More Notes As indicated last week, Lunch will be sporadic this week — there will likely be no servings for at least the next two days. In this jumbo serving you’ll find the week’s deals as well as the regular Monday offerings. Borders Sees Unlimited International Growth As we’ve underscored before, the international division is the growth engine of Borders, and the one place in which they have a clear edge over such rivals as Barnes & Noble. The Ann Arbor News says international CFO Gregg Bodnar thinks they can grow those sales up to $3 billion a year, from […]

Light Lunch It’s a classic late-August Friday, so today’s meal is light. Lunches may be sporadic over the coming week, due to a powerful combination of travel and summer. A few links and items of interest: The Quarto Group reported sales for the first six months of year of 31 million pounds, up 4 percent, and profit of 1.7 million pounds, up from 1.3 million a year ago. Quarto is among the companies suffering from the weak dollar, since the company gets 60 percent of their revenue from the US. The company cited HOUSEHOLD MANAGEMENT FOR MEN as one of […]

Comp Sales Rise at BN Superstores Barnes & Noble reported second quarter sales from their bookstores unit of $1.015 billion. Of that, BN stores accounted for $961.3 million, up 5 percent overall, with comparable store sales rising 1.4 percent. B. Dalton comprised $39.9 million, a comparable store decrease of 6.8 percent. At BN.com, quarterly sales fell 6 percent to $84.5 million, and the loss of $7.6 million was at the high end of the company’s guidance. The company reports profits a number of ways, complicated further by a one-time charge related to a recent bond redemption. But the message to […]

Notes Today’s a travel day, so this post is a little rushed. Lunches may be a little late the rest of this week. As you may know, we’ve made lots of subtle but important improvements to PublishersMarketplace features this summer — faster deal searching and the ability to use multiple keywords, the great new deal sub-categories, better review clipping during the week, date stamps in the contact database to indicate how new an entry is, and all the Bestseller analysis tools. And now we’ve added another big improvement — we’ve extracted Who Represents entries from a lot of our historical […]

Khouri Speaks Norma Khouri has admitted to some measure of fabrication in a televised interview. She now maintains she lived in Jordan for 12 years. “I had lived in Chicago and I lived in Greece and I have lived in Jordan. When I wrote the memoir I chose to write only about my time in Jordan, I have literary licence to do so. “I had to continue to tell people I was never in Chicago only to protect the existence of my relatives and my family.” She says the story told in her memoir is a real account, but “admitted […]

E-Book Pioneers Launch Audio Venture The team that created the Palm Reader software and built that platform into the most successful e-book venture so far will launch a new audiobook company that takes advantage of the latest standards at the World Science Fiction Convention in Boston on Labor Day. Mike Segroves serves as president and publisher of the new company, Paperback Digital, with Jeff Strobel as vp of software development and Dave Pascoe as vp of Commerce Systems. Using the MP3-CD standard, they can compress up to 17 hours of book narration onto a single CD. Most titles will be […]