Black Dog & Leventhal has signed with the new Abrams and Chronicle Books London-based distribution service for export sales in the UK, Ireland, European export, Japan, Korea and “several other international markets” starting on January 1, 2011. Separately, they have signed with Murdoch Books for sales and distribution in Australia, also as of January 1. (They have been using Scribo/Bookwise in Australia.) At Bellevue Press, Erika Goldman has been promoted to publisher and editorial director, and Leslie Hodgkins has moved up to associate editor.
Amazon Gets Patent for Six-Year-Old Concept to Sell Your Book Previews
On Tuesday Amazon was granted a business method patent, first filed for approval way back in the pre-Kindle days of July 2004, that covers the sale of book previews and excerpts. The complex filing also includes various scenarios for giving customers “personal viewer” discounts and credits in return for reading certain promotional excerpts, as well as schemes to vary preview fees “dependent on the work being viewed and/or the consumer’s prior purchase or previewing activity.” For now there’s no basis for concluding that this is something the etailer plans to implement, and the original filing is so old that it’s […]
Internal Bloomsbury Motivational Video Goes Online–And Then Goes Away Again
For a few hours today a Bloomsbury UK sales conference that was accidentally made “public” on YouTube was discovered and served as the book trade distraction of the day. Something similar happened earlier this spring when Penguin’s video take on “Empire State of Mind” was accidentally public online for a short period. By the afternoon, the Bloomsbury UK players’ take on the copyrighted Glee cast version of the song “Don’t Stop Believin” was gone again. On Twitter, reactions ran from gleeful to glum, since the music video also included a mock-serious narrated set-up from company executive Richard Charkin (who termed […]
People, Awards, Etc.
Managing director of De Fontein/Tirion in Holland Geneviève Waldmann will also runs VBK’s Kosmos as of October 1, though both houses “will maintain their separate identities.” Later this year De Fontein/Tirion will relocate to Utrecht to join with Kosmos physically. Senior publicity manager at William Morrow Jennifer Slattery has left her position to travel to Australia for the next 6 months. Judith Merkle Riley, author of six historical novels (Vision of Light, In Pursuit of the Green Lion, The Water Devil, The Oracle Glass, The Serpent Garden and The Master of All Desires) and a professor of political science at […]
New Books: Summers, and More 39 Clues
When Lawrence Summers leaves his position as director of the National Economic Council and returns to Cambridge at the beginning of next year, he is expected to start work right away on the first of two books he owes Farrar, Straus. Summers made a deal with Farrar in 2007 for books on education and economics. Originally planning to begin with the education book (following his controversial tenure as president of Harvard), the publisher tells us that he will now write about economics first. Scholastic announced a new version of their 39 Clues franchise, The 39 Clues; Cahills vs. Vespers. The […]
Bringing Lightning to Australia
Australia’s splendid isolation from Amazon and industry-wide print on demand will start to crack when Lightning Source opens a “full-scale” POD facility there in June 2011. Lightning Source already has an operations in the UK and is in a joint venture in France with Hachette.