In reporting results for the first six months of 2022, Quarto followed the classic corporate move of burying the most interesting developments at the very bottom of their announcement. They will sell the toy imprint Smart Lab (acquired as part of Becker & Mayer), “in order to focus on our core publishing business.” The will also close their distribution service, “which will start to impact our sales from July 2022.” They have “received a non-binding offer” for Smart Lab and “a sale is expected to be completed by September 2022.” The business is carried at an asset value of $2.36 […]
Baker & Taylor’s Systems Remain Offline More Than A Week After Ransomware Attack
Following a ransomware attack over a week ago (on the weekend of August 20-21), Baker & Taylor’s systems have been down, and remain so on Monday morning. The outage has been widespread: Title Source 360 and EDI have been inaccessible (and even their phone systems were down), with the company unable to process orders to library customers as a result. In the latest update, the company said: “We want to take this opportunity to thank you again for your continued patience and cooperation as we deal with the service disruption we’ve been experiencing. We know that it has been frustrating, […]
Understanding the Contours of Growing Backlist Sales
Some interesting data has surfaced recently providing more nuance about the true scope of backlist sales — from both the antitrust trial and NPD Bookscan — that’s worthy of gathering in one place. During the pandemic, Bookscan data showed a marked acceleration of backlist sales, from roughly 62 or 63 percent of print units in 2019 up to 70 percent of print units so far this year, with a trendline that looks like it never changes direction. That has been attributed to a number of pandemic-driven effects: A shift to more online sales; a reduction in new releases (particularly early […]
Bookselling: Rockefeller Center to Add McNally Jackson
Rockefeller Center developer Tishman Speyer announced that McNally Jackson will open a 7,000-square-foot bookstore at 1 Rockefeller Plaza, expect to open in winter 2022.
Four Hundred Fifty More Additional Minutes, How Do You Measure the Economics of Harm?
In auctions? In best bids? In GUPPIs whatever they are? In options? In Second Score? Better-best, too? How about books? Seasons of books…. OK, so we’re a little punchy: Thursday in court was filled with more fine-grain redirect of the two economics experts, as both sides revisited ground already covered. Defense expert Dr. Snyder’s asserted 23 percent of instances in which non-big-five publishers were winners (9 percent) or runners-up came up again and again — in part because of Dr. Snyder’s own confusion and overestimation on Wednesday about how many deals that comprised. It should have simply been in the […]
The Beginning of The End of The Beginning
Just three short but endless weeks after it started, the DOJ’s antitrust trial seeking to block Penguin Random House’s acquisition of Simon & Schuster ends Friday with closing arguments. (We’ll run as much as we can in today’s edition of Publishers Lunch; if there is more after our deadline we’ll post further over the weekend. Either way, we’ll share the full text when we can, as we have been doing throughout the trial.) Without pre-judging the outcome — since, as we have shown, Judge Florence Pan has been very much in charge of this trial from start to finish — […]