Growth, Opportunity, Piracy, Censorship
Katie Lee Hull | July 2009
While the rest of the world suffers the economic squeeze, the government-run Chinese publishing industry has counterintuitively managed to cultivate opportunity for expansion both for local entrepreneurs and international publishers. Talk of less state interference and mounting interest from foreign markets is encouraging some publishers to brave the censors, fears of piracy, and the cultural [...]
PEOPLE On December 15, two hundred and fifteen years after the Bill of Rights was ratified (in case you had lost perspective), Judith Regan was dismissed from HarperCollins. Maureen Egen, Deputy Chairman and Publisher of the Hachette Book Group USA, will step down from those roles January 1 and will leave the company by the [...]
Considering the contrasting audiences — one a collection of small publishers and publishing students, and the other a pride of publishing elite, the mantra at NYU’s Center for Publishing Management Forum for Independent Publishers and PW’s Summit was the same: It’s the consumer, stupid. At NYU, this theme was picked up by several speakers, including [...]
The AAP’s “Annual Meeting for Smaller and Independent Publishers” was devoted, as it has been for the past 6 years, to the small and feisty. Executive Director Pat Schroeder skipped her intro to go attend an “urgent” meeting by the Higher Ed Group to discuss textbook prices, but the conference proceeded with an ebullient and [...]
PEOPLE CDS’ Stanley Cohen has taken a leave of absence and Steve Black has stepped in as Acting Sales Director. David Wilk, VP of Client Services and Business Development, has taken over some responsibilities and a new Client Services Manager, Kerry Liebling, has been hired. Erin McHugh has been named Director of Creative Services, Trade [...]
When First Lady Laura Bush kicks off the 2nd National Book Festival on Saturday, October 12, on the Capitol’s West Lawn, she’ll be lending the White House imprimatur to the cause of reading in more ways than one. Besides bringing the likes of Ha Jin, Dava Sobel, Jules Feiffer, and Billy Collins, among some 70 [...]
As Riggio Guns for Lower Prices, There’s No Sure Cure for Sticker Shock Pantyhose, Len Riggio once said, lecturing publishers on the finer price points for L’eggs, sell blissfully at $6.99. But books are not leggings. And if publishers think $6.99 is a good price for the upscale products in bookstores, they’re hosed. Moreover, he [...]
When federal agents in Las Vegas hauled poor Dmitry Sklyarov off to jail on July 16 for hacking into Adobe’s ebook software, the 26-year-old Russian’s arrest proved a disastrous outing for the much-maligned Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), the 1998 law under which Sklyarov was detained. As hackers and civil libertarians lined up to blast [...]