Retail Week reports that Borders UK, which had already appointed Clearwater Corporate Finance to “seek new funding”, has sent out an information memorandum to “selected private equity houses and trade buyers”. The opportunity may be there for Borders UK to broaden its scope, Retail Planet Analyst Paola Montealegre commented that the store’s potential plans “may not be enough to compete with new channels such as supermarkets and internet retailers.”Retail Week
New Ventures: Media Takeover Firm Launched by Publishing Veterans, Quartet Press Launches
Former Informa finance director Anthony Foye and former Taylor & Francis CEO David Smith have joined forces to form the Critical Information Group, “with the aim of acquiring business media companies worth up to 1 billion pounds ($1.6 billion).” Smith and Foye said they would concentrate on B2B media businesses in Britain and overseas, with a focus on publishing and events. CIG raised 1.56 million pounds from nine British institutional investors (each will hold 5.3 percent of the company) in Thursday’s initial public offering, with a further 1.45 million invested by CIG’s directors.Reuters In other publishing venture news, Kassia Kroszer, […]
BEA Wrapup: The Forces of Contradiction
Enough ink has been spilled and will be spilled here and elsewhere about the big stories of BEA – the decreased attendance, the absence of certain major publishers on the show floor, the call for new ventures, all things e-book. But if there’s one big takeaway from this year’s convention, it’s that, at least to my mind, it was all about contradictory forces. Yesterday was the last Sunday of BEA, and yet most everyone I spoke with found it to be the most relaxing and enjoyable day of the show – probably because there were no expectations, smaller crowds and […]
Don't Let That Fool You, It Really Is BEA
Apologies in advance for the slightly self-serving nature of this Day Two Dispatch from BEA. It did come to a close for me, after all, with the end of the joint interview I conducted with James Ellroy and Colin Harrison at the Uptown Stage. If you want to know how it went, better ask somebody else – live interviews put me in a fugue state that I can’t shake off completely for a few hours after it’s over. But I can say the mental gymnastics of the role of interviewer turned around what was something of a frustrating day, this […]
More Day One Highlights: Giving It Away, Musical Keynote
Late Thursday morning, Simba’s Michael Norris introduced “Giving it Away: When Free eBooks Make Sense And When They Don’t” by citing, as all ebook-related panels seem to these days, with some statistics. According to a survey Simba recently published about ebook buying and reading habits, 8% of the US adult population bought at least one book in 2008 – but 15% of them said they had read an ebook. Discrepancies between what people buy and read are common, but for the purposes of this panel, it was a natural segue to talk of whether giving books away for free online […]
The Ties that Bind: ABA Opening Keynote Session
It took quite a while for the ABA’s opening keynote to get past the preambles and underway. Roughly a half hour into the allotted time, R.J. Julia owner Roxanne Coady explained that the panel’s purpose was “to talk a little bit about the partnership between authors and booksellers – formerly the bedrock of our literary landscape” at a time of “extraordinary disintermediation.” There’s an assumption about independents, she explained, of a “Mom and Pop/Apple Pie theory – that we have to exist”–but she suggested it’s more a matter of the “cute pet theory – we want them around, just not […]