That’s A Lot of Jobs The other real news of the day is the big action at our Job Board, where we had a vigorous 11 brand-new postings just yesterday, along with plenty more earlier in the week. For employers, we provide by far the single-largest audience of book publishing people available online (well over 27,000 a day to be precise) — and we do it at what is by far the lowest price. If you haven’t tried our Job Board since we relocated it to PublishersMarketplace earlier in the year, you’ll be surprised at how efficient and effective it […]
Lunch for Wednesday, July 14
RH Makes Rizzoli A Distribution Offer They Couldn’t Resist Random House’s distribution group has finally landed a client of scale, as Rizzoli has informed their current distributor Holtzbrinck that they will shift their business as January 1, 2005. Holtzbrinck Distributed Publishers sales and marketing vp Patti Hughes tells her staff in a memo that, “They thank us for representing them so well over the past 17 years in what was a wonderful partnership and confirm that this change in distribution was purely a financial decision for them.” New NY Head for Avalon; Bergstrom Promoted at S&S; Dempsey to Crown Avalon […]
Lunch for Tuesday, July 13
Rockport Gets Creative Quarto’s Rockport Publishing Group (with includes the illustrated design line Rockport, the mind/body/spirit imprint Fair Winds Press, Quarry Books, RotoVision and Apple Press) has acquired Minneapolis-based Creative Publishers International for $10.8 million in cash and convertible loan notes. CPi is known for their home improvement, home decorating, sewing and crafting, and outdoors-related books, including branded lines with Black & Decker and Singer. The company’s nature, photography and wildlife imprint, NorthWord Press name, and its children’s imprint Two-Can, are not being acquired by Rockport. Rockport CEO Ken Fund says in a statement, “This acquisition marks a major turning […]
Lunch for Monday, July 12
Everything Used is New Again We have often discussed the increased liquidity among used book sales as one of many major systemic challenges the book business faces, and now the NYT has concluded that, “Analysts and industry executives said the momentum among consumers and newly minted used-book sellers was just now approaching the point of biting into new-book sales.” Just now. The article cites the usual grab-bag of non-specific statistics, as well as following the erroneous conventional wisdom that, “Industry executives and analysts widely acknowledge Amazon as the engine of the market.” Alas, facile thinking like this will get us […]
Lunch for Friday, July 9
No Gephardt for Kerry; No Proprietary Classics for Amazon It’s not quite up there with the NY Post earlier this week, but the Ann Arbor News has substantially corrected their story cited here yesterday about classics lines being produced by the Ann Arbor Media Group. As company official Jim Edwards confirms, “There is no agreement between Ann Arbor Media Group and Costco or Amazon.” The Ann Arbor News states: “A July 6 Business story incorrectly stated that a partnership between Ann Arbor Media Group and Amazon.com planned to produce 200 titles by 2006. That goal is for the Ann Arbor […]
Lunch for Thursday, July 8
Classic Competition Heats Up As Amazon Commission 200-Title Line, Plus Separate Annotated Editions (and the Same Packager is Producing Classics for Costco, Too) Much of today’s news is a testament to the things you can learn on the Internet, sometimes in the most unusual places. Buried in an article in the Ann Arbor News, we discover this big development: Amazon has contracted with packager/publisher Ann Arbor Media (owned by the same family that controls printer Edwards Brothers) to produce a series of 200 classics, a separate series of study guides, and more. The classics program will span public domain literature […]