Harper Collins had used Bookshout.com since 2016 as the platform for ebooks sold directly to customers from their websites, but recently the Harlequin site told customers that “BookShout closed their business in early 2020, ceasing all operations.” (In an earlier email, Harlequin had told customers, “On December 30th, 2019, Bookshout unexpectedly informed us of their intention to close their business on January 31st, 2020.”) Harlequin recently switched to Glose as their new ebook provider. Direct ebook sales have been disabled on the main Harper Collins online store, but the company tells us they are switching to Glose as well and […]
eNews
Penguin Random House Pulls Titles from Unlimited Subscription Services Around the World
Earlier this month, as of January 15 by most indications, Penguin Random House removed its audiobook titles from a variety of “unlimited” listening subscription platforms around the world. The news was first reported out of Scandinavia, where the disappearance was notable on leading platform Storytel and its acquired subsidiaries (like Mofibo in Denmark), as well as on their leading competitors such as Bonnier’s Bookbeat and Russia’s Nextory. Missed in that reporting is that PRH’s titles have also been removed from Scribd, where their audiobooks were also a notable part of the offering. (When PRH audio first participated with Scribd in […]
Briefs
Film/TV Michael Chabon and Ayelet Waldman, through their company Escapist Fare, have signed a multi-year overall deal with CBS TV Studios. That deal starts with a limited series adaptation of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay for Showtime, but includes a number of other projects in development. Akiva Goldsman and Alex Kurtzman will executive produce Kavalier & Clay, and Paramount Television will produce (since Paramount Pictures owns the film/TV rights). Initiatives This year James Patterson will give holiday gifts totaling over $200,000 to Barnes & Noble booksellers around the country as well, in addition to his annual holiday bonuses […]
Reisman Admits Indigo’s Transformation Hit “A Brick Wall,” Will Expand Proprietary Product and Experiences Next
Indigo ceo Heather Reisman spoke to BNN Bloomberg as part of the groundbreaking ceremonies for the University of Toronto’s Schwartz Reisman Innovation Centre, funded by a $100 million donation from Reisman and her husband Gerry Schwartz. Reisman is more candid than she has been during recent Indigo investor calls in acknowledging that the first phase of the bookseller’s transformation is played out and more dramatic changes are needed. “As many people know, we started a big transformation a few years ago and we had really good success with it. And then we ran pretty much into what I call a […]
Scribd Raises $58 Million, As Some of Those Unauthorized Snapshots Have Been Removed
Subscription service Scribd announced raising $58 million in equity financing from Spectrum Equity. They say the funds will be used “to continue to operate sustainably and efficiently while accelerating our growth, product innovations, content acquisition and continued investment in our employees.” Despite the raise, Scribd has said that it has been profitable since 2016 — even declaring its model “more profitable than we wanted” before going back to mostly unlimited access in early 2018. Scribd irritated a number of key partners earlier this summer among authors, agents and publishers when they launched their Snapshots program without permission, creating their own […]
For Your Lawyers: Internet Archive’s Wikipedia Deal Raises Profile of Disputed Online Lending
Since 2010 the Internet Archive has built a massive online lending library of over 1 million titles based on a disputed (or invented, depending upon your perspective) view of copyright: They have scanned books from libraries, including a significant corpus of recent, in-copyright books, and lend the digital versions on the same one-lend-at-a-time-per-copy rule that publishers impose on ebooks that they lawfully license to library customers. The IA calls this “controlled digital lending,” which has been vigorously disputed in recent years by publishing organizations including the SFWA, the Authors Guild, and the AAP. That challenge may become more urgent now […]