Bertelsmann CEO Thomas Rabe will move on from his job when his contract expires in 2026. He told FAZ, “My contract runs until the end of 2026. My plan is to then move on to other tasks.” It will be “the right time for new impulses,” Rabe said. Thereafter, “I would like to be free.” He noted, “I can only imagine taking on one or two entrepreneurial roles, but more as a supporter and advisor.” Members of the company’s controlling owner the Mohn family have been rising quickly in Bertelsmann’s management ranks. Carsten Coesfeld joined the company’s supervisory board in […]
Tattered Cover Hopes to Come Out of Bankruptcy This Year, Considers Moving Stores
After filing for bankruptcy in October, closing three of their seven stores, and laying off approximately 25 employees, Tattered Cover Book Store has updated its reorganization plan. The company hopes to emerge from bankruptcy by June 2024, and return to profitability in 2025 “by reducing costs and improving operations,” the Denver Gazette reports. That work is ongoing, however, since an earlier filing indicated the company lost approximately $340,000 in January due to costs from the holiday season and it was expecting to record additional losses in February. “Without a doubt we still have complicated negotiations to complete, challenging local economic […]
Distribution: Storytel and OverDrive
Storytel will make over 25,000 audiobook titles produced by company-owned publishers available to OverDrive’s library clients around the world. The companies note, “This agreement will offer access to an unparalleled and culturally diverse selection of tens of thousands of premium audiobooks in 20 languages.” Storytel head of catalog management expansion markets Stefanie Lamprinidi says in the announcement: “We are excited to be entering into this partnership with OverDrive to offer our vast and diverse language catalogs of high-quality audio stories, spanning the wide range of local and international titles to libraries, schools and their users around the world,” “We share […]
Guernica Staffers Resign Over Essay By Israeli Translator
Several members of the editorial staff at Guernica Magazine including co-publisher Madhuri Sastry, senior editor April Zhu, fiction editor Ishita Marwah, poetry editor Cindy Juyoung Ok, and more, resigned from their positions over the weekend following the online publication of an essay called “From the Edges of a Broken World: In Israel, a translator tries to tread the line of empathy” by Joanna Chen. The essay has been taken down by the magazine without explanation but is still available on the Internet Archive. Sastry writes in a post on Twitter, “I stand by my courageous staff members who have been […]
People 3/8
Kara Thornton has been promoted to director of publicity at Running Press.
Dutch Publisher Develops AI Books
Dutch nonfiction publisher Maven has developed AI books, allowing readers to engage with a title by messaging with it. Built on the full text of a book—but without the ability to read straight through—the AI book is embedded as a WhatsApp contact and works by messaging in the app. The company markets the AI book as its own separate format, to sit alongside a regular full-text edition. “Although this is not a linear one,” Maven publisher Sanders Ruys said. “You don’t consume it from start to finish.” The AI book is built to be conversational, and users can ask it […]