Random House announced their acquisition of previously independent Ten Speed Press. Ten Speed’s four imprints–Ten Speed Press, Celestial Arts, Crossing Press, and Tricycle Press–will operate as parts of the Crown Publishing Group. The unit will maintain its editorial, marketing, publicity, design, and production staff in Berkeley, CA. Founder Phil Wood, who started the company in 1971, will serve as publisher emeritus, but “a new reporting structure for Ten Speed Press will be announced in the coming weeks.” Ten Speed has an active backlist of over 1,000 titles, which they have self-distributed. Random House will officially take over distribution on May […]
Partial DFW Novel Emerges
Agent Bonnie Nadell and David Foster Wallace’s widow Karen Green found a partial manuscript of THE PALE KING two months after the writer suicided. This week’s New Yorker carries a brief excerpt, and Little, Brown has what publisher Michael Piestch calls a tentative agreement to publish the work in 2010. “The characters are Internal Revenue Service agents working at an IRS facility in the Midwest. The intense tediousness of their jobs and their attempts to transcend boredom reflect Wallace’s preoccupation with the concept of ‘mindfulness’ — the idea, as he put it in a 2005 commencement speech, that you should […]
Amazon Gives In on Text-to-Speech
In a rare concession, Amazon is “modifying our systems so that rightsholders can decide on a title-by-title basis whether they want text-to-speech enabled or disabled for any particular title. We have already begun to work on the technical changes required to give authors and publishers that choice. With this new level of control, publishers and authors will be able to decide for themselves whether it is in their commercial interests to leave text-to-speech enabled.” Of course at the same time the etailer reasserts that the “experimental text-to-speech feature is legal: no copy is made, no derivative work is created, and […]
AAP to be Run By Another Former Member of Congress
AAP president and ceo since 1997 Pat Schroeder will leave the organization on May 1 “to sail uncharted waters.” Endorsing the fundamental nature of the group as a lobbying organization, the board has hired former six-term Maine Congressman Tom Allen to take over.Allen served on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, Budget Committee, Armed Services Committee, and Government Reform Committee. He says: “AAP advocates on issues of paramount importance ranging from free speech and education to the protection of intellectual property rights and international freedom to publish. I am excited about tackling the challenges of this new position and its […]
Rave Review for Books & Books' "Retreat"
Books & Books had to give up their space on Miami Beach’s prominent retail strip Lincoln Road: “It had to go, off the mall to a patio in the back, the latest victim of skyrocketing rents and changing retail economics on Lincoln Road. In its former prominent perch on the pedestrian mall: a Diesel jeans store.” Now in the “less-visible courtyard behind his former street-front location, Books & Books owner Mitchell Kaplan has reenergized his store with an elegant, light-filled new design, a sprawling outdoor newsstand and lounging area, an expanded cafe-restaurant and — mirabile dictu — four times the […]
Hely Hutchinson Admits Waterstone's Exclusive Was a Mistake; Cancels Plan
Hachette UK head Tim Hely Hutchinson said on Radio Four’s Today show he was cancelling Hodder & Stoughton’s plan to sell Glen David Gold’s new book exclusively at Waterstone’s in hardcover ahead of the fall paperback release to the trade. In what he terms “a historic climbdown,” he announces: “We got this wrong, and so I’m cancelling the exclusivity with the kind permission of Waterstone’s. In retrospect it was a mistake anyway, and choosing between confusion and conspiracy it was definitely in the confusion camp.” He noted, “Although the hardback [of Carter Beats the Devil] did not do very well, […]