By Rebecca Rego Barry on February 1, 2010 11:16 AM
In this day and age of downsizing print and book coverage, Fine Books is returning to print!
February 1, 2010, Durham, NC. Fine Books & Collections magazine, which targets collectors of rare and collectible books, will return to a regular print schedule in April 2010.
The magazine had suspended its bi-monthly publication schedule in November 2008, but published an edition in Fall 2009. Based on very positive results, the publishers will return the magazine to print on a quarterly basis. The annual subscription price will be $25.
Read More
January 31, 2010, 04:22 PM EST
Jan. 31 (Bloomberg) -- Amazon.com Inc. has removed print and electronic versions of books from Macmillan after a dispute over pricing of titles for the Kindle digital reader, the publisher said.
Macmillan proposed new terms for prices of electronic books last week, Macmillan Chief Executive Officer John Sargent said in an e-mailed statement. In response, Amazon.com said it was removing Macmillan’s print and electronic books from the site, he said.
“Amazon and Macmillan both want a healthy and vibrant future for books,” Sargent said. “We clearly do not agree on how to get there.”
Under the new terms, Macmillan wants to be able to set the prices of electronic books individually, with most new titles costing $12.99 to $14.99. Amazon.com charges $9.99 for most best-sellers and new releases. Retailers would get a 30 percent commission under the proposal, Macmillan said.
Titles such as “Sarah’s Key " by Tatiana de Rosnay and “Wolf Hall” by Hilary Mantel, listed as best sellers on Macmillan’s Web site, weren’t available for purchase from Amazon.com today. Macmillan books are still available on the site from third-party sellers, Sargent said.
Drew Herdener, a spokesman for Seattle-based Amazon, didn’t immediately return a voicemail message seeking comment outside normal business hours.
Amazon, based in Seattle, lost 62 cents to $125.41 on Jan. 29 in Nasdaq Stock Market trading. The shares have lost 6.8 percent this year. Macmillan, which has offices in New York and London, is privately held.
--Editors: Jonathan Thaw, Jeffrey Taylor
To contact the reporter on this story: Greg Bensinger in New York at +1-212-617-8557 or gbensinger1@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Jonathan Thaw at +1-415-617-7168 or jthaw@bloomberg.net;
Sponsored Links
January 28, 2010
One of the applications built into Apple's iPad tablet computer is an e-book reader that will come integrated with the company's new iBooks app and store. At the iPad's unveiling Wednesday, Steve Jobs announced that five publishers — Simon & Schuster, Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins Publishers, Penguin, and Macmillan — had signed on to provide books to Apple's venture, with more to come.
Publishers are happy to have their products on the iPad's virtual shelves because partnering with a behemoth like Apple gives them the clout they need to counter Amazon's virtual monopoly on e-book sales. So it wasn't too surprising that most of the big publishing houses had struck a deal with Apple.
The technology itself was part of what attracted publishers to Apple. Unlike others' e-book readers, iBooks and the iPad can handle full color illustrations and photographs. Books may feature videos of author interviews, even lectures and links to other sites.
"Because of the technology being used, we can now show our color books, our illustrated books, cooking and photography titles which really isn't possible through the grayscales of an e-ink device," says David Young, the CEO of Hachette.
Price also figures into the arrangement. Like Amazon, Apple has a store where its e-books can be sold. But Amazon has set the price for e-books in its store at $9.99, which publishers felt was too low. Young says Hachette has worked out a deal with Apple that puts the pricing power back in the hands of the publishers. Under what is called the "agency model," the publisher will set the price for a book and Apple will take a commission.
Read Full Story
The mid-winter meeting provided three 10-hour days of symposium and conference on library and archival preservation. Interest sectors included administration, digital conversion and digital preservation, conservator/curator forum, book production, media reformatting, collections storage and practitioner education. In all sectors, reports of fundamental transformation resulted in the most intensive mid-winter in a decade.
Recent transformations have inverted established concepts. For example, digital preservation practice now drives physical collection practice; emerging standards, methodology, influence, funding, and staffing. Other inversions include redefinition of print book production by electronic on-demand technologies and the dissolve and decommission of curricular education for practitioners in the wake of immense redefinition of skill sets.
The rapid build-out of infrastructure is pretty amazing in context of current economics and paradoxes are popping up everywhere. Risk assessment for high density collection storage has undergone revision following adverse fire, water, smoke damage simulation. Tools and agencies for certification of digital repositories have emerged and are now evaluating persistence of content in domains such as Google Print, HathiTrust, Portico and Jstor. Library binding is disappearing by double digits every quarter but the industry is thriving with reinstallation for print-on-demand technology and with new market interfaces such as LuLu, Lightning Source, (Amazon) BookSurge and all kinds of POD publishers. The digitization infrastructure for conversion from analog sources is also now building out a vender and service base and industrial NISO standards. Even Boston taxis now provide navigation screens for the passengers.
Read the Whole Story
January 28, 2010 01:16 PM
J.D. Salinger, the famously reclusive author whose novel “The Catcher in the Rye” was one of the best-selling books of the 20th century, has died. He was 91.
Mr. Salinger died of natural causes at his home on Wednesday, the author's son said in a statement from Salinger's literary representative, the Associated Press reported. He had lived for decades in a remote house in Cornish, N.H.
“Catcher” is estimated to have sold more than 60 million copies worldwide since being first published in 1951. It continues to sell some 200,000 copies annually.
A staple of student reading lists, the novel boasts one of the most celebrated characters in postwar American fiction, its narrator, Holden Caulfield.
Holden is a latter-day Huckleberry Finn: slightly older, far more knowing, and considerably less resilient. At once cynical and sensitive, the 16-year-old Holden has just been expelled from prep school and decides to spend a few days on his own in New York. Manhattan is the Mississippi on which he floats (Checker cabs are for Holden what a raft is for Huck) as he obsessively seeks to pierce the “phoniness” of adult society while trying to maintain his increasingly unsteady equilibrium.
A comparable spiritual yearning characterizes Mr. Salinger’s other best-known literary creation, the Glass family. Their brilliance and neuroses emblazon his other books, “Nine Stories” (1953), “Franny and Zooey” (1961), and “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction” (1963).
Full Article
Hard times for independent booksellers
By Abigail Curtis
BDN Staff
BELFAST, Maine — The shelves at The Fertile Mind Bookshop are crowded with Maine books, mysteries, classic literature and much more, just like they’ve been for 30 years.
But after longtime owners Bruce and LaRue Hayne dispose of the current stock — now for sale at the bargain rate of 40 percent off — they will close its doors for good.
“A lot of our regulars are making it a point to stop in,” Bruce Hayne said this week from behind the counter of his cozy store. “They tell us they’re going to miss us.”
So will many of the other independent booksellers in Maine, who say that staying in business despite the growing success of Internet behemoth Amazon.com is an uphill battle.
“The Fertile Mind is an institution,” said Andy Lacher, who has owned BookStacks in Bucksport since 1997 and is concerned about its future, too. “That’s what I worry about here. I worry every day. You’re all in the same boat. You just hang on by your fingernails.”
The Haynes, who are taking their second retirement, say they wanted to leave the business so they could spend more time with their grandchildren in Costa Rica. They tried for more than a year and a half to sell the business. Although a number of people were very interested, Bruce Hayne said, no one was able to get the financing together to turn a book-selling dream into reality.
“Frankly, this year was not a good year,” he said.
‘Rough year’
Whole Story Here
January 19, 2010 01:46 PM
By Bryan Marquard, Globe Staff
Robert B. Parker, whose spare, eloquent sentences turned the tough private investigator Spenser into one of Boston's most recognizable fictional characters, died in his Cambridge home Monday. He was 77.
Robert B. Parker (AP file photo/2006)
Publishing 65 books in 37 years, Mr. Parker was as prolific as he was well-read. He featured Spenser -- "spelled with an 's,' just like the English poet," he said -- in 37 detective novels. He also wrote 28 other books, including a series each for Jesse Stone, the police chief of fictional Paradise, Mass., and Sunny Randall, a female PI in Boston.
His latest book is "Split Image," part of the Jesse Stone series, and is due out next month, his agent, Helen Brann of New York City, said today.
Mr. Parker's marquee character became a TV series, "Spenser for Hire," starring Robert Urich. "Jesse Stone" became a TV vehicle for Tom Selleck, and "Appaloosa," his 2005 Western, was made into a 2008 movie directed by and starring Ed Harris.
Full Story
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
