News and opinion on the changing world of book publishing
Games and puzzles publishers make their next moves. Plus, what comes after sudoku?
Laura Hazard Owen | August 2009
When the sudoku craze swept the country in 2005, AdAge questioned whether it was the “Rubik’s cube for the 21st century” but also pointed out that it had been around in various versions for thousands of years. Its modern guise was invented by an American architect, Howard Garns; his “Number Place” ran in Dell Pencil [...]
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May 2009
PT thanks The Licensing Letter’s Ira Mayer for his reporting. Visiting the Bologna Children’s Book Fair in March after an absence of a dozen or so years was a wonderful reminder of how vibrant an art form children’s books are. While the children’s book market is dominated by name brands (Disney, Marvel, Nickelodeon, etc., as [...]
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June 2003
People Latest dope on AOLTWP: with funding tight, Perseus is said to be out of the running, while Random, which raised some capital recently and is looking for a deal, is the likeliest purchaser. Meanwhile, in the latest reshufflings: RH Value Publishing’s President Lynn Bond has left the company, following in the wake of the [...]
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October 2001
Reader’s Digest Revamps Amid Topsy-Turvy Fiscal Forecasts Pleasantville, New York has always been a delightfully apt address for the Reader’s Digest Association. Ensconced there in its bucolic 113-acre campus — the global headquarters for an empire old DeWitt Wallace built on tales of anodyne, American optimism — Reader’s Digest was pleasantry incarnate. For the 100 [...]
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August 2001
Every publishing career follows a narrative arc. For some, it’s the Proustian ebb of Swann’s Way. For others, it’s Finnegans Wake. And the most gripping career stories tend to be those that jump out of the genre altogether. As conversations with a dozen book-world veterans show, life after publishing does exist, and what’s more, there’s [...]
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March 2001
Advance publicity for this year’s Toy Fair generated all the thrill of a wet blanket, with announcements rolling in from industry giants Mattel and Hasbro that their presence at the 98-year-old show will be significantly notched down in 2002. As talk of “downsizing” and “retrenching” swirled in the press, we were also treated to the [...]
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July 2000
Copious amounts of ink flowed in the pages of the trade press and the New York Times on the subject of the most recent Licensing Show, which took place June 13–15 at the Javits Center in New York. Unhappily for exhibitors, however, the lucrative patina around the likes of Eloise and Curious George could do [...]
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