the country’s five largest trade publishers. On Thursday, Macmillan joined the others in announcing that it, too, will not participate: “Due to an abundance of caution for our employee safety and guidance of the city and state, Macmillan Publishers has made the difficult decision to withdraw from BookExpo and BookCon 2020. While we are disappointed with the situation we are in, we promise to find other opportunities to interact with our booksellers, librarians, readers, and fans going forward.”
Internet Archive Grants Itself Emergency Copyright Powers for Uncontrolled Digital Lending
“To make a real difference for the nation and the world,” the Internet Archive unilaterally granted itself emergency powers to lend a corpus of over 1.4 million ebooks without any restrictions, contrary to its own stated policies. They are calling it a “National Emergency Library to serve the nation’s displaced learners,” lasting at least through June 30. In a modest concession, authors can opt their books out [send an email to info@archive.org with National Emergency Library Removal Request as the subject line. Please include each URL of the book or books you would like to have removed]. They also “recognize […]
Barnes & Noble Education Adopts Poison Pill
In early December Barnes & Noble Education announced they would hire a financial advisor to “review strategic opportunities” — e.g. help try to sell the company — following yet another disappointing quarter, and claiming “a number of unsolicited inquiries” in rescuing the company from the management that has run it down. On Wednesday, with the stock trading at deep lows over the past few 10 days in the wake of broad campus closures, BNED adopted a poison pill (aka “shareholder rights plan”), to make sure no one actually buys the stock thinking they could gain control of the company. BNED said […]
Abrams Pledges At Least $50,000 In New Fundraiser to #HelpABookseller
Publisher Abrams launched a new #HELPABOOKSELLER fundraising challenge campaign to benefit BINC (Book Industry Charitable Foundation), looking to raise more than $100,ooo to help booksellers in need. Ceo Michael Jacobs says in the announcement, “As a company, we’ve been focused and committed to taking care of one another during this extraordinary time. We realized that what we possess at Abrams is a will and a drive to make a difference. So, we decided to raise funds to help booksellers in a way that brought our larger, interconnected book community together around this goal. Abrams’ corporate donation to BINC will comprise […]
Over Half of Barnes & Noble Stores Now Temporarily Closed
After resisting closing stores as much as possible, in recent days Barnes & Noble has been forced to temporarily shutter a number of their stores nationwide by order of local governments. As of late Wednesday morning, BN confirmed to Publishers Lunch that they now “have over 370 temporary store closures.” With a base of 620 stores across the country under normal operations, that means BN has closed about 60 percent of their stores so far. That leaves them with something under 250 stores still currently open. (At least a few more BN locations announced on social media during the day […]
LSC Communications Said to Prepare Bankruptcy Filing
As we have been warning, the largest book printer LSC Communications was perched on the verge of bankruptcy even before the economic crisis took hold. On March 4, LSC indicated they had been in “limited default” of their considerable loans since the end of 2019, with a forbearance agreement with their lenders good through May 14. With liquidity tightening drastically even for for solid companies, LSC’s refinancing prospects have become more limited in the past few weeks. Bloomberg reported earlier this week the company “is preparing to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy after failed efforts to restructure its nearly $1 […]