News and opinion on the changing world of book publishing
July 2010
Since part of the mission of museum publishing is to produce great, big, beautiful books, June’s D.C.–based National Museum Publishing Seminar, “Print and the Digital Network,” offered anachronisms and anomalies galore. Most of the seminar’s sponsors are high-end European and Far Eastern printers like Mondadori and CS Graphics. They declared that the illustrated, printed exhibition [...]
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Laura Hazard Owen | May 2009
Last fall, BookExpo America formed its first-ever Conference Advisory Board and decided to increase the show’s focus on content and programming. “In the past, we had too many sessions that were all over the map and that were trying to be all things to all people,” says Courtney Muller, Group Vice President of BEA. In [...]
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September 2008
PEOPLE As was anticipated, Marie Toulantis has resigned from her position as CEO of BarnesandNoble.com. She had been with the company since 2002 and will continue to serve as a consultant. Tom Burke, VP E-Commerce, and Kevin Frain, CFO, have temporarily assumed her duties. They report to Barnes & Noble CEO Steve Riggio. Marjorie Braman, [...]
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May 2007
Countless are the questions and few are the solutions publishers encounter when approaching “the digital problem” confronting the industry. But several publishers seem to be cracking the code, albeit from different ends of the spectrum. Travel publishers are capitalizing on its category’s unique potential to be nuggetized and monetized digitally, at times even rendering a [...]
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At the 9th Annual Education Industry Investment Forum (March 26-28), more than a hundred investors and entrepreneurs gathered to learn more about the current state of the $300B education market. As always, technology was the glue that binds. Sparknotes’ Dan Weiss joined HM’s Craig Bauer and Beth Aguiar, VP of Apollo’s University of Phoenix, to [...]
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June 2005
PEOPLE As we move into summer, some job changes include geographic movement, along with the usual hopping across town: Close to home Laurie Rippon, Publisher of CollinsDesign, is leaving HarperCollins effective July 31. She may be contacted through the company until then. Meanwhile, Steve Wasserman, fresh from his LA Times gig, is once again a [...]
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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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November 2002
Take a tourniquet to the supply chain if you like, but order pads will still be scorching hot at CIROBE, the indomitable remainder and promotional book fair that hit the Chicago Hilton from Oct. 25 – 27. “Our best show yet,” crowed a show spokesperson, and indeed, no amount of inventory management can seem to [...]
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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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June 2002
This year Publishing Trends abandoned its vendor survey, because trying to rate players in the fulfillment and distribution arena was like trying to judge a warehouse full of Rube Goldberg contraptions — there are too many moving pieces, and they all move in different (some might say mysterious) ways. But one thing is certain: they [...]
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