Bloomsbury released preliminary results for the year, ended Feb 28, reporting record sales and earnings. Sales of £264 million were up 15 percent from the previous year and 43 percent from two years ago. Profit before taxation and highlighted items grew 16 percent to £31.1 million. “These results demonstrate the strength of our strategy to publish for both the consumer and the academic markets, unusual in our industry, and to grow digital revenues while expanding globally,” ceo Nigel Newton said in a release. In the consumer division, sales were up 12 percent to £166.7 million with profit before taxation and […]
WH Smith Bookstores Up 2 Percent
UK retailer WH Smith reported results for the 13 weeks ended May 27 in a brief trading update, with High Street sales up 2 percent. Overall company sales rose 23 percent, driven by travel division gains of 31 percent. Travel stores in North American grew 26 percent as passenger numbers rebounded and the company opened new locations. Results
Imprints: Ten Speed Graphic
This fall Ten Speed Press will launch Ten Speed Graphic, an imprint dedicated to publishing graphic “literary adaptations, global webcomics, biography, memoir, history, how-to, fiction, and licensed entertainment titles.” The first book, a graphic adaptation of Hide by Kiersten White, will be released on September 12, followed by five other titles that season: an adaptation of Richard Adams’s classic novel Watership Down; George R. R. Martin and Raya Golden’s Voyaging, Volume One; Nora Krug’s Diaries of War; Tom Scioli’s Stan Lee biography I Am Stan; and Julio Anta and Yasmín Flores Montañez’s Sí, Se Puede: The Latino Heroes Who Changed […]
Daunt Aims to Improve B&N For Workers, But Unions Tell a Different Story
While it’s a common refrain that publishing is not a lucrative industry for workers, it is especially true for bookstore workers. Booksellers can make or break a book’s success, are knowledgeable about hundreds of individual products and the industry as a whole, and are a vital part of the publishing ecosystem. But they are often paid minimum wage or not much above, and even experienced booksellers often earn less than what entry-level colleagues in publishing offices make. There seems to be a disconnect between the career and the compensation—booksellers are paid like an hourly gig in what is, for many, […]
New Books Publishing May 30
This week, Luis Alberto Urrea, Megan Abbott, Siddhartha Deb, and James Comey publish new novels, while nonfiction includes new work by Seth Godin and Monica Potts. 17 works of fiction https://bookshop.org/lists/new-fiction-publishing-may-30 5 nonfiction titles https://bookshop.org/lists/new-nonfiction-publishing-may-30 We consult a number of sources in compiling our weekly lists and PM members can see our lists for the coming three months through this reference page. But if you want to make sure your key titles are on our radar, now you can use this form to submit brief details as well: publun.ch/submitNotable. Please submit your notable titles at least 3 […]
Bertelsmann CEO “Seeking to Promote Understanding of AI”
Bertelsman ceo Thomas Rabe told the Financial Times that, for creative industries, generative AI could be “very positive provided we…understand its potential and threats.” Overall, he sees the technology as “on balance . . . probably more of an opportunity.” For example, “He said there were even opportunities for authors to augment their output by feeding software with their previous output to generate new content.” Rabe added, “If it’s your content, for which you own the copyright, and then you use it to train the software, you can in theory generate content like never before,” he said. Plus, “Rabe also argued that a proliferation […]