Perseus Closes CDS Purchase After lengthy negotiations, Perseus has closed their acquisition of Client Distribution Services. With over $200 million in annual sales volume on behalf of client publishers (including Harvard Business School Press, Taschen, Abbeville, and Tokyopop), the privately-held CDS quickly rose to become the largest independent distributor, though the company has faced increasing challenges as start-up units from Ingram and Random House have added to the intensely competitive distribution environment. (The alliance follows the recently-announced departure of large CDS client O’Reilly to Ingram.) CDS was majority-owned by private equity firm Olympus Partners, which financed the purchase of what […]

Lunch Returns For those who didn’t remember (or notice in the first place) that we indicated last week Lunch was taking a vacation break, we’re back, and now you know why you haven’t gotten e-mails for a little while. Bookselling Doldrums: AMS Suffers Further; Softness at Hastings and Ottakar’s; Ailing Australian Chain Will be Sold (and Borders Is a Potential Buyer) Every time Advanced Marketing Services issues a bulletin it appears to contain bad news. Though the company remains long behind in filing formal earnings reports with the federal government, they indicated in a statement earlier this week that they […]

As Noted This will be the last regular Lunch until next Friday. Deals, jobs and everything else at PublishersMarketplace will move along as usual, as well as the daily and weekly deal mails, and news items and links will be posted to the PublishersMarketplace home page on occasion. F+W To Be Sold F+W Publications is sticking pretty closely to its long-discussed plan to sell off the company, though they are doing so well before hitting chairman William Reilly’s long-avowed goal of $500 million in annual sales. The WSJ and the NY Post both report the company is being auctioned, by […]

Schedule Note Tomorrow (Thursday) is a travel day; Lunch will be served, but there’s no telling which actual meal it will come closest to. From Friday (March 25) through next Thursday (March 31), there will be no regular meals while we restock the kitchen. Deals, jobs and everything else at PublishersMarketplace will move along as usual, as well as the daily and weekly deal mails, and news items and links will be posted to the PublishersMarketplace home page on occasion. Baron to Bookspan Former head of Dutton/Plume and Putnam Carole Baron will join Bookspan on April 4 in the newly […]

Appointments Libby Jordan is moving from the Morrow side of HarperCollins — where she had been associate publisher of Morrow/Avon and Morrow cookbooks — to the new Collins division, still as associate publisher. Jordan will oversee marketing and direct-to-consumer initiatives. At Bloomsbury, Peter De Giglio has been hired as chief financial officer. Most recently, he was vp of operations at Holtzbrinck Publishers. Excerpts from New Hitler Book Begin Reporting from Germany, the Guardian has details from the dossier on Hitler’s last days prepared for Joseph Stalin, which is being published in the UK and Germany now (in advance of US […]

NBCCs As you’ve probably read, the winners of the National Book Critics Circle awards: Fiction GILEAD, Marilynne Robinson Nonfiction THE REFORMATION: A History, Diarmaid MacCulloch Biography DE KOONING: An American Master, Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan Criticism WHERE YOU’RE AT: Notes From the Frontline of a Hip-Hop Planet, by Patrick Neate Poetry THE SCHOOL AMONG THE RUINS: Poems 2000-2004, Adrienne Rich Miramax, on Fumes We wouldn’t dare try to paraphrase the language from this Page Six item: “Miramaxers- or what’s left of them – are fuming. ‘We have no idea what’s going on,’ said one staffer in the book department. […]