As expected, Senator Elizabeth Warren won a lawsuit brought against her by a publisher and authors who said her letter to Amazon criticizing their book amounted to a First Amendment violation. In 2021, Warren wrote a letter to Amazon claiming that Joseph Mercola and Ronnie Cummins’s THE TRUTH ABOUT COVID-19 included vaccine misinformation and calling out the retailer’s algorithms that allowed the book to show up at the top of search results. The authors, along with Robert F. Kennedy, Jr (who wrote the foreword) and publisher Chelsea Green, sued Warren, arguing that her letter infringed on their First Amendment rights […]
People 5/5
SPARE Drives Q1 for Penguin Random House
Bertelsmann announced headline results for the first quarter of 2023, with sales up 5.6 percent to €4.8 billion and organic growth of 2 percent. They maintained their full-year forecast of “moderate to significant revenue growth and a stable operating result,” according to cfo Rolf Hellermann. Penguin Random House was a “main revenue driver” for the company, along with a few other divisions, with a “strong first quarter” led by Prince Harry’s SPARE, which the company says sold more than 4 million copies across formats. In a release, chair & ceo Thomas Rabe said, “We are growing significantly and will continue […]
Simon & Schuster Keeps Growing In Q1, As Paramount Acknowledges Sale Process Has “Restarted”
Simon & Schuster continued its hot streak in the first quarter of 2023, reported Thursday morning by parent company Paramount Global, with sales of $258 million, up $41 million from a year ago, and operating income of $58 million, up $8 million. As ceo Jonathan Karp wrote to staff, “All of our publishing divisions increased revenue, and all of our domestic groups had double-digit growth.” International sales were “a little over flat.” In a letter to staff, Karp confirmed what we had already heard from prospective bidders, which is that, “As expected, Paramount has resumed the process of selling Simon […]
People 5/2
TikTok Owner May Launch Publishing Company
ByteDance, the company that owns TikTok, appears to be expanding into the publishing business. The company has listed a number of open jobs in the “online publishing” department in recent weeks, and a ByteDance subsidiary recently filed a trademark for 8th Note Press. A spokesperson told PL that the initiative is not related to TikTok and that ByteDance is always exploring new opportunities. The trademark application states that 8th Note Press expects to offer print books, ebooks, and audiobooks in fiction and nonfiction, as well as an app to buy and read the books. Unsurprisingly, social networking is part of […]