Matthew Ballast has been promoted to acting director of publicity for Grand Central Publishing, replacing Jennifer Romanello, who recently departed the company. Rachel Burley has been appointed vp, director of open access at Wiley, where she will facilitate the identification of open access opportunities and lead the development of products, policy, technology, processes, sales, and marketing initiatives necessary to provide support to authors. She has been at the company for five years, most recently as vp, publisher for current protocols. At S&S Children’s, Jacqui Hudson has been named ebook developer and specialist for the Free Press, Aladdin, Simon Spotlight, Paula […]
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At Ten Speed Press, Lisa Westmoreland has been promoted to senior editor. Jeff Olson has been promoted to executive editor, Business at Apress, a division of Springer Science+Business Media. Marc Visnick has joined Callisto Media as director of sales. He was most recently director of sales, North America for Lonely Planet. Claire Kelley has joined Melville House Books as director, academic and library marketing. She was most recently marketing manager at Free Press. In addition, Dustin Kurtz has been named marketing manager, responsible for the company’s bookseller outreach programs and marketing for its series publications. Previously he was a buyer […]
Briefs: Gallimard Officially Acquires Flammarion; Smashwords Set To Provide Self-Published eBooks to Califa Library Consortium; and More
After months on the block, with a number of bidders dropping out and an asking price that nobody wanted to meet, RCS is officially selling French publisher Flammarion to Gallimard — the front-runner all along — for 251 million Euros, nearly 50 million below that original asking price. Reuters reports that RCS will receive about 230 million from the sale, and will post a consolidated gain of 88 million euros. The deal is expected to close in September. A number of publishers met with the European Commission in Brussels Tuesday to call for the streamlining of taxes on ebook purchases […]
New Pew Internet Report Shows Many Americans Don’t Even Know Libraries Offer eBook Lending
Following up on their April report about the overall ebook market in the US, and just in time for ALA, on Friday Pew Internet released a new survey pertaining solely to ebook usage in libraries, surveying 2,986 Americans ages 16 and older at various points between November 2011 and February 2012, with additional qualitative material drawn from a May 2012 survey of over 6500 respondents. 12 percent of ebook readers surveyed by Pew said they borrowed at least one ebook from the library in the past year, with book borrowers also saying they read an average (the mean number) of […]
eNews: Kobo Touch Available in Japan Next Month; Callaway’s HAPPY New Venture is A Lifestyle App; and More
The Kobo Touch will be available for sale in Japan as soon as July, according to a report from the Asahi Shimbun. Rakuten ceo and chairman Hiroshi Mikitani said the company plans to price the Kobo Touch reader at around 10,000 yen ($126) or cheaper, with plans to sell 50,000 ebook titles by the end of the year. “As a Japanese company, we cannot lose (to overseas rivals),” Mikitani told the paper. “With Kobo devices, we will be able to export Japanese content. The Japanese publishing industry will become a huge content industry.” Further details will be announced at a […]
Partnering With 3M, Penguin To Make New eBooks Available Again at NYPL and BPL In One-Year Pilot Program
More than four months after pulling frontlist digital titles from libraries, Penguin will make them available again in August at the New York Public Library and the Brooklyn Public Library in a one-year pilot program with renewable terms. And after parting ways with OverDrive, Penguin will work with 3M on this program which, if successful, could be rolled out to libraries across the country. 3M signed an agreement with the two libraries only this past Monday. Under the terms of the new program, the NYPL and BPL will be able to lend more than 15,000 Penguin frontlist titles with a […]