Uncategorized

The sale of a 22 percent stake in Penguin Random House from Pearson to Bertelsmann has officially been completed, per the previously announced agreement. Pearson retains a 25 percent share in the book publisher going forward. New York State Supreme Court Judge Barry Ostrager declined to dismiss Milo Yiannopoulos’s breach of contract lawsuit against Simon & Schuster. So the action will proceed to discovery and then trial. S&S noted in a statement that the ruling “was purely in connection with a preliminary procedural motion, and was not an adjudication on the merits of Yiannopoulos’ claims. As we proceed to discovery, we remain […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]