Are You Sitting Down? Riggio Says to Raise Prices The NYT finally gets around to covering recent industry stats, including those from BISG. There’s only one thing new in here, and it’s buried because they obviously didn’t realize its importance: Barnes & Noble CEO Steve Riggio “said he thought it was time for publishers to consider raising prices. ‘I’m not asking for publishers to start raising prices 10 percent,’ he said, ‘but perhaps a little price inflation in the coming years would not have a deleterious effect on unit sales.'” NYT The Big Picture The most unexpected reason you may […]

Are You Sitting Down? Riggio Says to Raise Prices The NYT finally gets around to covering recent industry stats, including those from BISG. There’s only one thing new in here, and it’s buried because they obviously didn’t realize it’s importance: Barnes & Noble CEO Steve Riggio “said he thought it was time for publishers to consider raising prices. ‘I’m not asking for publishers to start raising prices 10 percent,’ he said, ‘but perhaps a little price inflation in the coming years would not have a deleterious effect on unit sales.'” NYT The Big Picture The most unexpected reason you may […]

Personnel News At Simon & Schuster Canada, Deb Woods has resigned as president, effective July 15, to spend more time on personal interests. She has run the unit since 2002, coming over when S&S bought Distican. As CEO Jack Romanos noted in an internal announcemount: “The last three years have been a time of enormous change at S&S Canada, and Deb has done stellar work managing S&S Canada’s transition from what was essentially a distribution service to a wholly focused sales and marketing company within our family of international companies.” The current senior management team of Alison Clarke, Sheila Haidon, […]

Getting Ready for BEA The AP files their pre-BEA story, viewing the convention through the lens of TWBG head Larry Kirshbaum, since this will be his last convention as the head of the company. Looking back 30 years ago he recalls: “It was really a kind of floating party from suite to suite among people who were friends. It was a much more collegial business, without the pressure everyone has now from being with a publicly held company.” The AP adds: “Industry officials debate the necessity of BookExpo America, but Kirshbaum is among the believers, hoopla and all. He has […]

Important PublishersMarketplace Update As you may have noticed, we experienced a major hardware failure at the site towards the end of yesterday afternoon. The effect was unfortunately compounded by a “perfect storm” of negligence at our hosting company with our automated daily back up system. The good news is that the site was back up within hours, and all of our features and databases are fully functional. The bad news is that certain data pieces from much of May are still being recovered and reloaded, and parts of this process could take a while. Some member items, particularly tracker history […]

Eric Yang Takes Over to RH Asia As Chi Leaves Random House’s Asian star Y.S. Chi is stepping down from his position as the founding head of Random House Asia, exhausted from “the tremendous personal physical toll of his constant round-trip travel from New York” and in response to a recent request from one of his daughters to spend more time close to home. Chi will keep seats on the boards of the Random House Kodansha and Random House JoongAng joint ventures, and will take a job outside the book business. Random CEO Peter Olson comments, “Y.S. leaves us with […]