As we’ve been reporting and Amazon Prime customers have learned directly, browsing the Kindle Lending Library in full is difficult and understanding the entire contents of the 5,386-title collection has been unachievable–until now. Our data team has extracted and analyzed a nearly-complete compilation of all but 150 titles in that entire library. (For technical reasons we couldn’t scrape that last little bit; our analysis covers 5,237 titles.) So who is included and how many titles are represented? We have divided our results into three groups. The first is either known or presumed to directly licensed their titles to Amazon on […]
RLJ Equity Partners Acquires Parent Company of LJ, SLJ and Horn Book
Media Source Inc., the parent company of Library Journal, School Library Journal, The Horn Book and the Junior Library Guild, was sold to RLJ Equity Partners, one of the hedge funds created by Black Entertainment Television founder Robert L. Johnson. 21st Century Group, LLC and New Canaan Funding Mezzanine, LLC also took part in the deal, for which terms were not disclosed. LJ and SLJ had been acquired by Media Source in early 2010; Media Source was in turn previously owned by Riverside Company, which bought them in 2007. Media Source had been on the block for a while, according […]
Kobo Expects to Invest “Hundreds of Millions” to Open In “A Couple Dozen” Countries
In interviews following up on Indigo’s deal to sell Kobo to Japan’s Rakuten, Indigo ceo Heather Reisman made it clear that “over the next year, this business will need in excess of $100 million to take it to where this industry is going, and we just cannot play in that league for that amount of capital.” Kobo ceo Michael Serbinis thinks they will need even more investment than that: “Certainly the capital needs in the next couple of years, without revealing too much about strategy, is in the hundreds of millions. And whether a hundred gets you to 6 months […]
A Burst for Barnes & Noble
In a day when the overall market was down more than 3 percent, Barnes & Noble’s shares worked up nicely during the day Tuesday and then took off like a shot right after 3:00. Shares finished the day up almost 14 percent, at $13.68, and have continued to trade up this morning, now above $14 a share–their highest point since August. With no obviously discernible reason, the pop was likely driven by some kind of Wall Street rumor or expectation that the company could be back in play. At 1:00 yesterday, Liberty Media announced Barnes & Noble would present at […]
Trading Updates from Bertelsmann and WH Smith
Today is Bertelsmann’s turn for a brief, European-style third quarter trading update, with no breakouts by division. If you strip out the recent quarter by itself, sales of 3.575 billion euros were up 3%, and operating EBIT of 355 million euros was up 36 million euros, or 11 percent. For the year-so-far, sales are up slightly, and operating EBIT is down a little, with both of those categories performing better in the third quarter than earlier in the year. Release In the UK, WH Smith said in a brief update of their own that High Store sales declined 5 percent […]
People: Edugyan Wins Giller, and More
HALF BLOOD BLUES by Esi Edugyan (Thomas Allen) has won the 2011 Giller Prize, less than a year after Edugyan’s original publisher Key Porter Books suffered from financial difficulties that led to its bankruptcy this fall. There are currently 23,000 copies of the book in print in Canada and Thomas Allen publisher Thomas Crean told Quill & Quire “Tomorrow morning we’re going to be pushing the button again…I don’t quite know what the number is going to be, but it’s going to be upwards of 20,000.” In the UK, Sam Humphreys will join Michael Joseph as publisher at the end […]