Barnes & Noble also reported on holiday sales on Thursday, and there the news is at least somewhat better. Over the nine-week holiday period, superstore sales rose 2.5 percent, at $1.2 billion. Same-store sales rose 3.4 percent, which is a positive, though not as strong as last year’s comp gain of 9.7 percent. In good news for publishers, “book sales were strong overall, fueled by strength across multiple categories,” and “physical book sales on a comparable basis increased by 4 percent, exhibiting growth for the first time in five years. More broadly, “retail core” comparable sales, leaving out digital merchandise, […]
eNews: eBooks Fill the USA Today Bestseller List; Patterson Sells Over 5 Million eBooks; and More
Heavy post-Christmas ebook buying is evident in USA Today’s latest bestseller list, published Thursday morning, on which ebook versions outsold print editions for 42 of the top 50 books. Below are the outliers that sold more in print (one of which, Wimpy Kid, is not available in ebook form). This time a year ago, USA Today suddenly showed 19 of the top 50 titles selling better as ebooks than in print; up until then, no more than two of their top 50 met that criterion. 11 Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Cabin Fever, Jeff Kinney 19 Inheritance, Christopher Paolini 23 […]
Barnes & Noble Seeks Bids for Sterling
While Amazon is investing in their in-house publishing program, Barnes & Noble is headed in the opposite direction as part of their repositioning as a technology company, with bankers currently eliciting bids for Sterling Publishing. The WSJ reported the development on Wednesday, citing “people familiar with the situation,” and a BN spokesperson would not comment. But sources with direct knowledge of the offering indicate to us indicate that it has been in circulation for at least two months if not longer. Someone acquainted with the sale’s progress indicates that there is considerable interest in the company. There will be at […]
People
Carrie Thornton has joined HarperCollins as executive editor, It Books. Previously she was executive editor at Dutton. David Kelly has been promoted to deputy editor at the New York Times Book Review, reports children’s editor Pamela Paul. He replaces Bob Harris, who took a buyout at the end of 2011 after more than 29 years at the paper. In the Hachette Digital group: Anthony Goff has been promoted to vp, audio and large print; and Michele McGonigle has been promoted to director of production; Megan Fitzpatrick has been promoted to associate director of marketing and publicity for Hachette Audio. At […]
Corporate News: Scholastic Buys Learners Publishing; Bertelsmann Sells 50 Percent Stake in Pubbles to Weltbild
Scholastic announced Monday that its Singapore subsidiary acquired Learners Publishing, a Singapore-based publisher of supplemental English-language learning materials which has published more than 400 titles since its founding in 2000. “Through this acquisition, Scholastic’s offering of products in the English Language Learning segment is significantly enhanced,” Scholastic International president, growth markets Shane Armstrong said in the release. “Learners’ talented team and its list of outstanding titles will assist Scholastic in accelerating educational publishing growth in International markets.” Regulators approved Bertelsmann’s deal to sell half of its stake in German e-reading store/platform Pubbles to Weltbild for an undisclosed sum. The deal was […]
The Year In Deals: 2011
After a positive response to our pre-Frankfurt deal analysis and charts, our webmaster built a sophisticated set of tools to let us analyze all the data locked inside our Deals database, the largest collection of deal data ever compiled. So now we can offer an assessment of the deal trends of 2011, and we can put those results in the context of a five-year pattern as well. The data shows that US book deal volume increased for the second straight year in 2011, at 5,211 transactions in all, up 5.4 percent overall (after a 7.7 percent gain in 2010). Nonfiction […]