The Perseus Books Group

First came the independent authors, then came the newspapers and magazines, and now broadcast television networks are looking to join the burgeoning e-book marketplace. NBC News plans to launch NBC Publishing, a venture dedicated to releasing interactive e-books for tablets and e-readers.

Publishers Weekly revealed details of the new venture citing an email exchange with NBC vice president Michael Fabiano. The initiative will be spearheaded by NBC News and will leverage NBC's existing content assets from shows like Dateline, NBC Nightly News, Today, Peacock Productions, and NBC's archives as well as network and film properties including Telemundo, NBC Sports, and Universal...

The Perseus Books Group has created a distribution and marketing service that will allow authors to self-publish their own e-books, the company said on Sunday. The new service will give authors an alternative to other self-publishing services and a favorable revenue split that is unusual in the industry: 70 percent to the author and 30 percent to the distributor. Traditional publishers normally provide authors a royalty of about 25 percent for e-books.

The economics of the book business are changing so rapidly the industry barely looks like it did just six months ago.

The era of the book superstores, with their big windows and welcoming tables stacked high with books, has gone into decline. Many of the country's most enthusiastic readers have already switched to less-costly digital books. Amazon customers now buy more Kindle titles than hardcovers and paperbacks.

Last October, just before the deal-making frenzy of the Frankfurt Book Fair, the indie publisher Johnny Temple received an e-mailed book proposal that he was tempted to brush off.

The project, “Go the ____ to Sleep,” by Adam Mansbach, was an irreverent and foulmouthed parody of a children’s book, written in rhymey verse with profanities sprinkled throughout, giving frustrated voice to a universal problem for parents of small and stubborn children.

"At first I didn't really take it seriously, because it's so unlike anything that we publish," said Mr. Temple, the publisher of Akashic Books

Borders Group's recent bankruptcy filing and announced closing of more than 220 stores nationwide seems to warrant a closer look at trends in book retailing.

The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania has launched Wharton Digital Press, a global, all-digital publishing initiative that will publish books electronically, including as e-books, enhanced e-books, mobile apps and print books available through print-on-demand. The new press will operate in collaboration with Knowledge@Wharton, the school's online journal of research and business analysis, which reaches 1.7 million subscribers in 189 countries in five languages. 

(Press Release) NEW YORK, NY, Marketwire, January 18, 2011—Vook, the leading digital publisher of mixed-media reading, announced it closed $5.25 million in Series A financing from investors including VantagePoint Venture Partners and Floodgate.

Peter Davis, President McGraw-Hill Education; Brian Murray, President & CEO HarperCollins Publishers; Carolyn Reidy, President and CEO, Simon & Schuster; David Steinberger, President & CEO, Perseus Books Group; Tom Turvey, Director, Strategic Partnerships, Google; Peter Osnos, Founder and Editor-at-Large, PublicAffairs Books

With ostensibly lower production costs and a rich vein of backlist titles to mine, it may have been inevitable that e-book publishers would leverage the advantages of their medium to 
offer authors a higher percentage roy-alty rate for their works. This did not make it any less of a jolt when celebrity 
author Stephen Covey signed a digital rights deal with e-book publisher RosettaBooks, garnering him more than half of net proceeds for e-book sales of two of his older backlist books, including the famous "The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People," which would be sold exclusively through Amazon.com for one year. (Covey's print books are published by Simon & Schuster, which released a statement reflecting its position that e-book versions of the company's print titles should remain part of the company's catalog.)

Apple’s iBookstore on the forthcoming iPad is set to get larger. The company has just signed a deal with the largest distributor of independent publishers to sell electronic versions of it books on the new device.

Perseus Books Group, a large independent publisher that also distributes works from 330 other smaller presses including Grove Atlantic, Harvard Business School Press, Zagat and City Lights Books, signed a deal last week with Apple, following five of the six biggest publishers that have already signed agreements with Apple.