Veronica Park has joined Fuse Literary as an associate agent. She was previously literary agent and marketing specialist at Corvisiero Literary Agency. Alexandra Franklin has been promoted to associate agent at the Vicky Bijur Literary Agency. Maya Baran has joined Viking Penguin as publicity manager, returning to publishing full-time. Most recently she has assisted Broadside PR and The Countryman Press. The ALA has named Melinda Gates the honorary chair of National Library Week, starting April 7. At Porter Square Books in Cambridge, MA, Leila Meglio has joined as events manager. Most recently, she was publicity associate at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Sarah Rettger becomes […]
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Corporate: Pearson Gains On Steady Quarter, Scribd Pairs with NYT
Pearson provided a trading update on the first nine months of 2018. Total revenues were flat, with a 3 percent decline in US higher education courseware offsetting growth in the rest of the company. The company attributed some of the revenue decline to delays caused by the implementation of new enterprise software in the US, which it expects to “largely reverse” in the fourth quarter. That growth elsewhere, along with revised estimates for some one-time tax benefits, helped lift shares in London today. The traditionally terse comment on trade book performance noted, “Penguin Random House is performing in line with […]
Amazon Launches Book Subscription Box for Children
Amazon has entered the burgeoning business of book subscription boxes with their Prime Book Box program. The new initiative provides a collection of “books tailored to your child’s age” — two hardcovers, or four board books for kids 2 and under — sent every 1, 2 or 3 months, priced at $22.99 per box, plus tax. For now the program is offered to Amazon Prime members in the US only. They say that books in the boxes will be selected by a combination of “expert recommendations from our Amazon Books editors and customer ratings and reviews. Subscribers are presented with a […]
Scribd Returns to (Mostly) Unlimited Subscriptions, Now That They Are “More Profitable Than We Wanted”
Subscription service Scribd has resumed providing unlimited access to their catalog of books, audiobooks and other materials to most participants, while curtailing the benefits for the “small fraction of readers who read a high-volume of books,” according to ceo Trip Adler. After launching with unlimited reading of ebooks in 2014, and adding unlimited access to audiobooks later that year, the company had cut back to one audiobook per month in mid-2015 and curtailed unlimited reading in early 2016, to help “achieve long-term sustainability.” Adler says, “We decided to go back to unlimited because it works better in terms of providing a […]
Kobo Plus eBook Subscription Service Launches In Holland and Belgium
Kobo has launched an ebook subscription service, called Kobo Plus, in Holland and Belgium, jointly created with their local partner, the online bookseller bol.com. Priced at €9.99 per month (with a one-month free trial), the services promises unlimited access to 16,000 titles in Dutch and over 40,000 titles in all, “with considerable growth expected in the coming months.” Those titles come from major publishers — ceo of Dutch publisher WPG Patrick Swart is quoted in the press release — as well as Kobo’s self-publishing initiative. Indeed, Kobo says the service “was developed in close collaboration with leading Dutch publishers” and is […]
Kindle Unlimited: The Trend Continues, and The House Is On Top
Amazon made their monthly retroactive announcement of how much money they have decided to allocate to authors who participate in Kindle Unlimited, with November’s bounty following the pattern from the prior month. The pool was boosted by $100,000, to $16.3 million, while the total “pages read” declined, to roughly 3.032 billion (down from 3.122 billion in October, and 3.197 billion in September). On online forums, authors continue to complain that Amazon has not fully fixed glitches in their page counting software. Theoretically that’s leading more authors to opt out of publishing exclusively through Kindle and participating in KU. Increasingly, however, the […]