Jim Milliot

Dear Jim, When I wrote to you the other day by email with a brief note asking if Publishers Weekly might want to link to the recent news on NPR and at the Christian Science Monitor in the U.S., and in The Guardian and the Financial Times in London, about a new literary genre called “cli-fi”, [...]

The post An open letter to Jim Milliot at Publishers Weekly appeared first on TeleRead: News and views on e-books, libraries, publishing and related topics.

Last October, when superstorm Sandy ripped through Connecticut, it flooded Bank Square Books in Mystic. Owner Annie Philbrick recalls walking inside to the smell of the ocean and a soaking wet carpet.

She and her staff had moved everything as high as they could before the storm, but water and paper are a disastrous combination. With no power to turn on pumps or fans, Ms. Philbrick was in danger of losing her stock of more than 30,000 books.

Publishers Weekly (PW) magazine and Aptara announce that initial results from the 4th Annual eBook Survey of Publishers, conducted in April, reveal a 100% year-over-year increase in the number of publishers making greater than 10% of their annual revenues from eBooks (36% of eBook publishers surveyed as compared to 18% in 2011).

Two years? Three years? Five years? It's a parlor game in publishing circles to speculate how long it will take before e-books constitute a majority of their industry's sales in the U.S.

George Slowik Jr., who acquired Publishers Weekly last month from Reed Business Information, has named four veterans of the magazine as corporate officers. Publisher Cevin Bryerman, co-editorial directors Jim Milliot and Michael Coffey, and children's book editor Diane Roback will serve as vice-presidents in PWxyz, the entity that now owns PW, PublishersWeekly.com, and the BEA, London, and Frankfurt Show Dailies. "I am relying on their expertise, experience, and astounding commitment to the future of this franchise that they've all been part of for many years," said Slowik of the appointees. "Now they are empowered and enabled to act on their ideas, and they have made it very clear to me that it won't be business as usual."

Publishers, distributors and e-retailers expect the advent and growth of smart phones and multifunctional personal digital assistants (PDAs) to stimulate the growth of the young e-book market. Yet, no matter how young or how small the market is, publishers have made a commitment to e-books and are anticipating the market will take off. The size of the e-book market in terms of revenue is based on the number of available titles, publishers' revenues or the revenues generated by e-retailers. For example, the New York-based International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF), formerly the Open eBook Forum, reported in its "eBook Statistics" for the fourth quarter