Harlequin’s parent company Torstar reported third quarter results Wednesday for the period ending September 30. The book publishing unit had sales of $115.7 million (CA), down slightly by $1.8 million, (or less than 1 percent), largely due to foreign exchange rates but buffered by the benefits of the other half of Harlequin’s German business at the beginning of the second quarter of 2010, to the tune of $700,000. EBITDA was up for the third quarter by $600,000 (or 2.4 percent) to $24.8 million, with, as always, “digital revenue growth more than offsetting declines in print retail and direct-to-consumer revenues.” Those […]
eNews: Wiley Sues 27 BitTorrent Users Over Piracy; New Funding For Educational App Publisher Mindshare; and More
Last week Wiley filed suit in Manhattan federal court against 27 John Doe defendants who illegally downloaded various FOR DUMMIES titles from Ukraine-based Torrent website demonoid.me on October 18 and 19. The John Does are identified for now only by their IP addresses, all within the state of New York. Wiley claims in the suit that these defendants “are contributing to a problem that threatens the profitability of Wiley. Although Wiley cannot determine at this time the precise amount of revenue that it has lost as a result of peer-to-peer file sharing of its copyrighted works though BitTorrent software, the […]
Bookselling: Bodhi Tree Sale Falls Through; Point Reyes Books Tries Member-Supported Model
The sale of West Hollywood-based Bodhi Tree Bookstore by longtime owners Stan Madson and Phil Thompson to Karuana Gatimu and Lori Cutler, which had been in the works for the last few months, has fallen through. Shelf Awareness reported the offer had been “rescinded” but that Madson and Thompson “remain hopeful” another buyer can be found. “We had invested a great deal of hope and optimism in the offer agreement that, after many months of planning and negotiation, has come to naught,” the current owners wrote. “As a consequence, we have re-contacted interested parties in the business to explore opening […]
Bookselling: BN Boutiques and November 7 Announcement; Riverrun Bookstore Looks for New Location, Additional Backers
Building on our report from Friday, Barnes & Noble has indeed announced a press event on the morning of November 7 featuring “a very special announcement,” widely expected to unveil their latest ereading tablet. Separately, at the company’s annual meeting last week, the company confirmed the other piece of information cited from the Digital Reader: the company is doubling the size of the Nook boutiques in 40 of their “most productive stores” to 2,000 square feet of space, presumably to feature those new devices. Riverrun Bookstore will not renew the lease at its current location in Portsmouth, NH, set to […]
eNews: WSJ Adds eBook Bestseller List, Compiled By Nielsen; Amazon in Talks for Kindle in China; and More
Starting tomorrow, the WSJ’s Weekend edition will feature their own ebook bestseller lists. Like the NYT lists, the Journal will present both ebook-only lists for fiction and nonfiction, as well as combined print and ebook lists in both categories. All titles are eligible–self-published, children’s, backlist, etc.–as long as they have a minimum price of 99 cents or higher. Nielsen BookScan is aggregating the data for the WSJ, drawing on what the release calls “all major retailers,” said to include Amazon, Nook, iBookstore, Sony and Google eBooks among others. Like the other WSJ charts, the new lists will be positional only, […]
eNews: Anobii Prepares to Sell eBooks; Freethy Sells 1 Million Self-Published Books; and More
UK-based social book recommendation site Anobii announced that as part of their coming relaunch, they have reached agreements to sell ebooks from more than 10 publishers, including the UK divisions of Penguin, Random House, Harper Collins, Hachette, Bloomsbury, Harlequin and Wiley, along with Pan Macmillan, Faber & Faber and Canongate. Digital editions will be available for sale as of the end of October, with print books to follow at a later date. get them instantly on their free Anobii ebook apps. They will have Anobii iOS reading apps at launch, and plan to add Android apps “shortly.” Their cloud-based service […]