Canada’s dominant retailer Indigo has plans for a electronic text offering focused on free and paid downloads for mobile devices, Quill and Quire reports. The enterprise will be established as a separately-branded subsidiary of Indigo, serving customers throughout North America (with intentions of going global), and set to launch in early 2009. “The final details won’t be unveiled until December,” the magazine reports, but Indigo cto Michael Serbinis confirms certain detials. Material on offer will range from complete e-books for mobile reading to small chunks (chapters, articles and short stories) and user-generated content. It sounds as if download fees will […]
International News
Barnsley Looks Ahead
Harper UK ceo Victoria Barnsley gave a speech called Media’s Last Diehard? at the London School of Economics last night. Improbably, though it has taken 10 years for online sales of physical books to comprise 12 percent of sales at HarperCollins, she speculated that “within say 10 years more than half our sales will come from digital downloads.” She acknowledged that territorial rights will be “pretty hard to police” if ebooks become that prevalent and “also said it would be difficult to establish a profitable pricing model when most consumers are used to free digital content.”Bookseller
More Reports: Indigo Holds Steady
At Canada’s dominant retailer Indigo, sales for the second quarter fell 2 percent to $205 million (CA), with net earnings “down slightly” at $3.2 million. CEO Heather Reisman says “we were pleased with the bottom line results given today’s challenging economic climate.” Same-store sales rose 2 percent at the Indigo and Chapters superstores, and 7.4 percent at the small-format Coles stores. But online sales decreased 19.8 percent to $21.1 million, attributed entirely (and then some) to the comparison to last year’s numbers for the release of the final Harry Potter Book.Release
Bin Laden Has a Book?
If he’s still alive, Osama Bin Laden may be working on a book called Nidal (or Struggle), according to news services in India and Pakistan. One Arab daily is quoted as saying the book “looks at the atrocities committed against Muslims by the West and how the Crusaders have harmed world development with their objective of boosting the West’s global influence that ultimately helped the United States to seize the Muslim world’s oil reserves.” Bin Laden is said to be writing in Arabic with the assistance of a young man who will translate the manuscript into English. So far, however, […]
Woe Canada; Currency Plunge Squeezes Publishers
This time last year Canadian publishers and retailers were grappling with consumer anger over higher Canadian prices for books after the US dollar hit historic lows against the country’s currency. Discounts were applied at all levels (in part to keep sales from crossing the border to US retailers and suppliers) and for 2009 most major publishers repriced their books to be near or equal to US pricing. But it was what you would call a “good problem,” helping Canadian divisions of the big publishing conglomerates to produce another year of strong financial results. But now, in just under a month’s […]
Quarto Remains Confident
After reporting a loss three months ago, the Quarto Group says that sales for their fiscal third quarter were 34.9 million pounds, well ahead of last year (when they acquired MBI) but growing at a slower rate than in the first two quarters of year. They now say operating profit for the nine months of this fiscal year are 6.2 million pounds, up 15 percent from a year ago. (Interest on borrowings to acquire MBI reduces those profits by 2.7 million pounds.) CEO Laurence Orbach says “We remain on the lookout for growth opportunities.” The company cites a “very strong […]