Borders has agreed to sell its Paperchase stationery unit for $31 million to Primary Capital, a UK-based private equity firm. Under the agreement, set to close next week, Borders will continue to purchase and sell Paperchase products in its stores, and use $25 million of the proceeds to reduce the amount outstanding under its $90 million term loan credit facility, as specified under the terms of the loan agreement reached this past April. The deal comes just a month after Borders laid off an unspecified number of Paperchase staff, its third round of job cuts in 2010, and six years […]
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Waterstone’s to Freeze All Staff Pay
On the heels of another dismal quarterly report, Waterstone’s has confirmed that staff pay will be frozen this year. “No pay awards are being made across HMV Group this year as we continue to contain our costs,” a spokesperson to The Bookseller, revealing little more about the reasons for the across-the-board cost cuts. The move comes just a day after the bookstore chain announced it would open a movie theater in its flagship (and very large) Piccadilly branch after it signed an agreement with Curzon Artificial Eye.The Bookseller
Sotomayor Memoir to Knopf
Knopf will publish a coming-of-age memoir by Sonia Sotomayor, in which she will detail growing up in the South Bronx as an American daughter of Puerto Rican immigrants and track the events that culminated in her recent appointment as a Supreme Court Judge. “Sonia Sotomayor has lived a remarkable life and her achievements will prove an inspiration to readers around the world,” said Sonny Mehta in yesterday’s release. “Hers is a triumph of the Latino experience in America.” Knopf acquired World rights from Peter Bernstein to the still-untitled book, which will be published simultaneously in a Spanish-language edition by Vintage […]
Details Emerge About Purported 4th Stieg Larsson Novel
The ongoing legal dispute between Stieg Larsson’s family and partner Eva Gabrielsson complicates the likelihood of the unfinished 4th Millenium novel purported to exist from being published anytime soon, but some details on the book have come to light from John-Henri Holmberg, a friend of Larsson’s dating back to their days attenting SF conventions in the 1970s. According to the AP, Holmberg received an e-mail about the book from Larsson less than a month before his death on Nov. 9, 2004, in which the author said he had completed 320 pages of the expected 440-page book, set in Canada “120 […]
Briefs: Gloomy UK Publishing Stats for 2010 Thus Far; Amazon Shares Upgraded; Half Price Books Posts Gains; and More
HarperCollins UK CEO Victoria Barnsley has warned the industry is not likely to return to pre-recession glory after figures released by Nielsen BookScan for the first 24 weeks of the year, revealed a fall in the total value of book sales of 5.7% and eight of the top 10 publishers saw a drop in sales in 2010: “Our business needs to change, regardless of whether there is a recession or not. The economic situation has merely hurried the process along . . . To be honest, I don’t anticipate the market ever returning to pre-recession levels in its current form.” […]
As BEA Opens, CEOs Miss the Way Things Were
It could be the best of times but mostly it’s the worst of times, at least as viewed for the majority of this morning’s opening conference panel at BEA featuring a variety of executives from across the business: Moderator Jonathan Galassi from FSG, Esther Newberg at ICM, Bob Miller at Workman, author and Authors Guild president Scott Turow, Skip Prichard at Ingram, and David Shanks at Penguin USA. For the better part of the one-hour and twenty-minute session, most panelists–with no offense a senior, and not exactly youthful group–were weighed down by the challenges and obstacles of the digital transition […]