Amazon’s Newest Patent Play Amazon continues to be aggressive in defining and protecting intellectual property. The e-tailer was recently awarded a patent for many elements of encouraging and allowing customers to post online reviews, including the very process of using a Web site to fill out a review form. Internet News reports it also covers “encouraging consumers to write reviews of items they’ve purchased by determining the optimal times to send them e-mails or reminders,” and “in one embodiment of the patent, the system sends consumers a message inviting them to write a review in a predetermined amount of time […]

Please Note The timing/schedule of Lunch for the rest of this week is just plain up in the air right now. I’m headed to a conference on the future of publishing in Barcelona, by way of a quick business stop in London. Internet access and time to take advantage of it are both uncertain. Invoking our slogan of “except when not,” there will be some Lunches to come for sure, though possibly at unexpected times and not necessarily every day. News items and news links will likely to go to the PublishersMarketplace.com home page first — and deals, jobs, and […]

Last Day for Our Deals Deal You have just one more day to take advantage of our members-only twenty-five percent discount on our comprehensive printed compendium of over 3,000 deals for 2004, helpfully arranged by sub-category, price range and imprint, and cross-referenced by editor, agent, and more. Follow the link below for more information about the book (including downloadable PDF samples.) And make sure to use only the link below to qualify for this discount offer. Deal Book info and purchase http://www.publishersmarketplace.com/dealbookOffer.shtml If for some reason this has reached you even though you are not a paying member of PublishersMarketplace, […]

JAWBREAKER Set for End of Year Release In late October (after a second Federal Court filing earlier in the month), former CIA field commander Gary Bernsten and publisher Crown finalized clearances from the CIA’s Publications Review Board to issue JAWBREAKER on December 27, two months after originally scheduled. Crown executive editor Rick Horgan says, “We are going to publish the book with the redactions preserved,” with blacked-out text throughout the book where CIA approval was not granted, to make transparent to readers “all of the violence done to the manuscript.” (In the interest of readibility, places where multiple pages were […]

F+W Buyer Sues Previous Owners Even financially naive book publishing people took note when Providence Equity Partners sold F+W Publications to another private equity group, Abry Partners $500 million earlier this year, garnering more of a magazine sales multiple (estimated at two times sales) for the company than a book publishing multiple. Now Abry is suing Providence in a Delaware court, the Boston Globe reports, alleging “F&W artificially inflated its revenue for the six-month period ended June 30, 2005” by “channel stuffing” (incentivizing retailers to buy excess returnable inventory) so that “it overpaid for the company. Abry wants to rescind […]

AMS Restates Losses and Hints at Other Parts of Investigation Advanced Marketing Services (AMS) issued a release earlier today updating investors on their restatement of previous financial statements, and providing new information about their performance this year. The “cumulative after-tax effect of the full restatement will be a reduction in retained earnings of approximately $9.7 million as of March 31, 2003.” (They had estimated the restatement would be $11 million.) AMS has also admitted that a previous liability accounting for time differences between publishers’ records and the wholesaler’s own records was overstated by approximately $7.5 million in various years. While […]