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 […]

Also New and Improved Here’s another cool upgrade at PublishersMarketplace. Now you can search our contact database by location, so you can focus your searches by city, state, or even zip code. Contact page My Life: Week 2 After two weeks of collecting data, Nielsen Bookscan is reporting year-to-date sales for Bill Clinton’s MY LIFE of just over 764,500 copies through last Saturday. Clee Will Leave Post Longtime editor of The Bookseller in the UK Nicholas Clee announced that he will leave his job in late September, “to pursue other opportunities in the book world.” Clee, who has been with […]

New and/or Improved We have a few PublishersMarketplace updates for you: * Our genius webmaster has added a cool pop-up “bestseller history” feature to our very popular new bestseller section. So now the same way you can view a complete “tracker” sales history, you can also bring up and analyze a book’s complete bestseller list results, tapping our database back to last fall. So, for example, you can see that even as Gregory Maguire’s WICKED hits its highest ranking on the USA Today since its debut there last October at No. 34, the book ended its modest run on the […]

Catching a Famous Goat The WSJ tracks down the “My Pet Goat” story that President Bush is shown reading to a group of schoolchildren on 9/11 in Michael Moore’s “Fahrenheit 9/11.” They report: “Because the story is part of a classroom anthology, finding a copy — except for one listed under MY PET GOAT on eBay yesterday — has been near impossible. The story is contained in a book called READING MASTERY: Rainbow Edition, Level 2, Storybook 1, a school reading aid offered by SRA/McGraw-Hill, an educational publisher owned by McGraw-Hill.” This Amazon link says that it contains PET GOAT […]

Anonymous No More The Boston Phoenix declares that the author of the forthcoming IMPERIAL HUBRIS is anonymous at the insistence of the CIA, and against his own wishes. They report that, “Nearly a dozen intelligence-community sources, however, say Anonymous is Michael Scheuer — and that his forced anonymity is both unprecedented and telling in the context of CIA history and modern politics.” The paper supports the story with a fax from the CIA’s publications review board that reads: “This letter is to confirm that it is the Agency, and not the author that insists that approval for the manuscript is […]

Clinton Bookscan: Over 600K Nielsen Bookscan reports that they have tracked sales of approximately 606,000 copies of MY LIFE through last Saturday. The book was No. 1 in all 99 regional markets broken out within the tracking system. Given the percentage of the market that they cover, and the likelihood of big sales at nonreporting outlets such as Wal-Mart, Bookscan says they believe their tracked number is consistent with marketwide estimates provided by Knopf. Bremer’s Ready for Josephson Money Ambassador L. Paul Bremer 3rd is looking to make a quick transition to the private sector, having retained ICM’s Marvin Josephson […]