News and opinion on the changing world of book publishing
Laura Hazard Owen | July 2008
Since we last checked in with distributors, in June 2007, there are positive changes for the little guys. This year, micropress distribution experienced turbulence: The Sarasota, Florida–based BookWorld closed in late September 2007 without notifying its 104 clients. In January 2008, National Book Network (NBN) put its micropress sister company Biblio Distribution up for sale. [...]
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August 2004
People Publishers haven’t gotten the memo about summer doldrums, apparently, because this has been a record month for job changes: Phaidon Press announced that Chris North has become MD, working out of its London headquarters. North was most recently at HarperCollins, first in New York and later in Toronto as COO of HarperCollins Canada. Janet [...]
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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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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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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 [...]
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May 2003
“Best of times, worst of times” was the Dickensian scenario facing representatives from more than 50 publishing houses who hunkered down at the first Management Forum for Independent Publishers, hosted April 4-6 by NYU’s Center for Publishing. At the top of the agenda? “The economy, the economy, the economy,” chanted Center for Publishing Director Robert [...]
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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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May 2002
As Field Sales Forces Retreat, Will Telereps Take Up the Slack? Opened nearly a quarter-century ago, Auntie’s Bookstore is a solid fixture on the corner of Main and Washington Streets in downtown Spokane, Washington, a bustling burg of almost 200,000 that boasts the largest book-buying population between Seattle and Minneapolis. Judging by the number of [...]
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March 2002
Just How Big Is The ‘Off-The-Books’ Book Business? Sashay into any Barnes & Noble superstore, and there they are. Past the Barnes & Noble Café–branded 3-piece tea sets (“Great Curves. Excellent Style.”), past the Barnes & Noble–branded laser stationery, the velvet CD wallets, and the handy personal cash boxes, are, of course, the Barnes & [...]
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February 2001
Are Bulked-Up Book Distributors The Industry’s Next Goliaths? Time was, you would call a guy like Gilbert Perlman a book distributor. The warehouse, the sales staff, the publishing clients, even the name on the door — Client Distribution Services — all fit the modus operandi of firms schlepping books from the presses to the masses. [...]
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