Toronto’s Book City store group announced that they will close their flagship location (in the Annex) when the lease expires this spring, after 38 years in business. General manager and son of the group’s founder Ian Donker tells Quill & Quire, “we agonized over the decision, but sadly it didn’t make much economic sense to continue.” Their three other locations “have been strong and maintained their sales” and will remain open. Vallejo, CA has a new downtown bookstore, Koham Press, opened Wednesday by Rar Farmer (with a grand opening on January 25). A former manager of Half Price Books in Berkeley, […]
The Truth About 2013’s Top 100 Books: Not A Single, Self-Published Title
In today’s fragmented world of incomplete sales data — largely because we do not have any public disclosure of ebook unit sales on a title-level basis — USA Today’s annual list of the top 100 bestsellers performs a more important function than ever. That’s because they are the only compiler of bestseller lists to issue an annual chart that combines both ebook and print sales data from most major sellers. More particularly, their dataset includes Kindle sales but puts them in the context of the overall market, so you can differentiate between the storyline Amazon popularizes about what’s selling in […]
Corporate: Bloomsbury Finishes Well; Russian Publishers Merge
Bloomsbury issued a brief trading update on sales for the last four months of 2013. “In line with expectations,” sales rose 20 percent compared to a year ago, with “most of the growth generated from print sales.” Their sales had been up 13 percent for the first half of the year, helped by both trade hits and their continuing string of academic and professional publishing acquisitions. Separately, Russia’s two biggest trade publishers have completed the merger they began some time ago, with Eksmo finalizing their purchase of AST. The purchase price was not disclosed. Publishing Perspectives reports that Eksmo owner Oleg Novikov […]
Stock Expert Cramer Says Amazon Shares Are “Modern Art”
Later in the morning television host and author of the just-released Get Rich Carefully Jim Cramer provided an investment view of publishing and the larger media landscape. Extending the morning’s discussion, he said, “I simply don’t know how to stop Amazon. It’s not constrained by the need to make money. It’s modern art. It’s Jackson Pollock. It can’t be explained. It’s a Rothko, and everyone else is Rembrandt — and everyone else is worth a lot less.” At the same time, Cramer noted, “it is the best multi-year growth story out there.” Ironically, because the share price is fueled by […]
The “Bezosologists” At DBW
Bloomberg BusinessWeek reporter and author of The Everything Store Brad Stone opened Wednesday morning’s Digital Book World sessions focused on Amazon. “In a way, this is a room full of Bezosologists; we all have to be.” Stone spoke in particular to the company’s vast ambition and persistence: “The one constant is Amazon’s 20-year history is that it does not give up…and can be fairly ruthless and self-absorbed in how it constantly tries to disrupt the existing order.” He referred to “the notorious one-star review of my book that was heard round the world,” in which “MacKenzie Bezos took issue with […]
DBW Opens: Shatzkin, CEOs, O’Reilly, Data and More
The fifth annual Digital Book World Conference officially opened on Tuesday morning in New York to record-setting attendance and exhibits. Morning highlights included a ceo panel with S&S’s Carolyn Reidy, David Nussbaum of F+W Media, Sourcebooks’ Dominique Raccah, and O’Reilly Media founder Tim O’Reilly and a separate presentation from O’Reilly on how “the real ebook revolution is just beginning.” (Later in the show his company will presenting their Atlas digital publishing platform.) Program chair Mike Shatzkin (and partner in our Publishers Launch Conferences, the co-presenter of DBW) laid out some of the broad themes in his opening remarks. As Shatzkin […]