Year Starts with State of War Free Press moved up the release date for James Risen’s STATE OF WAR: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration to today. The AP says “the major revelation” in the book was already disclosed in last month’s controversial NYT article about secret eavesdropping on US citizens. The AP also reports on a story in the book that “illustrates how the CIA ignored information that Iraq no longer had weapons of mass destruction.” Time magazine dubs it “the book behind the bombshell.” Their take: “State of War provides an account of the […]

Happy New Year, and Meet the New Owners Ready or not, the calendar calls for the annual ritual of pulling out the crystal ball — or in our case, a ball covered with a few crystals — to muse about the year ahead in publishing. (NB: No points will be awarded to anyone who predicts that Simon & Schuster will be sold; book sales will be stagnant; or that a few months after the release of the film version of the DA VINCI CODE, the NYT will run a story about sales of the book appearing to slow down.) This […]

Amazon Pushes Textbooks Amazon Connect, the e-tailer’s fake “blogs,” struck me as a non-story (or at least a missed/late opportunity), but another new initiative not fed to the media is potentially much more significant: The company has launched a “new and used textbooks store.” Amazon Hershey Settles Hershey settled their lawsuit against and Simon & Schuster in expected fashion: the jacket of HERSHEY: Milton S. Hershey’s Extraordinary Life of Wealth, Empire and Utopian Dreams will be modified to indicate that the book is not authorized by the candy maker. Press release E-verything Old is New Again 2006 is already looking […]

Monday, December 26 Our Reminder If for some reason this has reached you even though you are not a paying member of PublishersMarketplace, please visit the link below to join us all the time for complete deal reports and more. Click to register http://www.publishersmarketplace.com/register.shtml Deal Reports Just e-mail to deals@PublishersMarketplace if you aren’t using the online form linked below. Report a deal using the online form The Key As usual, the handy key to our Lunch deal categories. While all reports are always welcome, those that include a category will generally receive a higher listing when it comes time to […]

Updates on the Waterstone’s/Ottakar Deal The heads of a number of UK houses held meetings recently with top management at HMV and Ottakar’s to underscore — in case their feelings were not already known — “in the strongest possible terms that the proposed merger of Waterstone’s and Ottakar’s was ‘against the wishes of the industry,'” PN reports. PN adds, “one industry insider suggested that both chains are deliberately ‘talking down’ Christmas sales to persuade publishers to support the merger on the basis that if it doesn’t happen, one will go under.” Meanwhile, the Office of Fair Trading has released its […]

Schedules You would think that waves of the autoreplies from all those people who started their two-week vacations last Friday would have been a hint, but it still feels as if the holiday has snuck up on us. With the added help of the transit strike there’s considerably less news day. If there’s not enough of note to make it worth mailing you tomorrow then our next dispatch will be the weekly deal round-up. Next week’s regular Lunches will be very light or non-existent, though we are working on some holiday treats, including our now traditional wildly inaccurate predictions for […]