Meanwhile, the surprise bankruptcy filing came yesterday from Canada, where the country’s largest distributor HB Fenn & Company initiated bankruptcy proceedings under the country’s Bankruptcy and Insolvency Act. In a brief statement Fenn said it had “encountered significant financial challenges due to the loss of distribution lines, shrinking margins and the significant shift to e-books, all of which have significantly reduced the company’s revenues.” The company’s Lisa Winstanley told the National Post more bluntly, “we’re ceasing operations effective immediately.” The paper calls it “the largest collapse of a Canadian publishing company since General Distribution Services/Stoddart Publishing went under in August […]
The New York Times Unveils Their E-Book Bestseller Lists
The NYT’s first-ever e-book bestseller lists will appear in print on February 13 and online on February 11 (reflecting rankings for the week ending January 30), as the paper previewed for publishing people at an event this morning. Not only will the paper publish a separate e-book list, but there will also be a hybrid print and e-book bestseller list. A spokesperson said the paper “wanted to provide more comprehensive lists of which books are selling.” Unlike USA Today’s approach, the hybrid lists give no indication of whether e-books outsell print editions; a note on their methodology says only that […]
McGraw-Hill Ends Year with Q4 Profit Drop
McGraw Hill reported fourth quarter earnings of $153.8 million; or 50 cents a share, an 8 percent (or $27 million) drop from $167.3 million, or 53 cents a share, a year earlier. Excluding items such as acquisitions and a prior-year gain related to the sale of BusinessWeek, earnings rose to 55 cents from 51 cents. Total revenue rose 4.2 percent to $1.52 billion for the quarter, but the education side saw revenue slide 4.6 percent to $496.3 million and profits decrease to $496.3 million, largely attributed to an overall decline in textbook open territory sales. For the year, total net […]
OFT Opens Investigation Into UK Agency Pricing
With agency pricing now starting to take hold among some of the largest UK publishers, the Office of Fair Trading is opening an investigation “into whether arrangements that certain publishers have put in place with some retailers for the sale of e-books may breach competition rules”, according to a release obtained by the Bookseller. It’s the first time in four years since the OFT took a long look at industry practices, when the merger between EUK and Bertrams caught its attention and eventually led the Competition Commission to rule it was not anti-competitive. The OFT claims to have received a […]
Announcements: Murakami’s 1Q84 Has a US Pub Date; FCIC Chipped in $40K In Shipping Costs; and More
Knopf has announced that all three volumes of Haruki Murakami‘s novel 1Q84 will be published as a single, 928-page book on October 25. The first two volumes were translated by Jay Rubin and the third by Philip Gabriel, and the combined edition will have a hardcover list price of $30 and an e-book edition published simultaneously. The UK edition of 1Q84 will not include the third volume, but will be published around the same time. The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission released its final report on Thursday, with Public Affairs’ book version going on-sale the same day. Demand has evidently been […]
DBW: Making Sense of the Next 12 Months
DBW closed out Wednesday afterfoon with a lively panel co-hosted by Mike Shatzkin and Michael Cader discussing, debating, and sometimes agreeing on what changes will affect the publishing industry the most over the next twelve months. Moving beyond generalized statistics on the percentage of overall book sales in digital form, Simon Lipskar of Writers House noted that with publishing comprising a “multiplicity” of businesses, it’s important to make “a more granular level of distinctions between authors and audiences,” since some bestselling authors’ sales are now approaching 50% digital or more, while other authors are selling books at 20% or less. […]