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 […]
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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 […]
People
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.
People
Amanda Ridout, who left Harper UK as managing director in May 2009 to pursue “confidential” ventures, has joined Phaidon as managing director. Investor Luke Johnson, who owned Borders UK on its path to bankruptcy, is joining the Phaidon board as a nonexecutive director. Emily Lavelle has joined Public Affairs as a publicist. She was most recently an associate publicist at Crown. Spiegel has posted an English version of their interview with Random House ceo Markus Dohle. The piece drew wire service attention at the beginning of the week for his guess that “I can imagine that we’ll end up above […]
Sales Rise at Harper As Profits Lag
HarperCollins has joined Simon & Schuster and Penguin in reporting increased sales for their most recent quarter, ending June 30, at $302 million, up over 8 percent from $278 million a year ago. Profits are still lagging, however, with an operating loss of $1 million–matching the loss from this time a year ago (though they were up $3 million prior to depreciation and amortization). For the full fiscal year, Harper recorded sales of $1.269 billion, recovering 11 percent after a poor fiscal 2009, with operating income of $88 million–hardly a stellar performance, but much improved from just $17 million in […]
The Barnes & Noble Update
Following yesterday’s after-marker news that the board of Barnes & Noble will explore “strategic alternatives,” the company’s shares are experiencing the anticipated heavy trading volume this morning, with volume of nearly 3 million shares in the first hour alone. At that point, the stock was up approximately 20 percent over yesterday’s close. After the board boosted the stock’s prospects, Goldman Sachs thoughtfully upgraded their rating from sell to neutral, and changed their 12-month price target from $12 a share to $15 a share. Analyst Matt Fassler still hates the company and they “do not see compelling value in the business,” […]