President Obama will announce later today two new steps in the ConnectED efforts. The Open eBooks initiative will make ebooks said to be worth over $250 million available for free to low-income students, through an ereader app developed by the New York Public Library. All of the five largest trade publishers are participating, along with Candlewick, Bloomsbury and Lee & Low. Macmillan is providing unlimited access to approximately 2,500 titles for K-12 readers; S&S is contributing access to their entire catalog of books for children 4 to 14, comprising 3,000 titles; Penguin Random House is promising an “extensive offering” of titles; […]
eNews
Penguin Random House Launches Unified Consumer Site
Penguin and Random House have come together on the web, launching a newly-designed site at PenguinRandomHouse.com that presents to consumers the combined catalog from across the company. Showing books to readers is the new site’s primary job: “With thousands of new books to choose from every year, it can be overwhelming trying to find a new read. We’ve made it easier than ever to surface books you’ll love through clean design, sophisticated genre pages, and suggestions based on bestsellers, your category preferences and more.” CEO Markus Dohle writes to employees this morning, “PenguinRandomHouse.com is an extension of our service to authors and […]
KU for March: New High for the Pool But Almost A New Low Per Book
Earlier this week Amazon made their monthly announcement of how much money they would retroactively chose to share with self-published authors whose work was read via the Kindle Unlimited subscription program. The total pool allocated for March reached a new high, of $9.3 million. Borrows were robust as well, at approximately 6.956 million — which left authors with a payment of $1.337 per read. That’s the second-lowest payment per read since the initiative launched, just above the $1.33 per read paid for October 2014.
People, Etc.
At Running Press, Jordana Tusman has been promoted to senior editor. After the London Book Fair wraps up today, there will be a memorial service in London tomorrow for former Random House UK deputy chairman Simon Master, who died in January. The service is at 11 at St Luke’s Church, Sydney Street, with a 12.15 reception in the Culford Room, Cadogan Hall, 5 Sloane Terrace. Announcements Vintage Books’ Vintage Shorts imprint will release 31 short story ebooks, including originals by Alexander McCall Smith, Hari Kunzru, Maeve Binchy, Patricio Pron, and Carrie Brown, during the month of May (one each day) to celebrate Short Story Month. […]
Scribd Adds Penguin Random House…For Audio
Up until now Penguin Random House has not participated in any of the major ebook subscription offerings, but the publisher has a new exclusive with Scribd for audiobooks. [N.B.: Scribd described the deal as exclusive, but PRH noted after this ran “that Scribd is not the only retailer offering audiobooks on a subscription basis. Our audio titles have been available for a number of years via a multiple retailers with various subscription models, including Audible, Audiobooks.com, and Overdrive in the library market, among others.”] PRH is making available more than 9,000 audio titles for unlimited listening as part of Scribd’s subscription program (which […]
Harper Likes $14.99
After we reported a week ago that Harper told a wide swath of ebook accounts that they would return to full agency for ebooks as of Tuesday morning Pacific time, the big question wasn’t so much Amazon as pricing. In September 2012, when HarperCollins was the first settling publisher to comply with the consent decrees through “agency lite” pricing, they also raised many of their consumer list ebook prices, often by many dollars above the original iBooks pricing “brackets” that pegged ebook prices to print book prices. As it turned out, Harper was the only of the settling publishers to […]