It’s All About the Expectations Sales were up 26 percent at Amazon for their second quarter, to $1.75 billion, but net income dropped to $52 million from $76 million a year ago. But the fall in profits was better than Wall Street expected and was due mostly to income tax changes, so shares were bid up again. Gross profit, one of Amazon’s many favored measures of performance, was up 32% to $450 million, which company CFO Tom Szkutak said was driven by third-party sales through the site — which now comprise 28 percent of all unit sales. They still don’t […]

The Rise of FSU’s Writing Program The Palm Beach Post looks at how Florida State University’s creative writing program “has become during the past five years what some believe to be the best in the country.” They add: “It did it with the help of patent money from the cancer drug Taxol, developed by an FSU scientist; the energy from pontifical mobster writer Mark Winegardner; and support of an established and respected English department.” Winegardner, who stepped down recently as director, says: “I defy you to find a faculty that is better in terms of quality and quantity of awards […]

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 […]