It is suddenly the obvious question of the moment, as the ebook pricing trial in the United States v. Apple began today at 9:30 — particularly since presiding Judge Denise Cote has already expressed her “tentative view” that “the government will be able to show at trial direct evidence that Apple knowingly participated in and facilitated a conspiracy to raise prices of e-books.” (Even absent that bar, antitrust attorneys indicate the government is the natural favorite in any trial like this one, and particularly so given that all five publisher defendants have already settled.) Assuming for speculative purposes that the […]
June Bookseller Picks
Amazon and Barnes & Noble agree on four titles in their “best books of June” lists, recommending: The Ocean at the End of the Lane, Neil Gaiman TransAtlantic, Colum McCann The Last Summer of the Camperdowns, Elizabeth Kelly Revolutionary Summer, Joseph J. Ellis Amazon’s spotlight pick for the month — The Son, by Philipp Meyer — was another title featured in our spring/summer edition of Buzz Books 2013, as was BN June pick The Astronaut Wives Club by Lily Koppel. (So far, an amazing 15 of the 28 books we featured right around Winter Institute have been named to monthly […]
People, Awards, Etc.
Wiley has hired John Kritzmacher as evp, chief financial officer, starting July 1. Current cfo and chief operations officer Ellis Cousens, who previously announced his retirement at the end of fiscal 2014, will “retain responsibility for certain global operations and oversee the company’s $80 million restructuring program.” Kritzmacher, 52, recently served as svp, business operations and organization planning at WebMD and was previously cfo of Lucent Technologies and Global Crossing. On Friday at BEA, the Publishing Hackathon awarded first prize to Evoke — which maps how characters in fiction are emotionally similar to each other as a way of discovering […]
A BEA Round-Up; During and After Hours
Malcolm Gladwell deftly moved on from his Wednesday remarks at BEA’s IDPF conference at a party thrown by publisher Little, Brown for his forthcoming book David and Goliath on Thursday night. He referred to his “disaster of yesterday” when he apparently “said I was in favor of turning the New York Public library into condos,” remarking facetiously “who knew that people would be offended by that?”Gladwell was pitch-perfect in telling his own retelling of the David and Goliath story that sets the theme for his next book. As with the Paul Revere story that was one of the signatures of […]
“Difficult Negotiations” Persist Between S&S and B&N, Limiting Author Events, Too
One controversy not evident on the BEA show floor but still very heated off the floor is the stand-off on terms between Barnes & Noble and Simon & Schuster that has resulted in reduced business between the publisher and the bookseller since the beginning of the year. (For some publishers, discussion of revamped terms with B&N began last summer, and we’re told there is renewed pressure from the booksellers on those who have not changed business terms.) It landed back on the radar when S&S author William Kent Krueger blogged that he was told to cancel two events scheduled for […]
Here At the Hothouse
Weather metaphors make it easy to declare this year’s Book Expo America a “hot” show and indeed we had the title of Boris Kachka’s forthcoming August book Hothouse: The Art of Survival and the Survival of Art at America’s Most Celebrated Publishing House, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, on our minds many times Thursday, in the aisles and across the evening of parties. But here’s a little secret of trade show reporting: Look back and you’ll see that nearly every show (except for those convened on the eve of lawsuits and world economic crises) is dutifully reported as having an upbeat […]