A judge has denied a Warner Bros. motion to dismiss 20th Century Fox’s lawsuit over Warners’ right to make a film based on the graphic novel “Watchmen” by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons. The ruling keeps alive the possibility Fox may share in the profits for the film, slated for release in March 2009, though the studio really wants the project to be cancelled outright. “When you have copyright infringement, there are some damages you never recover,” a source close to the litigation told Variety. At the heart of Fox’s suit, filed in February, is the contention that it never […]
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First Round Bidding for Reed Business
Reed Elsevier finally begins the bidding for the right to buy Reed Business Information (parent company of Publishers Weekly, Variety and many other publications) and, reports the Telegraph, up to a dozen offers have come in for the first round. Most of those believed to be vying for the whole division or for parts of RBI are private equity firms like TPG and DLJ Merchant Banking, Cinven and Candover, Bain, Apollo Management and Providence Equity Partners, while McGraw-Hill has teamed up with Advent and Quadrangle for a joint bid. The WSJ says that with “many of the 12 or so […]
Gossip Girl DVD Features Audiobook Tie-in
Even though the success of the TV version of Gossip Girl has, more or less, given the backlist of Cecily von Ziegesar’s series a healthy sales uptick, the same cannot be said for the audiobooks, with “consistently moribund” sales of less than 1,000 yearly according to BookScan. “The teen and the late-teen market has been a really tough market for us,” said Anthony Goff, publisher of Hachette Audio and Digital Media. So Hachette has teamed up with Warner Video and those who buy the first season of the show on DVD will also get the audiobook of book one, narrated […]
Persephone Books and Forgotten Women's Classics
At the Times of London, Amanda Craig profiles Persephone Books publisher Nicola Beauman: “There can be little doubt that Persephone, which reprints lost or forgotten women’s classics, has filled a gap left by the bigger Virago. Quieter, more interior and less obviously feminist than the latter, it celebrates its first decade as the champion of the kind of book trendy that literati like to dismiss as dull and domestic.”Times (London)
Obama Reply: Unfit for Publication
The Obama campaign has produced a forty-page reply to Jerome Corsi’s book in a PDF titled Unfit for Publication. Among other coverage, Timothy Noah looks at scholarly publisher Mary Matalin: “Simon & Schuster and the other big publishing houses have started conservative imprints, at arms’ length and with noses held, because they recognize them to be a gold mine…. But part of the deal, clearly, is that conservative imprints aren’t required to adhere to the same standards of truth as the grown-up divisions. If an Erwin Glikes or even an Adam Bellow is available to edit your conservative fall list, […]
Rushdie on Jones Novel
Salman Rushdie tells the AP via e-mail about Sherry Jones’s THE JEWEL OF MEDINA: “I am very disappointed to hear that my publishers, Random House, have canceled another author’s novel, apparently because of their concerns about possible Islamic reprisals. This is censorship by fear, and it sets a very bad precedent indeed.”AP