HarperCollins announced that Harper Lee‘s Go Set A Watchman sold more than 1.1 million units in North America since going on sale last Tuesday, with 3.3 million copies now in print. (Earlier Penguin Random House UK indicated Watchman had sold 105,000 copies in its first day on sale.) Subscription service Entitle Books announced it will shut down on Tuesday, July 21, telling customers on its website that they can move over to Scribd for a one-month free trial. Touchstone is launching Glommable, a consumer-facing pop culture website featuring content from various Internet personalities, shareable quotes, slides, and more. Authors featured include […]
Subscription
Macmillan Adds More Titles to Subscription Services
Macmillan is expanding their program to “test subscription” services for ebooks. After starting with 1,000 titles available through both Scribd and Oyster in January, the publisher is adding “more than 1,000 additional titles” to both services, along with more than 300 children’s titles. While it moves Macmillan forward with both subscription operators, it still leaves them shy of the participation levels from HarperCollins (which offers substantial backlist, and had put the 15,000-title Harlequin backlist in before Scribd recently cut their romance title selection) and Simon & Schuster, which offers its entire backlist for subscription reading.
Scribd Cuts Romance Catalog, Aims for “More Mutually Beneficial Terms” with Publishers
eBook subscription service Scribd is removing an unspecified — but apparently significant — quantity of romance and erotica titles from their catalog. The news was publicized by Smashwords ceo Mark Coker on his company blog, where he estimated that that “80-90 percent of Smashwords romance and erotica titles will be dropped by Scribd, including nearly all of our most popular romance titles.” Coker suggested that “the lower the price and the higher the word count, the better the odds the book will remain. Few books priced $3.99 and above will remain. Scribd is not publicly revealing the formulas for what stays and what goes, […]
People, Etc.
Jeff James will join Thomas Nelson as vp, marketing for Nelson Books on June 29. Previously he was the founder and ceo of Mythology, a marketing consulting practice for Fortune 500 firms. Steven Sussman will join Skyhorse as director of sales on June 29. Previously he was director of sales at Dover Publications. Antonella Pearce joins IPR License as business development manager. She was at the Publishers Licensing Society (PLS). J.K. Rowling has written extensively about the “reactionary, prejudiced, narrow-minded, ignorant and bigoted” Dursley family and their deep-seated resentment of Harry Potter on Pottermore, covered here by the Guardian. Partnerships […]
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 […]
People, Etc.
Eerdmans has hired Lil Copan as senior acquisitions editor, general trade. She was at Abingdon Press most recently. A group of senior management and board members have joined in a management buyout of the Peter Lang Academic Publishing Group from the Peter Lang Children’s Trust. The deal is expected to close by mid-2015. The new management team comprises Claude Béglé as chairman of the board, Kelly Shergill as CEO and deputy chairman, Vanessa Weber as CFO and Abdurahman Kaymaz as head of warehouse and logistics. Stuart Wilkins, who led the process on behalf of the Trust, said in the announcement: “The Trust Board recognized that their […]