J.D. Salinger filed suit in a NY Federal Court against the anonymous author of the forthcoming sequel 60 YEARS LATER: Coming Through the Rye, also naming UK company Windupbird Publishing, Sweden-based Nicotext, and SCB Distributors (which sells Nicotext books in the US) in the action. The complaint declares, “the sequel is not a parody and it does not comment upon or criticize the original. It is a rip-off pure and simple.” This Courthouse News piece adds, “Salinger says the defendants are acting in bad faith to confuse the public, which is likely to think that he wrote the sequel. He […]
Stake in Spain's Santillana In Play; Pearson, Cengage and Oxford Among Likely Bidders
The FT names Infinitas Learning (what used to be the education division of Wolters Kluwer) as another prospect interested in Santillana, called the “market leader in school textbooks in Spanish-speaking Latin America.” Owner Prisa could “sell up to 30 per cent of the business in a deal that could fetch up to ¬360m ($512m)” as they restructure their debt. The paper adds that “owning a stake in Santillana would fit with Pearson’s expansion into educational publishing outside the US, where the group is twice the size of any of its competitors.”FT
HMH Creates Digital Team; RAND Drops eBook Prices; SuperKindle Release, and More
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt’s trade and reference division has created a Digital Strategy and Planning Group, led by svp Cheryl Cramer Toto (who had been the company’s vp of development and planning, a job that included leading the integration of Harcourt and Houghton Mifflin). Under Toto are vp of digital content development David Jost, vp of digital business development David Langevin, and Sanj Kharbanda, who has been promoted to vp of digital market strategy. He “will identify unique market opportunities for Houghton digital content and develop and implement innovative consumer-facing programs.” Yesterday the RAND Corporation announced they were lowering list price […]
Bezos: No Profits (?), No Color, No Stats
Missed during BEA madness was Jeff Bezos’s webcast speech to Amazon shareholders last Thursday. At least as interpreted by some, Bezos seemed to indicate that Kindle isn’t making money for the company yet (despite wild analysis by Wall Street analysts who don’t understand the business). Bezos said the company “is investing very heavily” in its digital business but “I don’t want people to think it’s a big cash-flow generator for us.” Speaking of the company’s businesses in China and cloud computing he said they were in “investment mode” and added, “we continue to plant these seeds and our experience — […]
At British Conference, Ian Hudson Reviews Problems
Outgoing Publishers Association president Hudson of Random House UK spoke to the Book Industry Conference about “some of the key current concerns from a trade publisher’s perspective” and urged that publishers “address them together.” “The first and perhaps greatest current concern of trade publishers is the credit-worthiness of their customers.” The second is that “many small and medium sized trade publishers are themselves having to manage their own cash flow very carefully…. Indeed, some publishers I’ve talked to tell me that their ability to deliver their autumn publishing programs is being limited by the credit crunch and their difficulty in […]
Closer Reading of Google Edition
The NYT reported on Google’s continuing discussions with publishers of their plans to sell online access to the full text of some books currently available for searching and limited reading in their Partner Program with publishers. An offline component, similar to Google Gears, will allow purchased books to be cached in the browser. And Google has indicated to publishers that they will allow some form of limited printing (done a single page at a time) and limited copy and paste privileges, probably in the range of 20 percent of a book’s content. Now dubbed Google Edition, this initiative is the […]