Barnes & Noble Education announced on Tuesday a complicated plan to raise new capital to keep the company going. The unlikely new lead investor is Immersion Corporation, a publicly-listed “developer and licensor of touch feedback technology, also known as haptic technology,” which “has been accused of being a patent troll.” Immersion has a market cap of about $225 million. Immersion “leads” an investor group that will put $50 million of new capital into BNED along with a $45 million “fully backstopped equity rights offering.” About $20 million of that new money will go to transaction costs, leaving BNED with $75 […]
Mondadori to Acquire Chelsea Green Publishing for $5 Million
Mondadori announced Monday that it has a deal to acquire employee-owned Chelsea Green Publishing, for $5 million, subject to adjustment at closing, which is expected in by the middle of the year. For 2022, the publisher had sales of $8.1 million and an operating income of $1.1 million. Chelsea Green will become part of Rizzoli International Publications. Mondadori says that represents “a further step on its international development journey in English-speaking markets, which recently began with the establishment of London-based Rizzoli UK.” When the acquisition is completed, co-founder Margo Baldwin will take the role of publisher emeritus, as Stefano Peccatori […]
Yes, Karp Was Surprised, Too
Regarding the reporting a week ago that Meta considered buying Simon & Schuster to strip mine the catalog for LLM training, the publisher’s ceo Jonathan Karp told a NYT podcast he was just as surprised by the news as you were: “It was really quite an experience for me. So Saturday morning I was eating my breakfast and reading the New York Times…eating my Grape-Nuts… And this was total news to me! I had no idea that this conversation was going on. The story was quoting private conversations that nobody knew about. This really was news to everybody. I’ve checked. […]
BISG Eyes A Bigger Agenda, Looks to Grow Membership
On Friday the Book Industry Study Group (BISG) convened their annual meeting, highlighted by a presentation of their updated strategic plan. Broadly, the board “has been rethinking BISG’s strategy with an eye toward inclusion, research, standards, and education.” Standards — from the BISAC codes that categorize published works to ONIX and other key elements of supply chain communication — have traditionally been the core focus of the organization. But vice chair James Miller, who is senior director, merchandise systems at Barnes & Noble, said the organization aspires to “provide anyone in book publishing with a forum to identify, discuss and […]
Simon & Schuster Celebrates Their Past and Present
Simon & Schuster opened their 100th anniversary season with a blockbuster double-header. On Monday night, they featured over 30 prominent S&S authors on stage at The Town Hall (expertly curated by Cary Goldstein) in a surprisingly entertaining evening, and on Tuesday night they gathered well over 1,000 people in a party at Chelsea Piers. Monday’s event highlighted authors from across the company’s divisions, including many who have substantial history of their own with the house — starting with Doris Kearns Goodwin, who has published with S&S for almost half of those 100 years, beginning in 1977, and finishing with Bob […]
Open Submissions, Closed to AI
On Monday, Angry Robot Books announced an open submissions period for late April, but with a twist: “We will be doing things very different this year. We will be using something called Storywise, which is a non generative AI system that will help us sort submissions. This means that it does not learn from author’s works to inform an AI model, and therefore the AI model is not trained by your work.” But the community objected strongly to any use of AI in evaluating authors’ material. The publisher quickly dropped the idea, posting: “We have been watching & listening to […]