Amy Einhorn has resigned her position as president and publisher of Henry Holt, which she has held since September 2019, and will leave September 8 in order to join Crown on October 2 in the new position of svp, publisher of Crown Fiction, reporting to Crown Publishing Group president David Drake. Macmillan announced internally that Jamie Raab will oversee Holt “in the interim,” while they search for a new publisher for the division. The co-founder and president of Macmillan’s Celadon Books, Raab moved to the role of publisher-at-large for Macmillan in early 2022. (Holt has also been looking for a […]
Penguin Random House Sales Gain on Acquisitions and International, As Profits Are Flat
Bertelsmann reported results for the first six months of the year on Wednesday morning, with Penguin Random House recording sales €2.098 billion—up 9.5 percent versus €1.916 billion a year ago, due to a mix of acquisitions, international growth and the strength of Prince Harry’s memoir SPARE. But operating EBITDA remained flat even with the sales increase, at a relatively modest €258 million (compared to €257 a year ago, and a record €324 million in 2021). Interim ceo Nihar Malaviya wrote to staff that the flat earnings “should come as no surprise, as industry inflationary cost pressures and increased costs across […]
Bookselling: More Barnes & Noble Changes
The chain opens a replacement store in Brandon, FL today. The location for the smaller, planned replacement store in Cheyenne, WY has been announced, due to open on October 25. A company representative said, “This is our permanent location. We are aware of the size difference between this location and the old one (on) Dell Range, but we are going to stock all the good titles and authors that you all still love.” A long-awaited replacement store in Jonesboro, AR, taking over from a location that was damaged by a tornado in 2020, now has an opening planned for November.
Your Books Trained Those Large Language Models
As is already being contested in a number of lawsuits seeking class action status, the core datasets on which all of the major large language models have been trained rely on stolen, copyrighted books. As a new Atlantic magazine article by Alex Reisner puts it, “Pirated books are being used as inputs for computer programs that are changing how we read, learn, and communicate. The future promised by AI is written with stolen words.” BookCorpus was stolen from Smashwords authors. Books3 is a body of between 150,000 and 190,000 books from established publishers and authors. The Atlantic piece extracts the […]
Judge Approves Internet Archive Permanent Injunction, Limits It to Works That Have eBook Editions
On Monday US District Court John Koeltl quickly approved the proposed permanent injunction filed last Friday by the litigating AAP publishers and the Internet Archive, following his finding that the IA had infringed authors’ copyrights. That action means the imposition of the injunction — and the bringing down of illegal ebooks — will commence shortly. But the judge did agree with the Internet Archive to limit the injunction so as to apply only to books for which the publisher has a commercially-available ebook edition. His reasoning, as the IA had argued, was that the 127 named works in the case […]
Another Day Another Suit: Music Companies Sue Internet Archive Over Their Infringement
The NYT ran a disappointingly naive and ill-founded article on the Internet Archive’s clear, unequivocal, comprehensive loss in court for copyright infringement of published books on a “mass” scale. They fall head over heels for Brewster Kahle as performer of a “good deed” based on a simple “notion” of helping when he conferred to himself the power to violate copyright laws from around the world and break even his own fake lending rules when he gave away millions of ebooks “mostly unavailable elsewhere” (also proven false) without limits during the pandemic. Fortunately, there is a fact-based record with the court, […]