John Rudolph has been promoted to executive editor for Putnam Children’s, where has worked since August, 2001. Katie Henderson, previously at Bloomsbury, is now an associate editor at Doubleday. Ethan Friedman is leaving Collins Business. Lisa Grubka has left the William Morris Agency after six years to join Foundry Literary + Media.
On van de Wetering
Dutch crime writer Janwillem van de Wetering, 77, died on July 4, 2008, following a struggle with cancer. Best-known for his Amsterdam Cops series, Soho Press will be reissuing all 14 of van de Wetering’s Soho Crime novels in paperback, beginning this fall. Chicago Tribune book critic from the late 1980s to the mid-1990s Joseph Coates Jr., 75, died of lung cancer last week.Tribune
Charkin the Blog Book
Exact Editions learns via a permissions request that: “In September 2008 Pan Macmillan will publish Charkin Blog: the Archive, by Richard Charkin, an edited print-on-demand version of the blog he published while chairman of the company.”Exact Editions blog
Weltbild: Clarified In Translation
More information on the potential sale of Germany’s Weltbild, which a colleague there calls “the biggest fish to come on to the market” in some time, with sales of approximately 2 billion euros a year, and a market value estimated at about 1 billion euros a year. Holtzbrinck is already a 50-percent owner of Weltbild’s publishing company Droemer and is thought to be interested primarily in that piece of the empire. Separately, Weltbild is a 50-percent partner with Hugendubel in a holding company that operates multiple bookstore chains, including Hugendubel, Weltbild plus and Jokers, and most recently, they took over […]
Harlequin's "Enriched" eBooks
Harlequin has announced the launch of what they call “enriched editions”: ebooks containing “interactive buttons that hyperlink to Web sites containing photos, historical commentaries, illustrations, sound effects, maps, articles and more, bringing the world of the novel to life without the reader having to leave the computer or the current screen page.”Press release
Carnegie Mellon's Entertainment Technology Center Starts Lulu.com "Imprint"
The university has announced ECW Press, an academic imprint designed to experiment with “flexibility in publishing without the limitations encountered by traditional publishing.” They note in the release that “all ETC Press publications will be released under a Creative Commons license, and will also have associated websites to encourage and enable a community of collaborative authorship and discussion.” Lulu.com is their technology partner, providing print-on-demand along with downloads. The press can be found at http://etc.cmu.edu/etcpress/Release