Hachette Book Group

In the first half of the year, the Hachette Book Group derived 27% of its revenues from digital publishing, according to an announcement from the company today. Digital revenues were up 20% in the first half of the year compared to the first half last year.

While digital growth was strong at the book publisher, it represents a significant slowdown compared to the early years of digital at Hachette. In 2008, digital publishing accounted for about 1% of Hachette’s overall revenues.

The three major publishing houses charged with e-book price-fixing have reached a settlement collectively worth $69 million with nearly all state attorneys general, the District of Columbia, and some American territories. Under the agreement, which was announced late Wednesday and still must be approved by the court, the Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins, and Simon & Schuster will award consumers monetary compensation if they purchased e-books from those publishing companies between April 1, 2010 and May 21, 2012.

Singer and songwriter Steve Earle has sold two books to Grand Central  Publishing/Hachette Book Group’s Twelve imprint.

He will publish a memoir in 2014 and a historical fiction novel about “a runaway slave who survived the battle of the Alamo” sometime after that book.

Claire Ryan writes in to tell us that Tor's anti-DRM policy is not making some other publishers happy. According to letters received by Cory Doctorow, Hachette UK is telling its stable of authors that they must use DRM, not just for the ebooks it publishes, but for all publishers distributing the same ebooks in other territories.

"I’ve just seen a letter sent to an author who has published books under Hachette’s imprints in some territories and with Tor Books and its sister companies in other territories (Tor is part of Macmillan)…"

In an amicus brief responding to the DOJ’s proposed ebook pricing settlement against Apple and publishers, attorney Bob Kohn says the DOJ unwittingly showed that Amazon used predatory pricing on ebooks, and asks that the DOJ’s investigation of Amazon be turned over to the court.

New York, NY (PRWEB) July 25, 2012 Hachette Book Group (HBG), a division of Hachette Livre, the world’s second largest book publisher, today announced the results of a validation audit confirming the company is accurately processing digital sales and providing correct reporting to its authors. The audit, which looked at sales from January 2012, validated Hachette’s systems and processes for managing digital sales received from dozens of eBook retailers and revealed that 100% of the sales have been processed and reported.

Just one year after moving from San Francisco to New York, Vook is enhancing its cloud-based e-book publishing platform this week. Vook, which has made its name by enabling non-techie types to publish their work electronically, is now rolling out features such as an HTML5-based reader that will let many tablets and smartphones pull up titles published through the platform.

Matthew Cavnar, Vook’s vice president of business development, who demoed the new features at this month’s NY Tech Meetup, says it’s all part of the company’s strategy to further disrupt the publishing world.

Not surprisingly, book-store owners make up a large number of the people who filed comments with the U.S. Department of Justice regarding the government's antitrust case's against Apple and e-book publishers. The DOJ posted copies of the more than 800 comments on its Web site today. In April, the DOJ announced that it had filed an antitrust suit against Apple and five of the nation's largest book publishers. The government accuses Apple and of conspiring to raise prices and forcing Amazon and other retailers to follow suit. The government reached a settlement with three of the five publishers, Hachette

The Department of Justice’s lawsuit against Apple and major book publishers “sounds plausible on its face, [but] could wipe out the publishing industry as we know it, making it much harder for young authors to get published,” New York Senator Charles Schumer writes in a Wall Street Journal op-ed. Schumer has been in touch with the WSJ about the ebook pricing suit for awhile. “Rarely have I seen a suit that so ill serves the interests of the consumer,” he told the paper in April. Schumer’s overall argument against the agency pricing lawsuit is that the lawsuit hurts competition by making

What do you call a study about metadata? Metametadata? Metadatadata? 

The Book Industry Study Group (BISG) calls it “Development, Use and Modification of Book Product Metadata,” its brand new publication prepared by Brian O’Leary of Magellan Media Consulting and done in conjunction with BookNet Canada.

The 37-page report assesses why this is so (essentially an ever complicated web of middlemen like distributors, aggregators and content converters, as well as vast differences in the practices of large, medium and small publishers) and provides 10 recommendations publishers, retailers and other players (like metadata management vendors and services) can improve their processes and “future proof” metadata in the supply chain.