As previewed at Monday’s Publishers Launch Conference, on Wednesday Bowker announced full details on the expansion of their consumer research into ebooks beyond the US and UK. They will conduct a new annual study, starting in January 2012 (for presentation in March), to chart the state of consumer ebook and ereading device use and acceptance around the world. They will gather additional data samples from Germany, France, Spain, India, Australia, Brazil, South Korea and Japan, in collaboration with companies including A.T. Kearney, the Book Industry Study Group, Pearson and Tata Consultancy Services. In other enews, Ectaco is demonstrating their JetBook Color […]
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People, Etc.
At Basic Books, editorial director since 2007 Lara Heimert has been promoted to editorial and publishing director. In her new role she will play a larger role in the presentation and publication of the imprint’s books while freeing Basic Book Group publisher John Sherer to concentrate on the new Perseus digital marketing initiatives and to focus on the efforts at Westview Press and Nation Books. At Little, Brown Children’s, both Connie Hsu and Kate Sullivan have been promoted to editor. Liz Gately begins scouting for De Boekerij and Meulenhoff in the Netherlands as of October 1. Books-A-Million has hired Tyler Novak as general counsel. […]
eNews: Amazon Spain, Local Kindle Ads, Estimates of 5.4 Million eReaders in Q2, and More
As expected, Amazon.es launched yesterday with a press conference in Madrid featuring vp for Europe Greg Greely (in English). Greely announced the company offers 2.5 million print books in Spanish and 80,000 in Catalan, which because of the fixed price laws they can sell at a maximum discount of 5 percent. Orders from Spain will be served from a warehouse in a secret location outside Spain–just as Amazon.es’s 100 employees (many of whom joined Amazon as part of the BuyVIP acquisition last year) are not in Spain either, working out of the company’s European headquarters in Luxembourg. Regarding the reported […]
Details on Amazon’s Prime eBooks Benefit Plan
Last week there was a new round of intensification in Amazon’s long-brewing efforts to enlist publisher participation for an ebooks free-access model as part of the benefits package for their Prime members, as we heard from multiple publishers. The WSJ ran with a brief story last night with only modest details, which may have inadvertently given the venture the appearance of broader scope than it has acquired so far. Meanwhile, core trade people we’ve spoken to on background-only have provided a colorful range of metaphors invoking pigs with wings and a frozen underworld–even as some whose businesses focus more on […]
People
Jackie Harvey has joined the Lerner Publishing Group as national sales director. Previously she was a product and marketing manager in the K-12 school division of Pearson. Casey Francis has been named director of corporate communications for Thomas Nelson. Previously she was public relations and communications officer for Commonwealth Brands. Bella Pagan will join Tor UK as a senior commissioning editor on September 1. Previously she was an editor at Orbit UK. William Sleator, 66, the author of more than thirty books for young adults and children, died on August 2 in Thailand. Among his acclaimed novels were THE INTERSTELLAR […]
eNews: BookLamp’s Recommendation Engine Enlists Publishers; UMich Press Serializes Novels on Facebook; and More
Book recommendation service BookLamp will reportedly launch in August after a lengthy development period, with more than 20,000 available books from Random House, Kensington and other publishers. The idea is to search through full-text books and analyze them in order to make reading recommendations. Ceo Tom Stanton told Mashable that he doesn’t anticipate selling books or advertising on the site. BookLamp’s efforts at text analysis and recommendations have been underway since 2008, focused on science fiction and fantasy books to start, and according to site postings have mostly lacked a sufficiently large database to search against and analyze. A video […]