Ellen Knight, the former NSC official who oversaw the prepublication review of former national security advisor John Bolton’s book, filed an extensive and extraordinary letter with the court in the DOJ’s case against Bolton. Through her attorney Kenneth L. Wainstein, Knight describes a “designedly apolitical process [that] had been commandeered by political appointees for a…
Legal
Corporate: Early Retirement At HMH, and Judge Throws Out Parneros’s Defamation Claim Against BN
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt announced that 166 employees — five percent of the company’s workforce — opted to participate in a voluntary early retirement incentive program, which had first been announced August 6 in the company’s quarterly report. The program was offered to all US-based employees who are at least 55 years old and have at…
Trade Organizations Ask Congress to Limit Amazon’s Anti-Competitive Behavior
As Congress has been investigating big tech companies for anti-competitive behavior and searching for ways to regulate these ever-growing giant entities, three publishing trade organizations have joined together to focus attention on the obvious monopoly that is easy to address. The chief executives of the AAP, the Authors Guild and the ABA sent a joint…
Parneros and Barnes & Noble Make Final Arguments Before Judge Rules on Summary Judgement
In an August 6 phone conference, attorneys for Barnes & Noble and BN’s former ceo Demos Parneros presented final arguments on the bookseller’s motion for summary judgment dismissing two of the three claims against them before Judge Mary Kay Vyskocil, who replaced John G. Koeltl for unstated reasons in February. The motion, which aims to…
Internet Archive Demands A Jury Trial
The Internet Archive, sued by four AAP member publishers for “willful mass copyright infringement” after creating an open-access “National Emergency Library” of its 1.3 million self-scanned ebooks, has answered the complaint with a request for a jury trial. (In 1998, the Supreme Court ruled that there is a Seventh Amendment right to a trial by…
People, Etc.
Vanessa Campos has joined D4EO Literary Agency as an agent. She was previously sales and marketing director of Entrepreneur Press. Mariah Nichols has been promoted to literary agent. Imprints In the UK, Hodder & Stoughton has created the Hodder Studio imprint, which “brings together creative minds from a wide range of backgrounds and media industries.” and…