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Bloomsbury’s Last Potter-Based Report Bloomsbury reported preliminary results for fiscal 2007 this morning, with Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows helping to double sales for the year, at 150 million pounds, with pre-tax profit more than tripling to 17.9 million pounds. Publishing Khaled Hosseini and Elizabeth Gilbert in the UK and Germany provided another boost, as did their German edition of Jonathan Littell’s Les Bienviellantes/The Kindly Ones (not due to be released in its English translation until 2009), which has sold over 100,000 copies in German. The US unit, where there has been major staff turnover, declined 3.6 percent in […]

More from Amazon on POD, and Toasters Amazon’s Patty Smith spoke to Computerworld further about their new requirement that POD-based small publishers and self-publishing companies print their titles through Booksurge if they want the books sold directly by Amazon. “When we publish a print-on-demand title in our own fulfillment center, we can then marry that on-demand book with a regular book, or a toaster, if that’s what the customer ordered in the same box and ship it the same day to the customer. And that print-on-demand book that we printed is also eligible for free shipping.” She reiterated that companies […]

Johnston to Form New Imprint for S&S Children’s; Andrews Moves to Little, Brown More talent from the formerly separate Harcourt Trade and Houghton Mifflin continues to spread throughout the business. Harcourt children’s book veteran Allyn Johnston has joined Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing and will be vp and publisher of a new imprint located in San Diego. Johnston will report to S&S Children’s trade publisher Rubin Pfeffer. Calling her “one of the most respected editors in the business,” Pfeffer notes “her base in San Diego assures that as she continues to discover and develop writers and illustrators, she will bring […]

Books-A-Million: Weak Finish to Decent Year Fourth quarter sales at BAM tailed off after the holiday period (when same-store sales were flat), with comparable sales down 1.6 percent against a year ago, though up 3 percent overall at $168 million. Net income fell slightly to $16.5 million for the quarter. For the full fiscal year, sales were up 2.8 percent percent to $535 million, a Potter-powered 1.4 percent increase on a same-store basis, but net income fell by $2.4 million to $16.5 million. (Direct comparisons are a little tricky, since the prior fiscal year comprised 53 weeks instead of 52 […]

Dispensed With? Writer Joe Lavin breaks the embargo on Jose Canseco’s second book about the same subject via his web site, picked up by traditional media. He found VINDICATED on sale in a Cambridge bookstore ahead of the April 1 release date. In brief: “The [Magglio] Ordonez story is, by now, routine — just that old yarn of one player injecting another with steroids, possibly in the buttocks.” “The evidence against Clemens is somewhat flimsy, and Canseco even admits that he’s not completely sure that Clemens used steroids.… He does later state that Clemens did not attend the much-discussed barbecue […]

Borders, Still Dirt Cheap, Jumps as Goldman Hopes for BN Buy We’ve always regarded it as a poverty of imagination that Barnes & Noble is often tipped as a potential acquirer of Borders, and they strike us as among the least likely of acquirers. But Goldman Sachs analyst Matthew Fassler wrote in a report yesterday “we see improved prospects for a deal,” and that “Barnes & Noble could generate significant accretion from an acquisition of Borders.” As Bloomberg reports, “Barnes & Noble may add more than 10 percent to profit if it paid as much as $13 a share for […]