The NYT provided advance publicity this weekend for former Hyperion editor-in-chief Will Schwalbe’s new venture, Cookstr.com. Katie Workman is both editor-in-chief and chief marketing officer. Going live later this month, it presents recipes from chefs who are also well-known cookbook authors (and often Hyperion authors, such as Nigella Lawson and Jaime Oliver), and aims to sell print copies of those cookbooks as well. Schwalbe says they will start with about 2,500 recipes from 100 cookbooks. The article says that Nielsen Bookscan recorded cookbook sales for 2007 of 13.9 million copies, down almost 7 percent from 14.9 million copies sold in […]
eNews
Test Program for Universal Online Catalog
The innovators at Above the Treeline will begin testing an online interactive catalog of books from multiple publishers. The six-month pilot program features books from Chronicle, Harper, Wiley, Penguin, Random House, Simon & Schuster, Thomas Nelson, and Tyndale House. Called Edelweiss, the new interface aspires to let retailers “manage their catalogs easily in a single online library, to view dynamic, enriched content about new titles, and to efficiently integrate orders and bibliographic information back into their point-of-sale systems.” CEO John Rubin explains to BTW that they have tried to redesign the catalog to work as an interactive online product rather […]
Random Moves to Reduce eRoyalty Rates
Literary agent (as well as ebook publisher via E-Reads) Richard Curtis posts on his site about Random House’s recent letter to agents explaining their intention to reduce ebook royalty rates on new contracts as of December 1. The new proposal is for a royalty of 25 percent of amount received on sales–compared by Curtis to an earlier contract that provided 25 percent of the retail price until the advance was earned out, and 15 percent thereafter. (Authors who agreed to a lower electronic royalty in the early days will have their rates adjusted upwards.) The company says their previous rates […]
Harvard Remains a Google Dissenter
Harvard University was one of the earliest Google Library project participants to decide to let the search giant scan and post only out-of-copyright books from its collections, and the Harvard Crimson says that policy will not change even if the court approves the legal settlements announced earlier this week. University Library director Robert Darnton said in a letter to staff. “As we understand it, the settlement contains too many potential limitations on access to and use of the books by members of the higher education community and by patrons of public libraries.” He also noted: “The settlement provides no assurance […]
Free Books, As Long As You Blog
Thomas Nelson has launched a formal program to enroll interested bloggers and provide them with free review copies of “select titles” in exchange for the promise of a posting of a review of at least 200 words on a blog and at Amazon.com. Nelson ceo and active blogger Mike Hyatt credits his own blog with inspiring the initiative. It “originally came from heightened interest on my blog, around two of our recent releases, Stephen Mansfield’s The Faith of Barack Obama and Lynne Spears’ Through the Storm. My readers, many of whom are active bloggers themselves, wanted to engage in the […]
Google Questions, If Not Answers
The settlement with Google is nothing if not complex–the basic agreements runs to 141 pages, before the copious attachments. One of these, intended as a simple summary of the settlement for authors who think they qualify as part of the class action suit, runs 36 pages by itself. There will be lots of questions, both strategic and practical, and most of the answers will only make themselves known over time. Here are just a few that come to mind; feel free to add your own (questions or answers) in the comments field at PublishersMarketplace: — Does making a book available […]