At the close of Wednesday’s Making Information Pay conference, current BISG (Book Industry Study Group) chairman and Hachette Book Group president Ken Michaels addressed the importance of industry cooperation, particularly now that a simple “linear, rational, supply chain that we recognize and understand…no longer exists.” He asked, “the most important question I can convey from the podium today is this…. Can you really go it alone in isolation without participation in an industry group like BISG?” At a time when many have been intimidated about working together, even on common problems, Michaels said, “The important thing is that BISG continues […]
Book Fairs
The Big Questions
Our Publishers Launch Conference BEA, on Wednesday, May 29 aims to bypass the usual cross-section of digital fragments and aim straight at the issues on people’s minds and of greatest strategic consequence right now. So we’ll evaluate the coming Penguin Random House merger from a number of angles, along with Amazon’s ever-growing footprint — all of which leads to our major theme of assessing scale in its many forms. Scale isn’t just about size, though. It’s about leverage and resources (not just financial ones) and how you deploy them to strategic advantage. And it’s about deciding which core functions and […]
O’Reilly Discontinues TOC Conferences & Website
O’Reilly will end its Tools of Change Publishing conferences after seven years of operating in several cities, including New York, Frankfurt, and Bologna. In addition, the companion website will also close, and TOC co-chairs Kat Meyer and Joe Wikert will leave the company. “The decision to discontinue a popular conference was not one we made lightly,” publisher Tim O’Reilly said in the announcement on the TOC blog, “But after TOC 2013, we realized that a conference was no longer the best vehicle for us to contribute to publishing’s forward movement…Seven years on, ‘digital publishing’ is well on its way to simply […]
A Correction and An Extension
Due to an error at an outside registration vendor, the price for our big Publishers Launch BEA Conference on May 29 was prematurely raised to full list yesterday. On behalf of BEA and PLC, we apologize for the mistake. That mistake has been corrected and to make up for the inconvenience, BEA has extended the deadline to take advantage of the early registration discount through the end of day tomorrow, May 2. (Anyone who already registered and should have been provided a lower price will be contacted by BEA.) You can purchase the discounted conference ticket through a dedicated Publishers […]
Learn, and Save
This is our final reminder that after today, the early enrollment savings on our big Publishers Launch BEA conference on Wednesday, May 29 expire and tickets go to full price. The event features a timely and strategic focus on the big issues that matters most right now and going forward: Scale and Consolidation. Top executives from Random House, Hachette Book Group and F+W Media will describe how they are deploying scalable solutions to distribution, publishing systems and e-commerce. Former Macmillan president and now private equity senior advisor Brian Napack will frame how scale has become more important than ever, and provide […]
Pre-London Dealmaking Is Moderate As the Money Goes to Fiction
It’s time for our annual look at dealmaking activity in advance of the London Book Fair and as usual, we keep trying to find ways of looking at our deal report data that can reveal meaningful patterns rather than slight statistical oddities. It’s hard, because every weekday brings an average of 30 to 50 deal reports. So if we did this analysis tomorrow, with one more pre-LBF day of reports included the limited-window data would increase. Therefore, below we are going to show you some data from the past month as well as year-to-date deal totals. First up is year-to-date […]