Tag Archives: AOL Time Warner

Join the Club

Book Clubs Reinvent the Digital World If the term ‘book club’ evokes a muddled mélange (if not somewhat terrifying dream) of Oprah covering Tolstoy in gold stickers, growing legions of like-minded enthusiasts discussing scrapbooks or maybe even booksellers in Kabul, classes filled with Scholastic catalogs offering Shrek 2 tie-ins, while exclamation-point-laden mailers emblazoned with “6…Continue Reading

‘Real World’ Launches at Pratt

While young achievers crack open their coursebooks at the Columbia Publishing Course (100 students strong), and NYU’s Summer Publishing Institute uncorks the champagne (for its 25th anniversary), publishing scholars hail another milestone this summer as Pratt Institute launches “Publishing for the Real World,” a certificate program its creators describe as a vigorously hands-on education for…Continue Reading

Book View, May 2003

PEOPLE Between the Random/Ballantine merger and the “Voluntary Retirement” package, insiders say that the total number of exiting employees is cresting thirty, including Howard Weill (Hweill@optonline.net), Mike Moran (mmoran123@aol.com), Ivan Held (IvanHeld@yahoo.com), Dan Rembert (Drem3ert@earthlink.net), Kathleen Spinelli (kspinelli@ mac.com), Susan Gilmer (susan@gilmer.com), Barbara Greenberg, Erica Muncy, and editors Tracy Brown (Tracy_Brown03@msn.com) and Dan Smetanka. The…Continue Reading

The Book Beat

Amid Booming Book Biz Coverage, Critics See ‘Gaping’ News Holes First there was Keith Kelly at the New York Post. Then there were the hot-shots at Inside.com, and thus dawned a new era of frenzied jockeying among daily media scribes to fling arrows into the side of the homely book publishing business. While stalwarts such…Continue Reading

The Systems Showdown

The words “disaster,” “nightmare,” and “terrifying” pop up when talk turns to the company-wide software systems that several large US publishers began to adopt in the last decade. In this article James Lichtenberg, President of consulting firm Lightspeed, LLC, finds that the dot-com boom may be over, but for some publishers, the information age is…Continue Reading

Book View, August 2002

PEOPLE We will skip over the Thomas Middelhoff debacle, and move on to some moves that are less well covered, including that by a Middelhoff chronicler: The NYT’s David Kirkpatrick is leaving the Book Beat, to cover media, focusing on AOL Time Warner, along with Vivendi, Bertelsmann, and News Corp. His replacement will be named…Continue Reading

Book View, December 2001

PEOPLE Congrats to Phyllis Grann — and Random House — who have finally tied the knot in what is perhaps the last good news of ’01? Word is that not all publishers there are equally excited, leading to speculation about whether the last card has yet been played. Back at Penguin Putnam, Adrian Zackheim has…Continue Reading

All Crime, All the Time

Crime has been paying well enough for Court TV, the fast-growing cable network launched in 1991 (and founded by the now beleaguered Steven Brill) that under chief executive Henry Schleiff has doubled its reach to 60 million viewers in recent years, doling out televised trials by day and original riffs on the criminal justice system…Continue Reading

It’s Your Party

Pass the Chips and Dip, Y’all. Now Buy Some Southern Living Books. You may not see any hot-rodding pink Cadillacs when more than 1,000 salespeople descend upon Birmingham this month to attend the first national convention for Southern Living at Home, the newly minted home sales division of the Southern Living publishing group. Those automotive…Continue Reading

As Their Business Goes South, Direct Marketers Turn to Trade Books

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED AT INSIDE.COM (4/26/01) Battered by the rise of Internet retailing, skewered by deep-discount bookselling chains and wounded by waves of sweepstakes scandals, the mail-order book publishing business has been hit hard, as customers have become increasingly cynical about their responsibility to pay up, return promptly and — above all — remain loyal to…Continue Reading