The deal that Amazon Publishing’s New York adult line has been mentioning to agents since it started acquiring has formally come to pass: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt has executed a broad “print licensing agreement” and will issue the unit’s entire list in print form in North America, including through Amazon.com itself. HMH will publish the books under a distinct new imprint, called New Harvest. (There is some confusing wording in the press release, so you should be clear on two points: HMH is licensing rights and will be the print publisher, not just the distributor, and the HMH editions will be […]
eNews
Corporate: Apple Sold 15.4 million iPads in First Quarter; Meredith Buys AllRecipes.com
Apple reported record earnings for the first quarter of its fiscal year, ending December 31, and beat Wall Street expectations so handily the stock was halted after hours Tuesday, rising more than $30 a share. The company sold 15.4 million iPads and 37 million iPhones during the quarter on net income of $13.1 billion, and $43.4 billion in revenue. Profits more than doubled compared to the first quarter of 2011. Apple sold over 40 million iPads in 2011, and has moved more than 55 million units since launching in early 2010. Release Though Random House was among the four reported […]
BN Offers to Share Digital Reading Data and Work With Indies to Preserve Bookstores
Barnes & Noble vp of ebooks Jim Hilt told the Digital Book World audience Tuesday morning some things you aren’t accustomed to hearing from the industry’s largest chain of bookstores. Speaking to “the power of the independent bookstores,” Hilt said “the notion that we are competing with each other is, I believe, untrue.” He added, “as people move on to other forms of content, what we want to do is to be working together to get more books in front on more readers.” Without offering further specifics, Hilt suggested that BN would be willing to work with independents to help […]
DBW: CEOs Look to New Opportunities
A panel of ceo’s–Ellen Archer from Hyperion, John Ingram from Ingram, Dominique Raccah from Sourcebooks, and John Donatich from Yale University Press, moderated by F+W’s David Nussbaum–addressed a variety of issues at Digital Book World Tuesday morning. On the encroachments of retailers like Amazon into publishing itself, Raccah observed that “low-hanging fruit is going to go fast. If it’s easy, get out of it.” She is focusing Sourcebooks on “reader-centric models” where they can identify complex problems and serve them. Archer noted that yesterday’s NBC News publishing announcement “was particularly interesting” and said she is looking to “shape my business […]
DBW: Publishing Execs to Invest In Consumer Data and Relationships
“We want to lead the league in insights per minute,” Digital Book World conference chair Mike Shatzkin said at the show’s opening Tuesday morning, and James McQuivey of Forrester Research helped to further that goal with additional reports from their survey of 74 book publishing executives. (We ran initial excerpts the other week.) McQuivey found that 70 percent of those executives polled “believe that to succeed in the future, they must have a direct consumer relationship”–and 66 percent “will invest in acquiring customer data to help accomplish that” in 2012. Executives themselves are split as to what makes for the […]
DBW: Shatzkin’s Opening Thoughts
Digital Book World conference chair Mike Shatzkin began the ever-growing third annual gathering before an expected crowd of 1,600 people or more with a rapid-fire checklist of “the things publishers need to be thinking about in 2012,” many of which drove the agenda of the two-day conference. (As you know, Publishers Lunch and Publishers Launch Conferences are co-presenters of DBW.) Among Shatzkin’s points: “Publishers need to be at least as adventurous and experimental about pricing as authors are on their own.” He pointed out that, while XML has grown, “a lot of useful information is routinely lost between an author’s […]