Peter Osnos

On January 30th, subscribers to Publishers Weekly’s email newsletter received a special “News Alert” with a red rectangle across the top. “Simon & Schuster, Barnes & Noble in Dispute Over Terms” the headline declared. But the message itself was cryptic, offering no details about the terms involved or a clear explanation as to why there was a dispute to begin with. PW managed to get one quote from a B&N spokesperson:

The digitization of books has facilitated the rerelease of a spate of nonfiction works years or decades after their initial publication, and in some cases the common interpretation of their subject matter has evolved or changed significantly.

Melville House confronted this situation with its decision to reissue in December a 1964 book by A. M. Rosenthal, “Thirty-Eight Witnesses: The Kitty Genovese Case.” The book was originally released just months after the murder in March 1964 of 28-year-old Catherine Genovese, known as Kitty…

In his blogpost The Incredible Resilience of Publishing Fantasy , author Michael Levin responds to a piece in the Atlantic by former Random House editor Peter Osnos. Osnos makes the case that books will survive, while Levin makes the point Osnos avoids saying: trade publishers might not, having "lost the two things that made their business model work: the hammerlocks on distribution and marketing that the Internet has utterly destroyed." Levin's correct, but I also agree with Osnos that trade publishers are resilient and adaptive.

“There’s nothing like a hot book to make things happen,” observes Peter Osnos, founder and editor-at-large of New York-based publisher PublicAffairs, a member of the Perseus Book Group. When Scott McClellan’s “What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception,” got consumers fired up last spring, Osnos responded by utilizing digital print-on-demand (POD) technology. Here, Osnos provides eight tips for digital-printing success by recounting PublicAffairs’ experience with this overnight best-seller:

PublicAffairs, an imprint of The Perseus Books Group, recently found itself with an enviable problem—not enough books to fill orders for a runaway best-seller. The book was Scott McClellan’s White House memoir “What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception,” but luckily for Perseus, the appearance of McClellan’s face everywhere on TV this spring coincided with a propitious meeting at BookExpo America between John Ingram of Ingram Book Group, owner of digital printer Lightning Source, and Perseus Publisher Peter Osnos. “Demand went vertical, and there was a period of time when orders were coming in and they [didn’t have] any

The 2008 Publishing Business Conference & Expo—held March 10-12 in New York City— was the setting for a meeting of many of publishing’s top minds. With more than 1,000 book and magazine publishing industry executives in attendance, the Publishing Business Conference & Expo featured two-and-a-half days of intensive conference sessions addressing the biggest issues facing publishers today. Held concurrently, the expo hosted more than 100 exhibitors showcasing publishing technologies and services. The show, which this year featured its new Publishing Business brand, is produced by Book Business and Publishing Executive magazines and follows in the footsteps of the BookTech Conference & Expo. “The evolution