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. […]
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At Penguin USA, Jacqueline Fischetti has been appointed to the new position of director of content development, international. She will “spearhead the launch of an international expansion program that will introduce English-language books to the Latin American market, targeting adult and young adult readers who are at various stages of learning English.” She has been director of the Penguin Speakers Bureau since 2006, and joined Penguin Group in 1999. In yesterday’s piece on the book deal between the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission and Little, Brown, the quote about the publisher being selected for “intangibles” comes from the commission’s vice chairman […]
Unusual Deal for Financial Crisis Report Gives Treasury An Advance and Royalties
The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission and its staff journalist Matt Cooper have made a deal with Little, Brown for “authorized” publication of their report about the 2008 collapse on December 15 in both print and digital versions. As is usually the case with government documents, the publisher’s version will compete with a free downloadable version available on government web sites. But everything else about the deal, which the commission announced in a terse statement last week, is less traditional. As the Washington Post writes, the government retained two agents–Will Lippincott at Lippincott Massie McQuilkin and Joe Spieler of the Spieler […]
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 […]
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Diane Salvatore, who left the magazine world briefly to serve as publisher of Broadway Books, is becoming editor-in-chief of Rodale’s Prevention magazine. Richard Price will write a new series of detective thrillers that Holt will publish starting in fall 2011 under the pen name Jay Morris.