Trade
April 4, 2016 at 8:40 am
I’ve been a fan of unlimited e-reading services for at least a couple of years now. When Oyster Books went under I shifted to Kindle Unlimited. For short-form magazine content I use Texture, the offering formerly known as Next Issue. Prices for these services are typically in the $10-15/month range and, for the most part,…
March 22, 2016 at 2:42 pm
Today Bertelsmann, the majority stakeholder in Penguin Random House, reported that its total revenue grew 2.8% to €17.1 billion or about $19.2 billion in 2015. The company reported that PRH played a significant role in that growth, increasing its revenue by 11.8%. That increase is significant, especially in light or recent reports from the AAP…
March 3, 2016 at 2:28 pm
This week Hachette Book Group (HBG) quietly updated its website in an effort to better align it with HBG’s direct-to-consumer marketing strategy. The upgraded site include a responsive design that improves mobile experience, original audio and video content, and sharable online book excerpts. Currently the site features an audio excerpt from the Jordanna Max Brodsky’s…
March 2, 2016 at 2:00 pm
WASHINGTON — March 2, 2016 — Publishers’ book sales for trade (consumer) books from Jan. to Oct. were up 0.5% compared to the same timeframe in 2014. Overall publisher revenue for the 10-month period was $13.2 billion, down 2.8%. These numbers include sales for all tracked categories (Trade - fiction/non-fiction/religious, K-12 Instructional Materials, Higher Education…
March 1, 2016 at 2:50 pm
Sophie Rochester asks in a recent article on The Bookseller, “Can publishing keep its soul in an increasingly data-driven future?” Rochester seems to have her doubts. She makes the argument that data-driven decision making conflicts with the creative intuition of editors and authors. If all book publishers do is chase sales data, then they will…
February 29, 2016 at 2:42 pm
Last week Book Business hosted a free webinar (currently available on-demand) and asked industry experts what trends will shape book publishing in 2016. One of those experts was Kat Meyer, director of content development and acquisition at the Book Industry Study Group (BISG). She said that BISG members are most concerned with improving book discovery…
February 29, 2016 at 1:59 pm
In the past week, I’ve had conversations with leading executives at two of Amazon’s competitors in the ebook space. They had strikingly different takes on whether the agency pricing regime, which is now in place by contract with all five of the biggest trade publishers, helps keep competitive balance in the ebook marketplace or prevents…
February 17, 2016 at 2:53 pm
As one of the smallest but also one of the more successful independent houses operating in New York City today, Soho Press has been publishing award-winning literary fiction from its Manhattan headquarters for some 30 years. The publisher's international crime imprint, meanwhile, for which Soho Press is perhaps best known, is currently celebrating its 25th…
February 12, 2016 at 4:49 pm
Last week at the Professional and Scholarly Publishers Conference -- an event hosted by the Association of American Publishers (AAP) and Professional & Scholarly Publishers (PSP) in Washington D.C. -- keynote speaker Joseph Esposito posed a question that all publishers, not just those in the professional and scholarly segments, are struggling to answer. That question…
February 5, 2016 at 4:05 pm
UPDATE 5/18/2015: CEO Jeff Bezos has finally confirmed that Amazon is expanding its bookstore division Amazon Books, reported The Seattle Times. He shared this news at a shareholder meeting on May 17th. While not providing exact details, Bezos said, "We’re definitely going to open additional stores. How many? We don’t know yet. In these early…
