The ever-unpredictable Ninth Circuit (e.g. California) Court of Appeals on Friday overturned a lower court verdict and held that Simon & Schuster violated the Telephone Consumer Protection Act as currently interpreted by the FCC in sending unsolicited text messages to cellphones in promoting Stephen King’s THE CELL. MediaPost says “the decision appears to mark the first time that a federal appellate court has said that the telephone law applies to text messages.” S&S had argued that a text message is not a “call” under the law–the Appeals court disagreed, saying the law itself “is silent as to whether a text […]
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People: Corrected
On Friday we mangled the replacement of Mark Booth at Century: It’s Arrow publishing director Kate Elton who will become publisher of Century as well. She will “make some key new appointments at both Century and Arrow as part of the forward strategy for growth.” Elton reports to Cornerstone managing director Susan Sandon. Apologies for any confusion.
The Things Bezos Can Get Press for: He Wants Rival Google's Settlement Agreement "Revisited"
At a Wired conference in New York, Jeff Bezos stated the obvious, “we have strong opinions” about the proposed Google Book Search settlement, “which I’m not going to share.” Having admitted that he would not say anything of substance on his company’s concerns about of the biggest possible rivals in electronic reading, he offered a gee whiz reflection on the class action legal system at work instead: “It doesn’t seem right that you should do something — kind of get a prize for violating a large series of copyrights. You just can’t believe that’s the way it actually works.”WSJ blog
The CEO Whisperer
Unfortunately Tina Brown’s questions were as wispy as her voice at the CEOs panel at BEA on Thursday, with Brown suffering from laryngitis that led her to eventually leave the stage as her husband Harry Evans took her place. Evans produced a brief spark when he came on by declaring “the publishers seem to me to be extremely weak about Google” and asking about the pending legal settlement. Macmillan’s John Sargent underscored that “you shouldn’t focus on Google as the danger point; the danger is what Google enables in making a copy and giving it to libraries,” whose mission to […]
More on Crichton's Unfinished Novel
Thursday night HarperCollins convened a small tribute to the late Michael Crichton, attended by many family members and friends (including former Harper ceo Jane Friedman). Crichton’s longtime agent Lynn Nesbit recalled with emotion how he said to her, “Let’s grow up in the business together, and we did.” She noted, “It’s a happy event because he did leave so much behind.” And she promised there was more Crichton to come, since “he laid out the whole concept of the next book.: Harper publisher Jonathan Burnham confirmed afterwards that Crichton left behind approximately 90 manuscript pages of a novel-in-progress, along with […]
Elisabeth Sifton at FGS's Long View: "Wariness Is In Order"
Sifton has a long piece in The Nation with a wide sweep of publishing history to try and make sense of the present: “When I first got a publishing job almost half a century ago, my elders and betters in the trade regularly worried about The Future of Books, even though manuscripts continued to pour onto our desks. They worried, too, when firms changed ownership….” “What now? Publishers are battening down, and chain stores are struggling, having staked so much on nationally merchandised dreck, having committed themselves to imitating the look of the big indies but never quite matching their […]