More than a month after admitting to recycling material from previous articles into his New Yorker blog posts, Jonah Lehrer has resigned from the magazine, and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt has taken ebook editions of Lehrer’s newest book IMAGINE, published last April, off the market, halted shipment of physical copies, and is “exploring further options” with respect to IMAGINE’s continuing publication. The latest developments emerged after a report in Tablet demonstrated Lehrer fabricated a number of quotes attributed to Bob Dylan in IMAGINE, and that he obfuscated the truth to journalist Michael Moynihan for several weeks before finally admitting to the […]
News
Corporate: Quarto Shareholders Call For Orbach’s Removal; Apollo Floated as McGraw-Hill Education Buyer; And More
Two shareholders who together hold more than 19.2 percent of common shares in Quarto have written to the board of directors asking for a special meeting and the removal of Laurence Orbach – co-founder, ceo, chairman, and the company’s largest shareholder – as a director of the company. (Orbach is set to step down as ceo next year, with current coo Marcus Leaver to replace him.) They also ask that Tim Chadwick be named to the board, though no details were provided as to why this should be necessary. In a statement the Quarto Board said it “believes that it […]
Court Approves HMH Restructuring Plan, So Long As Case Moves Out of New York
At a hearing Thursday morning in federal bankruptcy court Judge Robert Gerber approved Houghton Mifflin Harcourt’s restructuring plan to exit the pre-packaged Chapter 11 bankruptcy filed on May 21, Dow Jones reports. The plan will wipe out more than $3 billion in remaining debt left over from Riverdeep’s heavily leveraged merger of Houghton Mifflin and Harcourt, allow Citibank’s $500 million loan to serve as the company’s exit financing, and leave HMH with approximately $110 million in net debt and about $150 million of cash on hand. HMH expects to pay down its loan debt by 2017. While almost all objections […]
Jonah Lehrer Acknowledges Repurposed Material in IMAGINE, Will Add Disclaimer To Future Editions
The one story that seemed to galvanize media circles more than any other this week was that of Jonah Lehrer and his apparent penchant for recycling the same material, down to the sentence, from publication to publication. Romenesko broke the news Tuesday morning when it revealed Lehrer repurposed material for his New Yorker “Frontal Cortex” blog from earlier stories he published in the WSJ; by the end of the day, numerous other examples of recycling were unearthed by many other outlets and journalists, so much so that the New Yorker appended an editor’s note to all five of Lehrer’s blog […]
M&S, Doubleday Canada Merge Into McClelland & Stewart Doubleday Canada Group
Now that McClelland & Stewart’s absorption into Random House of Canada is complete, the imprint will live on in the form of the newly merged McClelland & Stewart Doubleday Canada Publishing Group. Kristin Cochrane will oversee the group — which also encompasses Signal, Tundra, Bond Street Books, Anchor Canada, Doubleday Canada Books for Young Readers, and Appetite by Random House — as its newly promoted executive publisher and evp, Random House of Canada Limited. Additionally, Doug Pepper takes on the role of publisher of Signal/McClelland & Stewart and vp Random House of Canada, and Ellen Seligman moves up to publisher of […]
A Favor
So in the near unspecified future both of your full-time Publishers Lunch correspondents are gong to attempt something very rare–truly unwired vacations. Which is a good occasion to ask for all readers’ attention on an important matter of protocol. Please make sure that you send all of your general news to info@publishersmarketplace.com only, and all of your deal news to deals@publishersmarketplace.com only. Sharing your news with us is that simple! And if you don’t send your information to the right place, it’s very likely that we will not report it at all. Please use our personal addresses (someonesname@publishersmarketplace.com) for personal correspondence […]