As Barnes & Noble Education was bid down another 7.5 percent on Thursday, to a new low of $5.18 a share, the retail bookseller Barnes & Noble rose on renewed speculation of a deal to take the company private. It was a thin report, however; it ran in Dealreporter and was reported by Bloomberg. The account claimed BN has been working with Guggenheim Partners for as long as six months to help explore a sale. BN has worked with Guggenheim before, but spending six months looking for a buyer without results is not necessarily a strong buy sign. Deal Reporter claims […]
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PEN Center USA Withdraws Smelcer’s Stealing Indians Amidst Claims of Fraud
PEN Center USA withdrew John Smelcer’s Stealing Indians from the shortlist for their 2017 young adult award, after The Stranger and the LA Times reported longstanding disputes to the author’s claim of Native heritage. (The organization did not issue a statement beyond noting the withdrawal of the title on Twitter.) The Stranger first reported on Smelcer’s disputed heritage on August 23, with authors including Sherman Alexie weighing in that Smelcer has been “held in great suspicion and contempt in the Native world for twenty-five years.” The article also questions blurbs given to Smelcer’s books by authors including Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer, […]
Blended Statistics Part 4: A Broader View of What Authors Earn
Part 3 looked at the whole industry and laid important groundwork for roughing out a new measure: how much money do authors earn? The Author Earnings project has made valuable strides in making this a central issue. Up until AE, no one had even tried to tabulate what authors make in the aggregate, and their consistent perspective has been to focus on how much money authors — and self-published authors in particular — might be making, regardless of how they are making it (e.g. subscription reads, borrows and exclusive payoffs alongside royalties, etc.) It’s clear from AE’s work, no matter […]
Blending Statistics to See the Whole Market, Part 1
Now that the AAP has provided the final piece of standard industry statistical measures for 2016, we’re ready to share some additional statistical models that try to provide a broader picture of the trade publishing landscape. As has been well covered in the past, all of the core publishing statistics are incomplete in various ways. The AAP’s direct data reports cover only approximately 1,200 publishers, in dollars, with no units; Bookscan measure print unit sales, through major retail outlets, with no dollars, and we don’t know the size of the part of the market they don’t reach; PubTrack Digital tabulates […]
A Vote of Diminishing Confidence from Big Barnes & Noble Investor
On April 18, shortly before the official naming of Demos Parneros as ceo of Barnes & Noble, the company’s second largest investor David Abrams significantly reduced his holdings. Abrams and related companies sold 4.5 million shares of Barnes & Noble’s stock at $8.575 a share (and the movement of that big block is why the bookseller’s shares fell between April 18 and April 19. The leaves Abrams with approximately 5.9 million shares, or a little over 8 percent of shares outstanding, down from a holding of 14.33 percent. The last time Abrams bought BN stock, in February 2016, it was cheaper […]
People, Etc.
Former president of F+W Media Sara Domville will reunite with her old boss, joining America’s Test Kitchen under ceo David Nussbaum on April 24 in the new role of chief revenue officer. She “will be responsible for driving revenue growth in a number of key company divisions including sponsorship, licensing, underwriting and book sales.” Domville left F+W last July. Bookseller and publisher Donald Weiser, 89, died on April 12. He worked alongside his father at the Samuel Weiser Bookstore in New York and led the publishing company Samuel Weiser, Inc., which was sold in 2000 and became Red Wheel/Weiser. He was a founding member in 1975 […]