As expected — albeit on a slow timetable — Italy’s Competition Authority announced last Thursday it has formally opened an investigation into the proposed purchase of RCS Media’s book publishing group by Mondadori. (After more than 7 months of negotiation and consideration, the 127.5 million euro sale was agreed to by the RCS board last October.) The combined companies are expected to control approximately 35 percent of the trade book market in Italy. The CA will aim to “determine whether the acquisition of RCS books by Mondadori will result in the creation or strengthening of a dominant position” in the trade publishing market. […]
Bookstores
PRH Recovers From Systems Outage; ABA Winter Institute Faces Winter Storm
Penguin Random House has been working to overcome widespread systems issues at their Westminster, MD facility since early Tuesday morning that interrupted key internal resources, including order processing, as well as many of the company’s web sites. Ironically, the outages aligned with the UK launch of their new consumer-facing website Wednesday, even as the corporate UK site was down. (That site is live again now.) Penguinrandomhouse.com, the global corporate site and a wide variety of other sites run out of the US — including the company’s intranet — remain offline as we write this Wednesday morning. For better or for worse, […]
Amazon Expands to Penn, Expected to Acquire French Shipper
Amazon continues to expand in the college bookstore market, announcing another of their “staffed package pickup points” coming to the University of Pennsylvania campus this spring. It will be a 3,558 square foot space, “strategically located” in the university’s largest dining commons. Unlike previous pick-up stations at Purdue and UMass, it will also provide “communal work spaces with interactive media pods where students can connect their laptops and mobile devices to TV monitors for presentations, brainstorming, studying, and collaborating.” Penn vp of business services Marie Witt said the university had “discovered that almost half of all packages delivered to Penn student mail […]
Barnes & Noble “Pleased” with Flattish Holiday Sales
Barnes & Noble celebrated a happily mediocre holiday sales season, in a press release reporting on the nine weeks sales of through January 2. Total sales of $1.1 billion were slightly lower, down 0.8 percent, “due to lower online sales and store closures.” Same-store sales inched up, rising 0.6% over the holidays. Nook sales continue their fade, per the year’s pattern, down 25.8 percent to $41.2 million. Though the bungled summer relaunch of their web site clearly continued to cause problems, new ceo Ronald Boire says in the release, “We were also encouraged by the improved performance of BN.com during December, as the […]
Benjamin’s The Swans of Fifth Avenue Leads February Indie Next List; Sepetys Tops LibraryReads List
Melanie Benjamin’s newest historical novel The Swans of Fifth Avenue is booksellers’ number one pick on the ABA’s February Indie Next list. The rest of the list features: Be Frank With Me, by Julia Claiborne Johnson The Yid, by Paul Goldberg Breaking Wild, by Diane Les Becquets Orphan X, by Gregg Hurwitz The Portable Velben, by Elizabeth McKenzie The Forgetting Time, by Sharon Guskin All the Birds in the Sky, by Charlie Jane Anders The Things We Keep, by Sally Hepworth The Arrangement, by Ashley Warlick Sweetgirl, by Travis Mulhauser Georgia: A Novel of Georgia O’Keeffe, by Dawn Tripp My […]
Briefs: Amazon Holiday Stats, Printers Row Drops Print, and More
Amazon‘s annual holiday release featured a blizzard of whimsical non-statistics about all of the things they sold during the busiest shopping time of the year. Among the ebook-related bits, “the most popular Kindle book purchased on Christmas day was The Snow Child, by Eowyn Ivey.” The most gifted Kindle book during the holidays was the self-published Rath’s Deception by Piers Platt, and the most borrowed book all year in the Kindle Unlimited subscription program was No Ordinary Billionaire by J.S. Scott. The Chicago Tribune’s Printers Row Journal, a subscription-based supplement of book reviews and more, will drop the print version in the […]