Never known for its glamor, the permissions department has been getting a facelift and slowly gaining status as the legitimate, income-generating department it has always been. Its doing its fair share to boost the collective, otherwise sagging coffers of rights departments that have been hit by the retrenchment and subsequent mergers of book clubs as…Continue Reading
Facing ‘Oblivion,’ University Presses Rally ‘Round New Distribution Models Deep in a dark closet in the bowels of the University of Chicago Press’ main building resides whatmay be the answer to all university presses’ distribution woes. On a computer server, dubbed the BiblioVault, sit 5,000 books in digital format from close to 30 university presses….Continue Reading
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…Continue Reading
The AAP’s Director of International Copyright Development, Patricia Judd stunned her audience at the group’s annual meeting in late-February with Jesse James-like tales of raiding unsuspecting copyshops around the globe to stamp out the estimated $500 million black-market book biz, in which copy-machine crimes are at an all-time high. That estimate, she pointed out, is…Continue Reading
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…Continue Reading
PEOPLE Rich Freese has been named President of Publishers Group West, reporting to Kevan Lyon, EVP for Distribution and Publishing Services at AMS. Freese, who will relocate to the San Francisco area, succeeds Charlie Winton, founder and former President and CEO of PGW, and now Group Chairman and CEO of Avalon Publishing. Another publisher on…Continue Reading
PEOPLE Between the Random/Ballantine merger and the “Voluntary Retirement” package, insiders say that the total number of exiting employees is cresting thirty, including Howard Weill (Hweill@optonline.net), Mike Moran (mmoran123@aol.com), Ivan Held (IvanHeld@yahoo.com), Dan Rembert (Drem3ert@earthlink.net), Kathleen Spinelli (kspinelli@ mac.com), Susan Gilmer (susan@gilmer.com), Barbara Greenberg, Erica Muncy, and editors Tracy Brown (Tracy_Brown03@msn.com) and Dan Smetanka. The…Continue Reading
As Editors Keep Specializing, Are Generalists Going Extinct? Call it a healthy dose of editorial realism, or call it the Dilbert-ization of publishing. However you spin it, over the last few decades, it seems, that formerly abundant creature of the book-business veld — the free-ranging generalist editor, dismissive of pigeonholes and crossing categories at will…Continue Reading
Let there be no mistake about the 25th annual Calcutta International Book Fair. As host Subrata Datta Gupta informed the press prior to the show, though the fair paid special tribute to Brazilian literature and culture this year, “books from other Latin American countries would also be on sale showing that these countries have more…Continue Reading
