Audible’s attorneys had told Judge Caproni they would respond this week to her suggestion for a “standstill” on any launch of Captions and an expedited trial instead of ruling on a preliminary injunction. Instead, they filed a letter Thursday afternoon saying, “We have not, as yet, been able to reach agreement on a proposed path forward” with their client and the publishers. Instead, they asked the court to require 30 days of settlement discussions with a magistrate judge, and if that doesn’t produce a resolution, go back to ruling on the injunction and the motion to dismiss and then continue […]
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People, Etc.
Edmund White will receive the National Book Foundation’s 2019 Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. Filmmaker John Waters will present the award at the National Book Awards ceremony on November 20.White’s best known work include A Boy’s Own Story and The Beautiful Room. NBF executive director Lisa Lucas said in a statement. “It’s only when you’re able to look back at a body of work that one is able to see a career like Edmund White’s for what it is: revolutionary and vital, making legible for scores of readers the people, moments and history that would come to define […]
Woodson’s Red at the Bone Tops October Indie Next List
The ABA named Jacqueline Woodson’s novel Red at the Bone as its No. 1 pick for October. Also on the list are Stephen Chbosky’s Imaginary Friend, Jojo Moyes’ The Giver of Stars, and Ben Lerner’s The Topeka School, all excerpted and available for download in our Buzz Books 2019 Fall/Winter. The rest of the picks: The Dutch House, by Ann Patchett Ninth House, by Leigh Bardugo Olive, Again, by Elizabeth Strout The Water Dancer, by Ta-Nehisi Coates The World That We Knew, by Alice Hoffman Celestial Bodies, by Jokha Alharthi A Cosmology of Monsters, by Shaun Hamill The Butterfly Girl, […]
LSC Closes Plant in Torrance, Says More to Come
Troubled printer LSC Communications announced second quarter results on Thursday morning, with net sales of $869 million, down 7.8 percent from $943 million in the same period last year. As expected, they had a net loss of $24 million, which included after-tax charges of $26 million, “primarily due to the impairment of intangible assets in the magazines, catalogs and logistics segment and other restructuring costs.” With the planned Quad exit door slammed shut, ceo Thomas J. Quinlan III is now proceeding with a two-part plan to improve margins and free cash flow, and lower debt: First, using consultants to poll […]
Remember June: How Did They Pick?
Since we dutifully cover many of the monthly retailer and book club picks, we thought it might be interesting to recap the previous month’s selections as well, and see how they sold. (Of course these statistics are only a partial view, of print sales only; we know from experience that Reese Witherspoon’s picks will overweight significantly for increased digital audio sales thanks to her close commercial partnership with Audible.) Here are June’s picks, listed by approximate sales as tabulated by NPD Bookscan for the past 3 weeks through June 23. (Note: We updated this after the fact with sales results […]
Publishing Snaps Back at Scribd’s Unauthorized “Snapshots”
Authors, agents and publishers were surprised to learn earlier this week that reading subscription service Scribd — a retailer account for publishers — had helped itself to creating 500 short text and audio write-throughs of a swathe of high-profile nonfiction in the name of “discovery.” Did Michelle Obama, Daniel Pink, Elizabeth Gilbert, Phil Knight, Seth Godin, John Carreyrou, Eric Ries, Brene Brown, Steven Hawking, Chip Heath, Joshua Foer, Sheryl Sandberg, Yuval Noah Harari and countless others need a tech startup to rewrite in their own new copyrighted words short versions of “the key insights, the key themes, the tone, the […]