News and opinion on the changing world of book publishing
September 2005
Audible Braces as MediaBay and Amazon Enter, Growth Continues Across the Board Talking to audio publishers is like walking into a small town where everyone knows everyone else and all of the competition is friendly — at this point everybody is so excited by the potential growth of the industry that they seem willing to [...]
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July 2004
People June was a relatively quiet month, though that doesn’t guarantee a quiet summer, judging from the increase of job listings on industry job boards and murmurings around town: Harold Augenbraum is leaving The Mercantile Library to become Executive Director of the National Book Foundation, effective July 12. A search committee has been formed to [...]
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August 2003
Last month PT surveyed the bulging book-bags of client distribution players in the US, and a report to be released this month from the British Publishers Association indicates that a bundle of business from across the pond may well be coming their way. The US Book Market: A Survey and Route Map for UK Publishers, [...]
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July 2003
Random Redux, Freese Helms PGW: Client Distribution Biz Jostles and Grows Don Fehr, nearly a year into his tenure as Director of Smithsonian Books, needed a distribution fix. The august publishing concern (formerly Smithsonian Institution Press) was gunning for trade sales growth — aiming to reverse its mix of 80% academic and 20% trade-bound titles [...]
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March 2003
PEOPLE John Kilcullen, previously CEO of Hungry Minds, has been named President of VNU’s Music and Literary Group and Publisher of Billboard. He will also oversee Bookseller and Kirkus Reviews, Music & Media, and Airplay Monitor. As dissected daily in the NYT, Daniel Menaker was named SVP and Editor-in-Chief of the Random House editorial imprints. [...]
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September 2002
Your Guide to Cost-Cutting Without Lopping Off Heads Now that synergy’s been debunked, and good old Thomas Middelhoff has been spun off, the publishing world has settled down to the rather more prosaic task of whittling away at its already bare-bones cost structure. “It’s clear there is retrenchment,” as one public relations executive says, but [...]
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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 [...]
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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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June 2001
Vendor Survey 2001 As the old nursery rhyme has it: “Three wise men of Gotham / Went to sea in a bowl; / If the bowl had been stronger / My story had been longer.” The ever trenchant respondents to Publishing Trends’ annual survey on publisher services to wholesalers and retailers have cast publishers in [...]
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February 2001
As the year drew to a close in Germany, so did the long-running speculation about who would pick up the venerable Heyne Verlag, which for years was subject to rumors about an imminent sale to one of the four major players in the country: Bertelsmann, Holtzbrinck, Bonnier, and in the end the winning bidder for [...]
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