LibraryThing.com has launched a new free service, LibraryThing for Publishers, starting with Orbit, Zondervan and three other publishers. Open to all, the new feature is designed to let publishers “showcase their new titles and interact with the LibraryThing community.” The pages display bookshelves of the publishers’ titles, link to LT reviews, and more.DescriptionOrbit Books sample
eNews
Indigo Sales and Losses Both Rise, As Kobo Costs Weigh
First quarter results of Canada’s biggest bookseller–or “largest book, gift and specialty toy retailer” as they now describe themselves–Indigo carry an echo of what Barnes & Noble faces right. Same-store sales at their superstores rose by 1.5 percent, while smaller-store comps declined just 0.7 percent and overall sales of $204.3 million (CA) were up $10.7 million or 5.5 percent from a year ago. But their online sales remain flat in the face of Amazon’s growing strength in Canada and the net loss more than doubled, from $2.3 million to $5.3 million. CEO Heather Reisman says “the increased loss is not […]
eNews: Houghton Negotiates with Pat Conroy to Allow Release of Open Road Backlist eBooks, and More
The stalemate over electronic rights to some of Pat Conroy’s backlist titles has been resolved and Open Road is going ahead with ebook release of the titles that they announced almost a year ago. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt spokesperson Lori Glazer tells the AP, “in this instance we negotiated an agreed-upon separation of print from electronic, to our mutual satisfaction.” Arthur Klebanoff at Rosetta Books, who had published an ebook version of The Prince of Tides, says: “Did I want to renew this license? The answer is ‘Yes.’ But until the arrival of the Kindle, you had a tiny, tiny marketplace. […]
Dorchester: Digital, or Desperate?
Dorchester Publishing has switched to subsistence mode, though they have tried to sprinkle some digital fairy dust over the move. The mass market publisher has struggled for some time, now. At the beginning of the year they sold both frontlist and backlist titles from many of their top authors to Avon–an imprint of their distributor, HarperCollins. Earlier this summer, the Romance Writers of America reportedly cancelled Dorchester’s participation in their annual conference because the company was “past due in fulfilling contractual obligations to some of their authors.” And company president John Prebich confirmed to the media last Friday that their […]
Google’s Rough Count of the World’s Books–and Quirky Metadata
The Google Books blog has an interesting post on their current rough count of, using a definition of “book” that is “very close to what ISBNs are supposed to represent” if only all books had ISBNs and all non-books didn’t. So they do “count” different versions of the same work: lots of different editions of Hamlet, with different forewords, commentaries, and translated into different languages, as well as hardcovers and paperbacks of the same editions. On that basis, the current tabulation is 129,864,880 books. That number is likely to decline, however, as their algorithms get better at detecting libraries’ bound […]
People
Amanda Ridout, who left Harper UK as managing director in May 2009 to pursue “confidential” ventures, has joined Phaidon as managing director. Investor Luke Johnson, who owned Borders UK on its path to bankruptcy, is joining the Phaidon board as a nonexecutive director. Emily Lavelle has joined Public Affairs as a publicist. She was most recently an associate publicist at Crown. Spiegel has posted an English version of their interview with Random House ceo Markus Dohle. The piece drew wire service attention at the beginning of the week for his guess that “I can imagine that we’ll end up above […]