Two Australian publishers report incidents of censorship by Chinese printers of their books. A printer company in Guangdong in southern China informed the UNSW Press after their book was printed that “Chinese authorities have found sentences within the text which infringe their sovereignty and have refused to grant an export authorization.” (There was a reference to the “China-Tibet border” in a biography by Felicity Jack.) And Hardie Grant reports “a similar problem with a reference book being printed in Hong Kong for an international market after it was advised to remove a picture of the Dalai Lama.”SMH
International News
Indigo Rises in First Quarter
Sales at dominant Canadian chain Indigo rose 3.1 percent in their first quarter to $191 million (CA), while their net loss was reduced by more than half, to $1.3 million. Same-store sales were up 3.3 percent at the Indigo and Chapters superstores, while the smaller format Coles stores were up 5.4 percent, and online sales rose 7.7 percent, to $21 million. Release
Japan's Yohan in Bankruptcy
Book2Book reports that Japanese distributor of foreign books and magazines Yohan “went into bankruptcy today and all their employees were dismissed at once, the office was closed down immediately and the website appears to be closed. It is understood that it has gone down the bankruptcy route, rather than a supervised corporate reorganization. Yohan did not have any significant property and assets and reports suggest that there will be no payment of debts.” Their bookstore operations Aoyama Book Center and Ryusui Shobo are still operating, and are seeking to reorganize.B2B
Pushback Over RH UK's New Out-of-Print Language
It’s the story that keeps coming back. This time the focus is Random House UK which, according to Society of Authors deputy general secretary Kate Pool, seeks to redefine out-of-print so that rights are eligible for reversion to an author “only if the publisher cannot supply a physical or electronic copy of a book within a month, or if there have been no royalty earnings for a year.” President of the Association of Authors’ Agents Philippa Milnes-Smith says that some agents had “raised concerns about RH’s approach to negotiating boilerplates…over the terms being proposed and the approaches being made to […]
Google Book Search, en Francais
Google has now officially confirmed the enrollment of the the Municipal Library of Lyon as the first French institution to join the Google Book Search Library Project. Together they will digitize “close to 500,000 public domain books.” You may recall that in the early days of GBS there were two primary schools of griping: the we’re going to be included and we don’t want to be branch, and the we’re not going to be included (and horrible English works will smother the world) branch. Needless to say, the French were among the leaders of the latter camp, advocating for government-backed […]
Consternation in UK Over Asda's HP Paperback Discount
Sales of the paperback release of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows in the UK were dominated by Asda after they decided to sell the book for just one pound for the first three days. Asda book buyer Steph Bateson says they sold just under 40,000 copies during the promotion, while Nielsen Bookscan tracked sales industrywide of 46,257 copies in that three-day period. Despite the money lost by the chain on the promotion, Bateson tells the Bookseller “I think we have shaken the other retailers up a bit, which was always our intention,” calling it a “genuine footfall and sales-driving […]