Publishers Weekly

BISG announced the recipients of its 2014 Industry Awards today at its Annual Meeting of Members in New York City. Awards in four categories recognize the wide range of BISG and industry achievements that help smooth the processes that bring content to readers and help move a transforming industry forward.

Bill Kasdorf of  Apex Content Solutions has been awarded BISG's The Industry Champion Award.  Kasdorf was recognized for his work as Chair of the Content Structure Committee and his  broader efforts to improve standards throughout the industry.

In the New York Times coverage, for example, the fact that hundreds of indie publishers were part of the deal doesn’t show up until — well, it doesn’t really show up at all. The fact that Perseus even had a “distribution arm” doesn’t appear until paragraph seven, but you’d have to know what “distribution arm” meant to really get it, and even then it only merits half a sentence: “Under the terms of the deal, Hachette would keep the Perseus publishing business,

As Amazon and Hachette exchange blows over e-book pricing, whose side are you on? Andrew Albanese, Senior Writer for Publishers Weekly, weighs in.

Hear more about the Amazon vs Hachette situation at beyondthebookcast.com.

Publishers from Belorussia, Pakistan, India, Denmark, Australia, Malaysia, the U.S. and China were among the winners of the first London Book Fair International Book Industry Excellence Awards, given in association with the Publishers Association and presented at the fair yesterday.

Book Industry Study Group (BISG) and the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF) have announced early details of the conference program for the upcoming IDPF Digital Book 2014.

Independent bookstores, with their paper-thin profit margins and competition from Amazon, have found themselves a Daddy Warbucks.

The best-selling author James Patterson has started a program to give away $1 million of his personal fortune to dozens of bookstores, allowing them to invest in improvements, dole out bonuses to employees and expand literacy outreach programs.

A memo yesterday from Markus Dohle, CEO, Penguin Random House, and Madeline McIntosh, U.S. President and Chief Operating Officer announced that the Penguin warehouses in Kirkwood, New York and Pittston, Pennsylvania will close a year from now, signaling a major step in the Penguin Random House merger.

According to the memo, the closure of the two facilities will begin in February 2015 and be complete by June 2015. The operations at the two Penguin warehouses will move to the Random House warehouses located in Westminster, Maryland and Crawfordsville, Indiana.

On behalf of all employees at Smashwords, I want to start by thanking every Smashwords author, publisher and agent that publishes and distributes with Smashwords.  We serve at your pleasure and we appreciate your trust, partnership and support. 

I also want to thank the retailers and library aggregators that comprise the Smashwords distribution network.  Every day, you work tirelessly and often without adequate recognition for the amazing service you provide our authors and publishers.  You receive, ingest and merchandise our books to your customers.

A federal judge in New York threw out claims by independent bookstores that Amazon and the big publishing houses conspired to create a monopoly by using technical measures to ensure that ebooks bought on Amazon could only be read on Kindle devices and apps.

In a ruling published on Monday, US District Judge Jed Rakoff rejected the notion that Amazon's "device specific DRM" (digital rights management) provided any benefit to the publishers and described the bookstores' claim as "threadbare."