Improvement at Penguin and Pearson Pearson’s earnings report for the first six months of their fiscal year is filled with palpable signs of relief. The big Pearson Education division has started to deliver the strong results that were expected (and promised) for this year, with sales up 14 percent overall, driven by an even larger increase at their big K-12 School unit. Meanwhile, Penguin “has made a solid start to… a transitional year, in line with expectations.” Which means the publisher is past its UK warehouse problems and layoffs from earlier this year and a weak holiday stretch in the […]

Norton Announces 9/11 Gifts One year after publishing the authorized, royalty-free editions of the 9/11 Commission Report — following long-promised intentions to donate “any extraordinary profits” to charity (and a declaration in late-January that an announcement would be made “before long”) — Norton has announced in a press release they will make three gifts of $200,000 each. The recipients are the Center for Catastrophe Preparedness and Response (CCPR) at NYU and their International Center for Enterprise Preparedness project, plus the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University, endowing Norton-9/11 Fellowships in International Relations. Norton president […]

Harry Buyers Bought Widely Perhaps the best Harry Potter news for publishers other than Scholastic comes from this AP report, in which Barnes & Noble CEO Steve Riggion says that 40 percent of customers buying HALF-BLOOD PRINCE bought other things, too. Borders says that over half of their Harry customers bought something else at the same time. “Most of the additional items were non-bestsellers aimed at adults,” according to a spokesperson. But Wall Street analysts like Danielle Fox at Merrill Lynch — with proven expertise in tracking stock movements and the finer points of bookselling — tell the AP that […]

Harry By the Numbers In case you haven’t already seen the collected numbers: Scholastic reported selling 6.9 million copies of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince in the first 24 hours on sale in the US, and noted they had already ordered (and started delivering) a reprint of 2.7 million copies. Amazon’s US pre-orders were over 919,000 copies. Barnes & Noble sold 1.3 million copies in the first 48 hours, including pre-orders and online sales. Borders sold 850,000 copies in the first 24 hours, and over a million copies in the first 48 hours on sale. Separately, Listening Library reported […]

The Latest Leak As we surmised recently, the best way to get your name in the papers this week is to say that you bought a copy of Harry Potter on sale prematurely. This time its two men in Indianapolis who found their copy on Monday in what “they described as similar to an airport gift shop” downtown. Up to Chapter 18, one of the men says: “A lot of what I’m reading, I’m not sure what I’m supposed to believe. What J.K. Rowling is telling you is pretty shocking considering the last five books.” In other Potter-related angles, the […]

Osnos to Step Aside; New Head for DK PublicAffairs founder Peter Osnos announced this morning that a new publisher will be hired for the imprint and he will become editor-at-large once the new executive comes on board. Osnos says in a letter that he will also take “time for some other projects. I expect to work on a new initiative looking for ways to make books like ours more available in a changing world. And I will pursue my interests in the fields of journalism and human rights.” In his statement, Osnos notes: “As we begin our ninth year, this […]