The publishing and events group is targeting debts of below £1bn but insisted there was no danger of banking covenants being breached. The final dividend, down at 3.9p from 11.3p, will be paid on 3 July.Telegraph
News
Announcements
Gary Young has won the Shelley Memorial Award, given annually by the Poetry Society of America to a living American poet “selected with reference to genius and need.” The 2009 Iowa Short Fiction Award was given to Kathryn Ma for her collection, “All That Work and Still No Boys,” which will be published this fall by the University of Iowa Press. IndieBound has been named by ReBrand as one of its 100 Global Winning Brands.
Waterstone's Exclusive Deal Provokes Indies' Ire
Sunnyside, Glen David Gold’s first novel since 2001, will be published in the UK by Sceptre this July – but only Waterstone’s stocks the hardback for an exclusive four-month window while all other booksellers will receive only a paperback later in the fall. The news has independents in a letter-writing campaign calling for a boycott of the paperback edition, while others have said they are considering removing the publisher from any recommended lists, or that they will “think twice” about ordering books from Sceptre in future. Waterstone’s sold 19 books with an exclusive time window in 2008 but it appears […]
Atwood Drops Out of Dubai Festival
Margaret Atwood has pulled out of the Emirates Airline International Festival for Literature in the wake of the fair’s decision to cancel the launch of Geraldine Bedell’s The Gulf Between Us because of the inclusion of a gay character. Other authors due to appear at the festival, including bestselling children’s authors Anthony Horowitz and Lauren Child, are now also reconsidering whether to attend. Atwood, a vice president of International PEN, has written to the festival’s director about the “regrettable turn of events” surrounding Geraldine Bedell’s The Gulf Between Us. “I was greatly looking forward to the festival, and to the […]
Announcements
Wiley-Blackwell has partnered with the American Physiological Society to produce Physiology Online, an evolving compendium of current knowledge of all aspects of the field. The publication will be launched online in January 2010 Featherproof Books is launching a subscription-based imprint called Paper Egg Books, which will determine print runs of its titles by the number of subscribers who sign up for the program at $20/year. The sixth annual LBF Lifetime Achievement Award in International Publishing will be awarded to Houghton Mifflin Harcourt editor Drenka Willen. BEA has lowered the hotel rates for the 2009 convention, with most nightly rates dropping […]
S&P Downgrades B&N Shares
Standard & Poor has downgraded Barnes & Noble stock from “hold” to “strong sell”, noting that B&N shares “have risen about 40% over the past 3 months and are now trading well above” S&P’s target price. The firm also expects further weakening in sales over the next fiscal year and is “also concerned by the long-term trend of declining adult readership levels.” B&N’s Board of Directors also declared a quarterly cash dividend of $0.25 per share, payable on March 31 to stockholders of record at the close of business on March 10.Business Week