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In “a challenging year,” SImon & Schuster ceo Carolyn Reidy’s year-end letter is mostly focused on taking “time to celebrate our industry and our company, to remember and be grateful for what makes publishing an exciting and wonderful business and Simon & Schuster a special company within it.” She also suggest that “this is precisely the moment – when established routines do not yield the customary results – that we must take chances and embrace risk.” In digital news, like Random House, Simon & Schuster will “nearly quadruple eBook sales this year” even with a delay in their initiative announced […]

Former Harcourt executive Andre Bernard uses the recent memorial service for Robert Giroux as the launching point for an assessment of current happenings in publishing (and at Harcourt in particular). He says that Houghton Mifflin Harcout is “reportedly now trying to bring” recently fired longtime editor Drenka Willen back “in another capacity.” “One way or another, whether printed on paper or seen on an electronic screen, good books — great books — will continue to find their way to readers. Good writers — great writers — will continue to surface, with the help of the Drenka Willens and Rebecca Saletans […]

Random House ceo Markus Dohle pens his first “year-end letter” to employees. He calls it “a year of many publishing triumphs, and a year in which we have begun implementing a strategy and vision for our company that will enable us to come out ahead and build our business profitably amid an almost unprecedented economic downturn. Each of our divisions worldwide has been rethinking, and in some cases reformulating, what we must do to adapt to the changing ways our books are being ordered and sold by our retailers and distributors and purchased and read by consumers. We have faced […]

The New Yorker’s Fiction Issue carries a loaded line-up: An unpublished story by Mark Twain (from the book that Harper Studio will publish), as well as stories by Roberto Bolano, Alice Munro, Colson Whithead, and Donald Antrim, plus a personal essay by Zadie Smith and Dana Goodyear on cellphone novels in Japan.New Yorker

That new feature we’ve been working on at PublishersMarketplace.com is live today. The Publishers Lunch Automat takes us back to our very roots of finding news stories from all over of interest and relevance to the publishing business. But the whole idea of news and where it comes from has changed dramatically since the first Lunch was baked in 2000, and the Automat is a way of navigating literally hundreds of sources, comprising industry news, commentary, financial updates, blog posts and more. Organized pages present hundreds of the latest headlines for trade news, blogs from people who work in the […]

Maybe it’s a byproduct of all that turkey eating, as this week has seen a veritable feast of ridiculous “advice” from all over for publishers. We’re all accustomed to every American adult believing they are an author-in-waiting, but now it appears many of them want to be publishers as well. First came author James Gleick. Even though he helped negotiate the Authors Guild’s settlement with Google, he begins by mischaracterizing its particulars, asserting that it will “allow the scanning and digitizing of something very much like All the World’s Books. So here is the long dreamed-of universal library, its contents […]