Wiley-Blackwell has partnered with the American Physiological Society to produce Physiology Online, an evolving compendium of current knowledge of all aspects of the field. The publication will be launched online in January 2010 Featherproof Books is launching a subscription-based imprint called Paper Egg Books, which will determine print runs of its titles by the number of subscribers who sign up for the program at $20/year. The sixth annual LBF Lifetime Achievement Award in International Publishing will be awarded to Houghton Mifflin Harcourt editor Drenka Willen. BEA has lowered the hotel rates for the 2009 convention, with most nightly rates dropping […]
People
At Faber, Hannah Griffiths, formerly Head of Paperback Publishing, has been appointed Director of Paperback Publishing, and Sarah Savitt, formerly Paperbacks Manager, has been promoted to Editor. Phillip Wagner has been appointed the new CEO of BCA effective immediately, replacing George Saul, who left the company last week. Most recently Wagner worked with Aurelius, which bought BCA at the end of 2008. Sudanese novelist Tayeb Salih, best known for his 1966 novel Season of Migration to the North, died in London Wednesday aged around 80.Reuters Bram Cavin, a longtime book editor with Macmillan, Doubleday and Prentice-Hall, died on February 14 […]
S&P Downgrades B&N Shares
Standard & Poor has downgraded Barnes & Noble stock from “hold” to “strong sell”, noting that B&N shares “have risen about 40% over the past 3 months and are now trading well above” S&P’s target price. The firm also expects further weakening in sales over the next fiscal year and is “also concerned by the long-term trend of declining adult readership levels.” B&N’s Board of Directors also declared a quarterly cash dividend of $0.25 per share, payable on March 31 to stockholders of record at the close of business on March 10.Business Week
Amazon's Credit Upgraded; Kindle Expansion Hitch
S&P also bumped up Amazon’s credit rating one notch to ‘BBB-‘ from ‘BB+’, citing the company’s “strong brand, robust performance, and improved credit-protection metrics” during a “difficult retail environment.” In other Amazon news, Mark Bertils puts the lack of Kindle availability in Canada, the UK, and other territories squarely on the shoulder of Jasper Wireless, which is Amazon’s direct wireless partner, not Sprint: “I am willing to bet that Amazon’s contract with Jasper is exclusive. For the Kindle to grow, Jasper has to grow. And the MVNO market is dead everywhere but in the US and Jasper’s specialty — machine-to-machine […]
Dubai Festival Responds to Censorship Allegations
The inaugural Emirates Airlines International Festival of Literature in Dubai got off to a rocky start yesterday with reports that Geraldine Bedell, originally under consideration but not on the festival’s final schedule, had been disinvited because her novel, The Gulf Between Us, contains references to homosexuality. “I do not want our festival remembered for the launch of a controversial book,” the Times of London reports festival director Isobel Abulhoul wrote to Bedell. “If we launched the book and a journalist happened to read it, then you could imagine the political fallout that would follow.” Bedell also told the Times of […]
New (ish) Works by Mailer, Cheever, Dick
The New York Review of Books runs the second of three previously unpublished selections of Norman Mailer’s letters with annotations from the author’s biographer, J. Michael Lennon. John Cheever’s short story “Of Love: A Testimony”, runs in installments throughout the week on FiveChapters.com, its first appearance in over 66 years. And though it’s a bit of a stretch to call it a “new” work by Philip K. Dick, his fifth and final wife Tessa has self-published The Owl of Daylight, which she terms a “tribute” to the novel of the same name her former husband was working on until his […]