The AAP reported sales for February, the second installment in their expanded Stat Shot tabulations. Though it doesn’t fit the narrative in the general and tech press, trade sales of $438 million were up 22 percent over last year’s revised count of $360 million, driven by a $58.5 million gain in children’s and YA (not doubt due in part to the major success of the Hunger Games books, which added 12.5 million units in print in the first three months of the year). Those sales were cleaner as well, with the absence of the big Borders returns a year ago […]
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Liz Egan has joined Amazon Publishing’s New York imprint as senior editor, focusing on fiction, memoir, and parenting. Previously she was the books editor at Self magazine for seven years. Tattered Cover manager of operations Neil Strandberg is joining the ABA’s staff in the new position of director of member technology. Relocating to New York, he starts on May 7. Eric Brandt has joined Yale University Press as senior editor, Humanities. He was most recently senior editor at Harper One. At Random House Children’s, Dominique Cimina was named director of publicity and corporate communications; Casey Lloyd and Elizabeth Zajac have both moved up to […]
eNews: Target Confirms Kindle Removal; Coehlo’s 99-Cent Backlist Promotion; Bundled Nooks With HMH Textbooks; and More
Target confirmed on Wednesday the report we mentioned in Wednesday’s issue indicating that that 1,800-store chain will stop carrying Kindle devices. Company executives wrote to vendors in January to protest moves such as Amazon’s price check app: “What we aren’t willing to do is let online-only retailers use our brick-and-mortar stores as a showroom for their products and undercut our prices.” Target was first big mass merchant to start stocking Kindle products in 2010. Wal-Mart, Best Buy and Staples are among the big retail chains that still sell Kindle products in their stores. Earlier this week Paulo Coehlo announced on […]
eNews: More from Lynch on Microsoft’s Nook Investment; Target Will Stop Stocking Kindle Devices On Apparent “Conflict of Interest”
The Kindle Fire may have been Target‘s top-selling tablet device last Thanksgiving, but as of this month it appears the retail chain will no longer stock it, or any Amazon e-reading product, due to an apparent and unspecified “conflict of interest.” According to an internal memo obtained by The Verge, Target “will be removing Amazon hardware from its locations starting this month” and “shipments of Kindles themselves will cease as of May 13.” (In fact, if you search for “kindle” on Target’s website, no results show up at all.) It’s not clear as to what the perceived conflict of interest […]
eNews: Warner Bros. Scripts Turned Into eBooks; DemiBooks’ New Children’s Appstore; and More
Warner Bros. announced it would sell four of the movie studio’s classic scripts — CASABLANCA, BEN-HUR, AN AMERICAN IN PARIS, and NORTH BY NORTHWEST — as enhanced ebooks for Kindle, Nook, and iPad. It’s the first part of a large-scale initiative in which they hope to turn hundreds of scripts into ebooks. The WSJ reports each title will retail for $10 and “includes the film’s actual shooting script and rare historical documents from the Warner Bros. archives.” President of Warner Bros. digital distribution Thomas Gewecke told the paper the company “had been looking at a variety of ideas to leverage […]
BN Puts Nook and College Business Into New Subsidiary, With Microsoft Investing $300 Million
The future of both Barnes & Noble and the digital reading business took new shape Monday morning as the bookseller announced the creation of a new subsidiary, into which they have transferred all of the Nook and BN College units (comprising “their digital device, digital content and college bookstore businesses.”) Microsoft is investing $300 million in that subsidiary–called simply NewCo for now (a standard corporate placeholder before the real name is finalized)–in exchange for preferred shares representing a 17.6 percent stake. That gives the newly-formed unit an approximate valuation of $1.7 billion (with BN’s share valued at $1.4 billion) — far more than […]