As of today, Nielsen Bookscan will supply data for three weekly book charts for the Wall Street Journal – Hardcover Fiction, Hardcover Non-fiction and Business – to run on Fridays, though they will not add unit sales data. The WSJ is the second paper to adopt Bookscan as its bestseller data provider (the Washington Post was the first.) Bookscan will also create additional, customized charts for WSJ.com around specific genres – this week it’s hardcover romance.WSJ Bestseller List Page
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Price War Continues: Walmart Vows to Cut More, HBG's Young Speaks Out
Walmart.com spokesman Ravi Jariwala told the WSJ the company will continue to adjust prices on their promotional pre-order books “so that Walmart.com offers the lowest online prices” after two rounds of price-matching from Amazon. Similarly, ceo Raul Vazquez told the Journal on Thursday they “will go as low as we need to” in order to become a low-price leader. If you’re losing money already to prove a point, then why not lose some more–but if Amazon keeps playing along, the two companies could push the price of lead titles to unimaginably low levels. For the moment, as of Friday afternoon […]
Random House Settles Billionaire's Vinegar Lawsuit and Apologizes, Though Author Does Not
Random House has settled a lawsuit brought by UK wine expert Michael Broadbent over the book BILLIONAIRE’S VINEGAR by Benjamin Wallace. The publisher apologized for allegations in the book that, as Broadbent’s attorneys put it, he “had behaved in an unprofessional manner in the way in which he had auctioned some bottles [said to have been owned by Thomas Jefferson] and that his relationship and dealings with Hardy Rodenstock, who discovered the original collection, was suspected of being improper.” The NYT says Random “issued a statement in court accepting that they were not true. Random House also paid an undisclosed […]
Two With Harper Connections Play the Other Side of Palin Portrayal
First we saw Lloyd Grove’s Beast piece that points out last fall’s parody paperback TERMINATRIX: The Sarah Palin Chronicles, published by Collins, was likely co-authored by Adam Bellow–who is editing Palin’s GOING ROGUE. It was published as “compiled by the Editors of the Wasilla Iron Dog Gazette,” but “informed sources” say it was the work of Bellow and Bruce Nichols.Beast Then we saw on Time.com that Joel Stein wrote a 49-page parody (offered as a free pdf), ROGE JOURNALIST: An Even More American Life. His co-author is ghostwriter Neil Strauss–one of the two people behind the Igniter line under Harper’s […]
AAP Returns Annual Meeting to DC
After eight years of convening their annual meeting in New York, the AAP is moving next year’s general meeting on March 3 back to its traditional home in Washington, DC. It will be coordinated with the annual meeting of the organization’s School Division (which convenes that morning). The AAP says the move is “in an effort to maximize the opportunity for publishers to press their case with members of Congress on a range of important issues including copyright, domestic and international piracy, reading and literacy initiatives, the impact of the open source movement, and the 2010 outlook for K-12 publishing.”
Stanford Closes Publishing Course, and Studies Possible Successor
The venerable Stanford Publishing Course for Professionals, serving book publishing and magazine professionals since 1978, has closed, a victim of both the economy and larger transitions in the program’s core fields. Longtime director Holly Brady is leaving Stanford–saying she “expects to continue the conversation from another vantage point here in Silicon Valley”–and her staff has been dismissed. This move comes admits broad cost-cutting at Stanford University, with the school recently disclosing a 27 percent drop in their endowment capital over the last fiscal year, with investment losses of approximately $3.5 billion. They reportedly cut over 400 positions earlier in the […]