Finance

Edwards Brothers, Inc. and Malloy Incorporated, two leading book manufacturers, announced today that they would merge effective February 6, 2012, forming a new company called Edwards Brothers Malloy. The new company will have combined sales of $115 million and will be the sixth largest book manufacturing firm in the United States, offering publishers a global distributed print program and fulfillment services that combine to form a single print supply chain solution.

1 in 5: The estimated number of illegal book downloads in 2011. With the surge of 
the e-book industry comes 
a nefarious side effect: 
piracy. Illegal downloads have doubled in the past year, despite publishers' attempts to combat the trend.

The year 2011 may well go down as the annum of the e-reader. Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple, Sony and Kobo went all-in for holidays to get their e-readers, tablets and apps into as many hands, purses and briefcases as possible. In 2012, we'll see the results of that push, as publishers anticipate the next step in the digital evolution. Book Business interviewed executives across a wide swath of the industry, from giant trade publishers to university presses, educational outfits and upstart indies. We found that while digital is on the march, print is far from dead, and the next bold move in the industry may be maximizing the synergies between the two.

I asked publishers and authors how they’re promoting their e-books for the holidays and got answers from bundling and free samplers to Kindle Fire giveaways. Click through to see who’s doing what.

The decision by major publishers to strike a pricing deal with Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) has been the source of speculation and several antitrust investigations. Now, a new court filing suggests someone inside the industry was leaking the publishers’ pricing strategy.

In a brief filed in New York federal court this week, law firm Grant & Eisenhofer said it should get to represent consumers because it has special knowledge about how the scheme took place. The filing reads in part:

The HMV Group made a profit of 11.5m from the sale of book chain Waterstone's, but the fillip did not prevent the CD and DVD retailer sinking further into the mire with operating losses for the six months to end-October up 25% to 30.4m after sales fell 18%. Total sales were 364.9m, down 17.6% on 2010 (442.7m). Like for like sales for the first half were down 11.6%, compared with a 15.5% drop in 2010. HMV sold Waterstone's to Alexander Mamut for 53m in June, and also sold HMV Canada at the same time. The trading loss from these

In a note to clients issued Monday, Hudson Square Research's Daniel Ernst reported on the results of a pre-holiday scouting trip he took to retail stores in New York and Connecticut over the weekend -- only a handful of shopping days before Christmas -- where he found "floor traffic up materially, but lines at checkout short."

Demand for tablet computers was strong, he wrote, with Apple's (AAPL) iPad maintaining its lead. Amazon's (AMZN) tablet sales, however, were a mystery.

My first fiasco happened years ago with a London publishing house. My draft manuscript was accepted at a time when literary production was conducted over glasses of sherry and lunches fortified with Bordeaux. I was immediately attracted to the civilised, genteel culture of the industry. I was flattered that my work was being carefully cosseted by a team of editors and art directors, honing typefaces and imagery - naturally, between more sherry sessions - leaving me believing it was a pity the rest of the world didn't operate the same way.

$9.99 is often treated as a magic price—the cost of a New York Times bestseller on Kindle back in the good old days, before big-six publishers adopted agency pricing models and ended Amazon’s discounting of their books. However, for a variety of reasons, few readers ever had the chance to buy those $9.99 e-books—in large part because e-readers themselves were so expensive. From yesterday’s Wall Street Journal : When Amazon.com Inc. introduced its first Kindle e-reader back in November 2007, the $9.99 digital best seller was a key selling point. Today, the price of a

COMMENTARY: Amazon (AMNZ), which usually doesn't get too specific about details of its sales, apparently felt the need to crow about the Kindle. The company claims to have sold 1 million a week for the past three weeks. It's hot news, fueled in no small part by the Kindle Fire tablet. But while Amazon congratulates itself and tries to intimidate would-be competitors, publishers are potentially pouring cold water on the retailer's ardor. E-book prices are rising, according to a Wall Street Journal report. And that could come back to hurt Amazon, as well as Barnes & Noble (BKS), as