A judge has denied a Warner Bros. motion to dismiss 20th Century Fox’s lawsuit over Warners’ right to make a film based on the graphic novel “Watchmen” by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons. The ruling keeps alive the possibility Fox may share in the profits for the film, slated for release in March 2009, though the studio really wants the project to be cancelled outright. “When you have copyright infringement, there are some damages you never recover,” a source close to the litigation told Variety. At the heart of Fox’s suit, filed in February, is the contention that it never […]
Announcements
Anna Crowe has joined Houghton Mifflin Harcourt as a Senior Publicist. She was previously with Bantam Dell.
Braman to Holt
Marjorie Braman will take up the long-vacant post of editor-in-chief at Henry Holt, starting September 8. An executive editor at HarperCollins, she has been there fore 12 years. Holt president Dan Farley says in the announcement, “She is one of the leading editors in the industry and her excellent track record at Harper Collins is notable for her publishing of quality and commercial books at the same time that she has excelled as a partner for her authors and as a team player for her colleagues.” Braman says: “I hope I bring to Henry Holt, where there is a long […]
First Round Bidding for Reed Business
Reed Elsevier finally begins the bidding for the right to buy Reed Business Information (parent company of Publishers Weekly, Variety and many other publications) and, reports the Telegraph, up to a dozen offers have come in for the first round. Most of those believed to be vying for the whole division or for parts of RBI are private equity firms like TPG and DLJ Merchant Banking, Cinven and Candover, Bain, Apollo Management and Providence Equity Partners, while McGraw-Hill has teamed up with Advent and Quadrangle for a joint bid. The WSJ says that with “many of the 12 or so […]
Kafka's Estate, Possible Pornography in the News
The recent death of Esther Hoffe, secretary to the man who famously defied Franz Kafka’s wish for his papers to be burned, has put the estate in question – and in the news again. As her mother did, reports the NYT, Hava Hoffe is keeping scholars and archivists up at night wondering about the condition of what they believe are letters, diaries, photographs and perhaps unpublished works of Kafka and Brod. “This material belongs in Jerusalem,” argued Mark Gelber, a Kafka scholar and a professor of comparative literature at Ben Gurion University in Beersheba. “Brod became a Zionist before the […]
Gossip Girl DVD Features Audiobook Tie-in
Even though the success of the TV version of Gossip Girl has, more or less, given the backlist of Cecily von Ziegesar’s series a healthy sales uptick, the same cannot be said for the audiobooks, with “consistently moribund” sales of less than 1,000 yearly according to BookScan. “The teen and the late-teen market has been a really tough market for us,” said Anthony Goff, publisher of Hachette Audio and Digital Media. So Hachette has teamed up with Warner Video and those who buy the first season of the show on DVD will also get the audiobook of book one, narrated […]