News and opinion on the changing world of book publishing
February 2005
Publishers Pressured to Use Coding System Despite its many Flaws Not too long ago, an editor at a major househeard from a disgruntled author. He was fretting over the fact that his Thanksgiving-themed book was being categorized under the BISAC subject area “Social Science/Customs & Traditions.” He was concerned that the potential buyer for his [...]
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February 2004
PEOPLE Following the doldrums of December, January brought some major moves, including Michael Jacobs’ sortie from Scholastic, and David Steinberger’s installation as the President and CEO of the Perseus Books Group. Movement is everywhere: Random House has combined its two separate retail sales forces into a single unit, resulting in the departure of at least [...]
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December 2003
With Academic Sales Dwindling, University Presses Target the Trade Market With “tectonic changes” rocking the university press empyrean — a withering library market which once scooped up 750 copies of just about every title; steadily shrinking subventions; plunging public funding; and redlining revenues that, one director says, “keep going through lower floors than anyone knew [...]
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April 2003
70,000-Odd Small Publishers Might Be Wagging Your Dog They’re out there — all 73,000 of them — scrabbling for your shelf-space, mucking up your mindshare. That’s the number of book publishers in the US, according to Bowker’s Books in Print database, and it has nearly doubled in the past decade. Blame the go-go ’90s, the [...]
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January 2003
Two New Surveys Suggest That Book Price-Elasticity Is Getting All Stretched Out Among the persnickety trends of 2002 was continued brow-furrowing from industry observers and surveyors about the perception that book prices are disastrously high (see article). Some have cited the ruinous effect of “increasingly ubiquitous remainders” on the one hand, and stunningly deep discounts [...]
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October 2002
Twelve bucks a title. That’s how much Barnes & Noble has suggested it will charge publishers if they don’t beef up their title information feeds to the nation’s largest bookseller. Over the summer, B&N, having announced its data-streamlining partnership with Bowker, marched 40 of its largest suppliers into its offices and delivered the dreaded ultimatum: [...]
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April 2001
PEOPLE Gene Brissie, previously Editor in Chief at Prentice Hall Trade Publishing, has left to become a partner with Bert Holtje in the James Peter Associates Literary Agency. . . . Some changes in the S&S group: BJ Gabriel has been named VP National Accounts, with responsibility for sales of all S&S products, including adult [...]
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December 2000
It’s strap in and launch time for the three most prominent contenders in the world of author-focused websites. To wit: AuthorsOnTheWeb.com, another node on Carol Fitzgerald’s Book Report Network, expects to go live by December 11; PreviewPort.com, an author portal headed by novelist Susan Bergman, is set to roll out an e-book store, and hopes [...]
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July 2000
A Quick Reference Fix for Publishers As we were trying to find hard data on the subject of reading groups recently, we realized once again how little useful, accurate, or relevant information there is on book publishing. So we asked a few people who are in the knowledge business — reference librarians, consultants, packagers, etc. [...]
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