F+W Media has launched the first of a series of ebook subscription sites across the company’s verticals. They are beginning with the Artist’s Network eBooks Book Club, a collection of over 100 full-color art instruction titles. An annual subscription costs $199. Impelsys’s iPublishCentral is their technology partner. CEO David Nussbaum says they hope to enroll “thousands” of subscribers in the first year. (The company already enjoys success with other subscriptions for this community, through their Artists Network Video Network.) The next F+W communities to launch ebook subscription plans will be writing, design, outdoors/weapons, woodworking, and romance. Princeton Review is selling […]
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Kate Travers will join Workman as director, digital business development starting April 11th, reporting to Andrea Fleck-Nisbet. In this role she will oversee our web properties and services, develop and maintain Workman’s online communities, and help to plan Workman’s overall digital media strategy. She was most recently at F+W Media, where she was responsible for executing digital strategy across 23 e-commerce and 18 community websites. Brianne Halverson will join the It Books and Harper Design marketing department as associate director of marketing beginning April 9. She was most recently director of publicity for William Morrow. Elizabeth Hanslik Psaltis has been […]
Smashwords Tells DOJ That Prices Have Dropped 25 Percent Under Agency
Smashwords founder Mark Coker has an extensive post on data he prepared for a phone call with the Department of Justice on Tuesday as part of the investigation of agency pricing. “My goal was to express why I think it’s critically important that the DoJ not take any actions to weaken or dismantle agency pricing for ebooks.” Smashwords also uses the agency model, driven to adopt it because one retailer alone “made it a practice to strictly enforce most-favored-nation pricing upon its authors and publishers”–Amazon. At first Smashwords used the “hybrid” model that many publishers were forced to deploy when […]
International: Barnes & Noble Incorporates Digital Media Company In Germany; Dutch Book Chain Selexyz Files for Bankruptcy; And More
As another piece of Barnes & Noble’s coming international expansion, TechCrunch notes a Buchreport finding that BN incorporated a new company, Barnes & Noble Digital Media GmbH, in Germany on March 15. Company vp, general counsel and corporate secretary Eugene DeFelice is listed on the new Germany company’s incorporation papers, from which one can infer that BN has formed the legal entity but does not yet have an operational plan. BN already has an existing partnership with German bookstore aggregator BookWire. Once-dominant Dutch book chain Selexyz has been suffering from serious financial trouble since last fall (and never really recovered […]
Bowker Merges US and UK Consumer Research Brands; Random House Adds “Ideas Exchanges”
Following their previous acquisition of UK-based Book Marketing Limited, Bowker is merging that unit’s work with their US-based PubTrack Consumer research line under the new global banner of Bowker Market Research. That moniker will now incorporate their consumer research around the world, industry statistics, the UK’s Book Marketing Society, and their ISBN-driven bibliographic statistics in the US. UK-based Jo Henry will run day-to-day operations, reporting to vp Kelly Gallagher in the US, who will “continue to set the overall business intelligence strategy.” Random House’s distribution division RH Publisher Services is providing their client publishers with an “ongoing series of workshops, seminars, and collaborative […]
Potter eBooks Now Available to Libraries
As of Thursday morning, the Harry Potter ebooks and digital audio recordings are available to libraries through OverDrive, as previously promised. Participating libraries can be found via www.overdrive.com/harrypotter. OverDrive is providing EPUB files, and library patrons can borrow Kindle-format files in the US. OverDrive had been taking pre-orders from libraries for what was said to be an April launch, and then mysteriously “temporarily suspended pre-sales and display” through library catalogs on March 20.