Job Hunting? Click Here

By PT Editors
March 1, 2001
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Going, going, gone are the good old days of dropping lunchtime crumbs over the “Positions Open” section in the back of PW, when you’d gamely search for that next dream gig. (“Marketing Director, U. of Hawaii Press”? Hmmm.) Yes, clickability has hit the hiring game, with Internet job boards humming away 24/7 and recruitment field leaders HotJobs.com and Monster.com awash in resumés fueled in part by dot-com layoffs. (Monster is currently seeing 30,000 new resumés per day, up 50% from the end of last year, while HotJobs saw a 77% leap in January.) Now, such sites are being joined by job boards exclusively for the media and publishing industries, making vacancies that much easier to advertise and — hopefully — to fill.

The new job board section of Publisher’s Lunch, for example, grew organically out of job listings being posted unofficially on the site’s message boards, and within the first month is outdoing PW by 6 to 1. “It’s got off to a stronger start than I would have dared plan or expect,” says Lunch creator Michael Cader. Unlike PW, which will post only its print ads online for a small additional charge, or NYTimes.com, where you have to search the entire job board by non–industry specific categories (publisher, marketer, etc.), Cader’s boards use the same technology as HotJobs and Monster, which allows jobs to be searched in a variety of ways including location, industry, and keyword, but only lists jobs confined to book publishing. “There is an inherent insularity in this business that means broad-scale job boards are not effective,” Cader adds. “Publishers are looking for publishing people, and general job boards are drawing non-publishing people.”

Internet job boards also have the advantage of speed — and the relative absence of space constraints. Employers click on the “post a job” link and can post jobs immediately. Billing is done by mail, and costs are low, charged by listing, not by word count. Cader charges $150 per job per month, comparing to HotJobs’ $195 per 30-day listing, and Monster’s 60-day posting at $295. By contrast, the dead-tree posting method will run an absolute minimum cost of $144 for the NYT Book Review, while for PW it’s $54 (though you’d get only 15 words for that).

As for useability, Publisher’s Lunch and partner Media Bistro (which hosts its own listings of media jobs at mediabistro.com) are easy to use and trawl focused user bases. Monster boasts a slicker interface, international jobs, and more sophisticated search tools, but is lighter on media offerings. Meanwhile, HotJobs currently lists the greatest number of publishing jobs, the majority NYC based, though with a good spread through the rest of the US. Publisher’s Lunch, however, does not offer the resumé/job-matching service that the bigger, more established services do. (The Lunch job board is at publisherslunch.com.)

Susan Gordon, president of Lynne Palmer Associates, the publishing recruitment firm, believes job boards supplement rather than threaten traditional recruitment methods. “Job boards are another form of advertising,” says Gordon. “They are not going to make us disappear. When people come to a recruiter, they’re looking for deep industry knowledge. There will always be a lot of work ferreting through resumés, clearing the pap, screening candidates, advising. You can get a ton of information from job boards, but you still need to know what to do with it.”

But the boards do work. Esther Margolis, president at Newmarket Press, recently filled a mid-senior level post via HotJobs. “The professional level of the people who responded was excellent,” she says. “You could describe the position in detail, and it was a third of the price [of The New York Times].” Would she bother with print ads in the future? “No need — I was very happy with the response.”

College grads, probably the most Internet comfortable of job-seekers, have already been flocking to Jobtrak.com, the college career network serviced by Monster. Prospective employers are charged per college access ($25 per college up to $395 for a full national listing) and the listings are available only to students and alumni (50,000 of whom access the site daily) via passwords issued by college career centers. “A couple years ago I think students would have searched through a variety of means,” says one recent graduate, “but now my first stop would be Jobtrak, followed by HotJobs and Monster.” Another graduate who found her job at Penguin through HotJobs calls the site “the most useful for entry-level positions,” though admits that it wasn’t all plain-sailing. “I was excited when I applied, but no one ever called me back. I had to get my friend who already worked here to contact HR for me.” She’d definitely use the service again, though would not make scanning the boards a lunch-break habit: “Never! I spent too much time doing that while I was unemployed.”

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International Fiction Bestsellers

By PT Editors
March 1, 2001
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Bruit on the Baltic
Johansson in Sweden, Delerm Dines On in France, and Noll Gets Warped in Germany

A “determinedly girls-eye view of events” has captivated Sweden this month, as the third and final volume in 70-year-old Swedish writer Elsie Johansson’s trilogy hits the stands with what’s been praised as “an unusual kind of bildungsroman.” The new one, Nancy, is the latest installment in the emotionally charged story of young Nancy Petersson’s childhood in rural Uppland, following the tumultuous events in the wake of her father’s death. Exchanging pastoral village life for “a dingy little backstreet flat” in Uppsala during wartime rationing, Nancy and her mother delve into the town’s proletarian dross. Drudgery at a job sorting mail in the post office is only exacerbated when mom up and moves in with a “friendly butcher” she’s met at work. The earlier volumes in the trilogy — all of which are standalone works — were the highly acclaimed 1996 title Glassbirds (which opens with the discovery of a strange suitcase under an attic staircase) and 1999’s Wild Flower (about Nancy’s later teenage years, which involve heartthrob Lars). Some 60,000 copies of the new one have been sold since its January publication; together the trilogy is up to some 350,000 copies to date. Rights to all three books in the series have been sold to Gyldendal in Denmark, and we’re told a deal is pending in Germany. See agent Linda Michaels.

Meanwhile in Sweden, Joakim Pirinen has checked in with an “absolutely mad, dada-ish, and very talented” prose debut called The Swedish Monkey, which takes off to hilarious points unknown (“A challenge for a translator!” was all our source could report at press time), and clearly incorporates the zany gestalt of the young writer’s well-known comics. Pirinen has also been known for his radio drama writing. A first printing of 7,500 copies is going fast, with no foreign deals reported as yet; see Ordfront for rights. And finally in Sweden, a note of congratulations to Gao Xingjian, whose books continue to rise up the list.

A brief word in from Holland, which sees bestselling author Ronald Giphart return to the list with the 1992 novel I Love You Too (we’re told the book is hot again due to a related film release). The politically active, thirtysomething author is said to be “a great hero for young writers in Holland,” and more gala parties appear to be in the offing: his 1996 novel Phileine Zegt Sorry is reportedly under contract with the Oscar-winning production team of Antonia’s Line, which was directed by Dutch filmmaker Marleen Gorris.

On the subject of films, all of France has been howling over Pierre Pelot’s The Wolves’ Pact, which is based on a mega-blockbuster movie, apparently one of the biggest productions in the history of French cinema. Briefly, at the end of the 18th century, the Chevalier de Fronsac and his American-Indian blood brother Mani are sent to the province of Gévaudan to inquire about an “unknown creature.” It turns out not to be a wolf per se, but something “far beyond reason.” The upshot is “a detective novel, a love story, a fantasy, with the tremendous rhythm of an action movie, all rolled into one!” No foreign sales have been reported as yet; see the French Publishers’ Agency for rights. Also on the list in France, Philippe Delerm dines on in the tradition of his 1999 collection We Could Almost Eat Outside, and has just published Siesta Assassination, a series of 40 short evocative texts (“as delicious as ever,” says his publisher) that meditate on life’s small dramas, “those brief moments when your perfect happiness is suddenly invaded.” The 1999 work was published in 30 languages (including a Picador edition in English) and Gallimard expects the same or better of this book. The new one has already sold 170,000 copies in France; see the FPA.

In Italy, Susanna Tamaro has rocketed to the top of the list with Answer Me, in which an elderly Italian woman writes a letter of confession and advice to her granddaughter, who is estranged and living in America. Tamaro gained wide exposure in 1996 with her debut novel Follow Your Heart, which sold millions of copies in Italy alone. A second novel, Anima Mundi, which investigated communist prisons for Italians in Yugoslavia after World War II, sold 400,000 copies in 1997 (and was savaged by Italian critics as “a storehouse of clichés”; the author retorted that her anti-communism was at issue, and not her prose). In any case, despite taking a few knocks, Tamaro has remained staunchly in favor of keeping her particular brand of sentimentality in the arts: she once lamented that too many artists today have “a limited horizon that goes from the umbilicus to the feet, and this is very sad.”

Meanwhile, the diabolical Ingrid Noll is back in action in Germany, where Blissful Widow has landed at #8, giving readers another go at Noll’s knack for “the Eurocrime novel that focuses on the internal lives of its characters rather than fast-paced action.” Noll’s earlier mysteries have been praised for the deftness with which her collection of seemingly unsympathetic characters lures readers into the author’s unabashedly “warped sense of reality.” In Hell Hath No Fury, for example, Noll details the angst-ridden fallout when “a strait-laced spinster on the wrong side of middle age tumbles head over heels in love with a family man.” The grim but riveting work highlights, as one reviewer put it, “the futility and total desolation of a relationship where each is using the other for their own ends.” Read at your own risk. Noll was born in Shanghai in 1935; her novel The Evening Breeze is Cold had a first run of 100,000 copies. HarperCollins UK published Noll’s first three titles, but not the subsequent two books, so be advised that the search is on for a new English publisher, according to Hedwig Janes at Diogenes, which controls rights.

Lastly, Catherine Clement’s novel Theo’s Odyssey has wandered all the way to Brazil, and hits the charts there at #8 (having stopped off along the way to be published in the US in 1999 by Arcade — it was originally in French). The work, some may recall, chronicles a 14-year-old boy who is diagnosed with a mysterious and terminal tropical illness, and embarks upon a world tour of religious sites with his wise Aunt Martha, who impresses upon him the metaphysical subtleties of the world’s spiritual traditions. Comparisons to certain other bestselling juggernauts were coming fast and furious upon the book’s publication, though one reviewer opined: “Teenagers don’t act like that. This book almost doesn’t deserve to be compared to Sophie’s World.” Others, however, dubbed it a “perky pilgrim’s progress.”

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Book View, March 2001

By PT Editors
March 1, 2001
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PEOPLE


A relatively quiet month, personnel-wise: Peter Bernstein has taken a new position as Editor-in-Chief of the University Alliance for Life-Long Learning, an online venture of Oxford, Stanford, Princeton, and Yale Universities to develop distance learning courses. He had been working on an author website, AuthorByAuthor. . . . VP and Managing Director Scott Lubeck has left Westview (a division of Perseus) to become CTO of the Harvard Business School Publishing, reporting to CEO Linda Doyle. And Holly Hodder has been promoted to Westview’s Editorial Director
. . . . Kathy Gilligan has left McGraw Hill, where she had been subsidiary rights director for Professional Books
. . . . David Lappin, recently Director National Accounts at S&S, has joined ex-Henson publisher Jane Leventhal in Jack Hoeft’s new venture, which he will announce shortly. . . . As reported elsewhere, Kent Carroll has left Carroll & Graf, where he was publisher and editor-in-chief.

VIRTUAL PEOPLE


John Conti, most recently at Contentville, has joined a B2B startup called RealRead, a sampling service which gives publishers the ability to let online book buyers see what they need before they buy, as VP of Sales. The Japanese company is “well-funded,” with the US as the base of operations. . . . With its announcement of a new e-book initiative, HarperCollins promoted Chris North VP and General Manager, Electronic Publishing, reporting to David Steinberger. Sean Abbott will be senior editor of E-Books, and Leo Hollis will be Editorial Director of E-Books for HarperCollins U.K. . . . Rightscom, a UK consultancy business specializing in the rights management issues associated with the delivery of Intellectual Property in an online environment, announced that it has merged with Mark Bide & Associates.

DEALS


Carlisle Agency’s Larry Chilnick sold the biography of astronaut Alan Shephard to Crown’s Emily Luce in a five figure deal. The author, Neal Thompson, is the military affairs reporter for the Baltimore Sun. Chilnick also sold The Sober Gourmet, by Elizabeth Scott, to Harvard Common Press’ Pam Honig. The book is a “healthful lifestyle” book that will include recipes for recovering alcoholics. . . . Jim Hornfischer of The Literary Group International, who agented Flags of Our Fathers, played author this month when his book, The Last Stand of the Tin Cup Soldiers (also about WWII), was sold in a preempt. His colleague Frank Weimann, president of the agency, handled the deal, but the lucky bidder was unknown at press time.

Scott Manning reports that clients Paul and Julie Lerner, authors of Lerner’s Consumer Guide to Health Care (which they published via their own imprint, Lerner Communications) are doing a five-part series on the Today Show. Paul used to be at Morrow, where he was Harvey Ginzburg’s assistant. Though they are not looking for a trade publisher for this title, they “wouldn’t rule anything out.” Check out www.lernerhealth.com.

DULY NOTED


Maria Campbell celebrates her first year scouting for Warner Bros. with five projects that the studio has snapped up, including Bryan Burrough’s “Hunting Hackers” article, Stephen Carter’s The Emperor of Ocean Park, and Joe Kanon’s new thriller The Good German, which was also taken by the scout’s publishing clients Karl Blessing (Germany) and Little, Brown UK. (Both had published him previously.) Campbell has just reupped for another year with the movie company.

• The Licensing Letter reports in its Annual Business Survey of retail sales of Licensed Merchandise 1992–2000 that the past year experienced a 1% dropoff from the previous year, which was unusually high due to the extraordinary sales of Star Wars properties (pace DK). Publishing was up 4%, however, and the Music category is the big winner, with a 23% increase in sales, because of “slick marketing and squeaky clean personas of a growing number of teen and tween-targeted bands.” Next is Celebrities/Estates, though most of that increase is attributable to Martha Stewart’s program with Kmart, which has surpassed the jackpot $1 billion mark. In general, though, it seems retailers are wary of going after hot licenses, until they start taking off.

• There’s the aforementioned Martha, and Rosie, and of course, Oprah, but no longer will there be Mary Higgins Clark’s Mystery Magazine, which Family Circle was publishing increasingly sporadically over the past four years under Editor Kathryne Sagan’s aegis.

• We await with bated breath the announcement of the 100 Great Jewish Books of the Modern era, which are to be announced this spring. In September the National Yiddish Book Center convened a panel of scholars, critics, and writers (including the LA Times’ Kenneth Turran, and scholars from England, Jerusalem, and the US to debate the list. Criteria include literary merit, Jewish authorship, and treatment of Jewish experience or sensibility. For further information contact Nancy Sherman at the National Yiddish Book Center, (800) 535-3595 x 111 or nsherman@bikher.org.

• Pat Holt confounded regular readers in a recent newsletter by mentioning that coverage of Amazon “borders on the hysterical.” She went on to critique the Washington Post story, saying “The Post story goes on and on, slicing and dicing Amazon.com as the Best New Fall Guy of the year. Every time something positive comes up — for example, nobody says Amazon ISN’T paying its bills; in fact, the data show that Amazon is paying its bills FASTER than before — the Post charges in with something negative.” Meanwhile The London Sunday Telegraph picked up the Post’s article, with its own headline, “Is Amazon up a Creek?” But the March 1 edition of Money has a more evenhanded approach, citing analysts, researchers, and retail experts, including Paco (Why We Buy) Underhill, who sees its “customers rule” philosophy as a continual lure.

• All good things come to those who wait: The price on Inside and PW’s March 19 Summit, Opportunity & Challenge, has dropped to $495, from its previous $795 price. Speakers include the usual suspects, as well as some timely additions, including Dave Eggers, Bob Stein (reincarnated, post-Voyager, as the founder of Night Kitchen), and Michael J. Wolf, the Booz, Allen media guru (as opposed to NY Magazine’s media pundit). Kurt Andersen and Nora Rawlinson (one of the two women listed on the roster of speakers) host the event. For information go to Inside.com, or call (888) 750-0716.

PARTIES


PT’s scout tells us that Bertelsmann’s US Scout Bettina Schrewe threw a “lovely fete” for Goldmann’s Georg Reuchlein and BTB Chief Andrea Best. “Among those spotted,” we’re told, “were smart young editors: Sarah McGrath (Scribner), Ethan Nosowsky (FSG), Dan Smetanka (Ballantine) and Courtney Hodell (Random),” along with agents Kim Witherspoon, Neil Olson, and Henry Dunow.

That same evening the Greenburger agency hosted a dinner for Rowohlt’s Georg Heepe, who has taken on the title “Editor Emeritus.” In attendance were agents Irene Skolnick, Wendy Weil, Cynthia Cannell, and writers Paul Auster, Sapphire, and Walter Abish.

In late Feb., crowds packed into the Carnegie Club at the invitation of Will Lippincott and Randall Rothenberg, Publisher and Editor-in-Chief respectively, of strategy+business, the (relatively) new Booz, Allen–backed business publication, and Myles Thompson’s new business imprint, Texere. S+B is poised to make a big circulation push, and had run an excerpt from the just-published Why I Hate Flying by management guru Henry Mintzberg. (The quote on the jacket was from “Marketing Maven” Philip Kotler, who said, “Now you don’t have to read Drucker On Management.”)

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In the Know

By PT Editors
February 1, 2001
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Vault.com is a web site used by job seekers to get the lowdown on what it’s really like to work for a company — in full, unexpurgated, and unsubstantiated glory. Many publishers aren’t even listed, including the entire Holtzbrinck group, while Norton gets little traffic and virtually no messages. Same with S&S, which has had all of three messages posted in the last year.

On several publishing message boards, however, the emails are flying. Not surprisingly, given its size, one of those is Random House (though it’s not up to the level of Barnes & Noble, which has had 137 postings in that time). Recently the subject of salaries at Random has become a hot topic, with several workforce entrants astounded at the high (relatively) starting salaries. This led to some mean spirited (and misspelled) emails suggesting that Random’s hiring practices are not all that they could be. One ex-employee called the company “Racist House,” while another offers a mock list of job qualifications: “Blond Hair, Blue Eyes. Long legs a plus. . . .”

The debate over hiring and salary practices, however, has been raging since the site launched in ’99, and Random is certainly not alone. An ex-Scholastic employee slammed the company last week for its low pay and long hours. Another slammed an individual, which is against Vault policy (PT has since brought the posting to their attention), while one particularly frustrated ex-employee railed, “I sometimes thought that the entire company was an overblown psychological experiment to see just how much ‘wacky’ behavior a ‘real’ employee could take.” As for “picking managers out of the hat” (the method another email suggested was used by the company), “I think they pick some off the wall of the post office.”

Others seem more generous. “Anonymous,” apparently fed up with the carping, wrote: “I left Scholastic 2 years ago and have been miserable ever since. I didn’t know I had it so good . . . I long for the good old days. . . .” Hire that email!

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Talk Miramax Books Finally Takes Off

By PT Editors
February 1, 2001
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ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED AT INSIDE.COM (2/6/01)

It’s been a dramatic couple of weeks for Talk Miramax Books, which, after a shaky start, seems to be finding itself as a nonfiction publisher of high-profile books. Last month the house bought super-lawyer David Boies‘s memoirs, and last week it paid $3 million for a memoir and a business advice title from New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani. Today, Talk executives are holding what will probably be the final meeting with Madeleine Albright, to convince the former Secretary of State that she should take their $1 million instead of Scribner‘s. Whether these high-priced books will earn out — something other publishers doubt — hardly seems to matter. What Talk seems to be after — and seems to be getting — is a lot of buzz. That and some fodder for its much-vaunted synergy.

”These books,” says Jonathan Burnham, president and publisher of Talk Miramax Books, ”don’t define the list but announce that we’re in the business of doing major nonfiction books. We’re a small publisher with big muscle.”

Talk is also a publisher with a built-in publicity arm, in the form of its monthly magazine, which has run an excerpt from every nonfiction book the house has published so far. Jerri Nielsen‘s Icebound, for example, which is No. 2 on the New York Times bestsellers list, is excerpted in this month’s issue. ”We usually acquire serial rights,” says Burnham. ”On most occasions the serial will run in Talk magazine, but if we felt that the extract would better suit another publication we would certainly do a deal, and would sub-licence serial rights in the conventional way.”

Until recently, Talk Miramax Books, which launched last summer, seemed not to have found its way. Its first nonfiction title, Martin Amis‘s Experience, while widely read and reviewed in literary circles (and excerpted in the magazine), sold only 3,700 copies* in hardcover. Simon Schama‘s History of Britain — for which the house paid $250,000 — sold just over 6,000 copies. An upcoming excerpt from Stolen Lives: 20 Years in a Desert Jail, by the Moroccan princess Malika Oufkir, who tunneled her way out of prison with a teaspoon, will appear when the book does. The plan now is to publish about 20 books a year in hardcover, plus some paperbacks, Burnham said.

The new political acquisitions will also make obviously valuable contributions to the magazine. If Tina Brown‘s Talk has never quite landed on the grand stage to which it has aspired, the book division may help it get there. Put another way: the company may be acknowledging the wobbliness of the magazine, and attempting to shore up its image through books. A former employee comments that it’s easier to turn around a books division by throwing a bit of financial weight behind acquisitions and marketing than it is to right a magazine, which could reasonably expect to take 5-7 years to see decent profits.

The breakthrough appears to be Icebound, the tale of a doctor at the South Pole who discovered and treated her own breast cancer. The house was said to pay about $1 million for the nonfiction title, by Nielsen with Maryanne Vollers. ”Talk Books is doing a really great job fulfilling the mandate set out for them: getting attention with high-profile books, making a splash, making some money,” says a former Miramax employee. But others within the industry gripe that Talk Miramax’s focus on buzz-generating, one-shot authors ignores the whole notion of a backlist, on which the success of a publishing house ultimately rests.

”They’re paying ridiculously high prices to be zeitgeisty, which makes noise now but doesn’t lay foundations for the future,” says one agent. Burnham, who was named publisher in 1999 after a brief stint at Penguin Putnam, is a much-liked editor among agents (it’s not unhelpful that his coffers run deep), and generally thought of as an intelligent buyer. But there is increasing talk about the type of purchases he’s making. ”There’s a certain amount of bafflement about what they’re trying to do with the books list,” says one agent. ”It does seem to be a bit of a puppet for the magazine.” That close association with the magazine — which some consider ”confused and silly” — may hurt the reputation of the book division.

And while the original objective of Talk Miramax seemed to be to publish articles that could become books, as well as vice versa, the magazine’s focus on celebrity and Hollywood would appear to inhibit that kind of synergy. Vicky Ward, the magazine’s executive editor, disagrees, saying, ”If you look back over the past issues, there’s a very deliberate mix of business politics, celebrity, culture, fashion and literature.” And Burnham insists there are several magazine-to-book projects currently in gestation — but declines to detail them.

Burnham concedes that recent acquisitions have been pretty expensive. ”We’ve laid out a lot of money in the last two weeks,” he says. He adds, however, that his overhead is not massive and so the risks are not that big, especially for a film company used to taking big risks. While the latest signings have been commandeered by Harvey Weinstein and Brown — which raises the question of how much pressure Burnham and the books division is under to perform — Burnham insists that he has absolute freedom to publish as he chooses. ”Every division makes its own creative decisions,” he says.

(*All sales figures are total sales through Jan. 28 at Barnes and Noble and B. Dalton stores and at Barnesandnoble.com. These numbers are thought to equal 20 percent of the total number of trade books sold nationwide.)

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The Shelf Life of Books: It All Depends on Who’s Stacking and Tracking

By PT Editors
February 1, 2001
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Laura Bush ranks her shoes by color, keeps her record collection impeccably dust-free and swabs her cabinets with Clorox for kicks. And as we all read in the New York Times, the nation’s First Librarian also shelves the family volumes by the Dewey decimal system.

While Washington’s power brokers eyed their dottily piled-up volumes and marveled at the First Lady’s obsessive-compulsive streak, some of us took note that book collections bring out a bit of the crank in everyone.

Take Rolland Comstock, the Missouri bibliomaniac who has confessed to stickering all of his 50,000 books on the spines — red for signed editions, blue for unsigned American editions and green for unsigned English editions. And then there’s good old Samuel Pepys, the 17th-century diarist who arranged his 3,000 volumes strictly by height, from smallest to largest — and in bequeathing the collection to Cambridge University, stipulated that no book could ever be added or removed.

Admittedly, professional bibliophiles aren’t often so warped. ”I’ve always been in favor of the tried and true alphabetical,” says Peter Stern, a rare-book dealer in Boston. ”I’m not sure why anyone would do anything else.” Stern does recall a client who organized his books by the date of acquisition. ”I thought that was pretty odd, but not totally insane,” he explains. ”Organizing a book collection seems like something that should be wackier, but it isn’t.”

Oh, but there are some creative systems. ”I’m an extreme book buyer,” says Dennis During, a professor of business who teaches in New York City. Adequate cataloging of his 10,000 mostly nonfiction titles, he says, requires nothing short of the Library of Congress classification system. ”It’s guaranteed to find a unique shelf location for each book,” During explains, noting that he finds the system superior to Dewey, which provides a subject number for every book but requires further alphabetization by the collector. During puts labels on the back covers of every volume, having abandoned a more vigorous attempt to barcode each one upon arrival. The next step? Downloading it all into a PDA, so that when he’s shopping he can consult a list of titles he has already acquired. ”It’ll keep me from buying duplicates,” During says.

Wacky schemes are afoot elsewhere, notably in Kent, Conn., where a two-story library is nearing completion to house what by all accounts is the world’s best collection of first editions in the highly collectible mystery market. ”It looks like we built a house on the side of the library, rather than a wing added to the side of the house,” says Otto Penzler, who owns the Mysterious Bookshop and is relishing the moment he can begin shelving his 50,000 volumes of mystery and crime fiction. ”It sounds obsessive,” he says about the collection, then reconsiders: ”Well, it is obsessive.” After 12 years of construction (”I kept running out of money”), the house will have to contend with a library that keeps growing every day, thanks to the collectibles constantly passing through his bookshop. ”I have been accused of opening the store as a front for my own collection,” says Penzler. ”Not entirely incorrectly, either.” To organize the loot, Penzler departed from his preferred method of a single alphabetized collection. Instead, there will be two alphabets, one for each of the library’s two floors. Favorite books go on the first floor, where he’ll be spending more time; less coveted books go upstairs.

And oh, how the plot thickens — with cookbooks. ”The interesting thing is how politics plays into cookbook shelving,” says Susan Friedland, executive editor at HarperCollins, who edits culinary luminaries such as Marcella Hazan and Alice Waters. Most of her several thousand cookbooks are sensibly shelved by cuisine — French food, Italian food, American food — and appliance-related books have their own section. But here’s the politico-culinary twist. ”The Indian food is near British food because of the Raj,” Friedland says. ”The Turks and Greeks and German food are together because they were on the Axis. It’s all quite idiosyncratic, but it really works for me.”

What works is, well, what works. To be fair to Laura Bush, it must be said that Dewey has his defenders, none more ardent than Joan Mitchell, who is editor in chief of the Dewey decimal classification at the Library of Congress. ”I suspect quite a few librarians use Dewey at home because it just makes organizational sense,” she says. ”If I reflect on my own collection, it’s definitely organized by Dewey.” Many people are unaware that the system is constantly updated, so there’s a place for the latest book on animal diversity (333.954), or that treasured volume on Playpal dolls (688.7221).

Meanwhile, swanky Dewey partisans are checking in at the Library Hotel, New York’s latest boutique accommodation, which uses the Dewey system to organize its floors, so that the tenth floor is given over to General Knowledge, while the eighth floor is Literature. Each of the 60 rooms has a different topic theme, the ”Erotica” room on the Lit floor reportedly being the hotel’s most popular.

Still, Dewey definitely has his detractors. ”I don’t know any collector who uses the Dewey decimal system,” grumbles Nicholas Basbanes, author of A Gentle Madness, the 1995 work on book collecting and bibliomania. ”It just doesn’t make any sense.” For his part, Basbanes shares an anecdote about Umberto Eco, whom he visited while researching his latest book, Patience and Fortitude (which are the names of the two lions in front of the New York Public Library; the book is due out in September from HarperCollins). ”Eco had to move twice, because the floors were in imminent danger of collapsing from the weight of his library,” Basbanes says. ”Now he’s got 30,000 books in the house, and he designed a warren of shelves so that you could not fit any more than one book deep on a shelf. He wanted to be able to see every book.”

You might say seeing every book was the rationale for the personal library of meditation guru Osho on the 40-acre campus of the Osho Meditation Resort in Pune, India. The library’s 150,000 volumes ”are sorted according to size and color,” say the collection’s curators, ”and placed on the shelves in an arrangement that suggests ocean waves. The effect is organic and natural, with no solid blocks of color or size to grab the eye and weigh it down.” Books are cross-referenced by cover color, number of pages, and trim size. That way, if Osho wanted to see that ”big book on Einstein’s theory of relativity with the blue cover,” the librarian would know just where to go.

”He wanted it to be aesthetically beautiful,” says Sarito Neiman, the Osho organization’s New York-based editorial director. ”It was his first priority.” Neiman adds that occasionally workers at the library would change the covers of black books, if there were too many in the collection, so as to lighten up the mood. Incidentally, Neiman says that Osho, who died in 1990, remains India’s bestselling author, selling more than a million books and audio books every year.

In other words, there are book nuts, and then there are book nuts. Simon & Schuster editor in chief Michael Korda probably sums up the vast majority of collectors with his seat-of-the-pants aesthetic. ”I just pile my books up,” he says with a refreshing nonchalance, ”and go on visual memory if I need to find one again.”

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One-Stop Shopping

By PT Editors
February 1, 2001
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Are Bulked-Up Book Distributors The Industry’s Next Goliaths?

Time was, you would call a guy like Gilbert Perlman a book distributor. The warehouse, the sales staff, the publishing clients, even the name on the door — Client Distribution Services — all fit the modus operandi of firms schlepping books from the presses to the masses. But times have changed. So has the nomenclature. “We don’t call ourselves a distributor,” Perlman explains, adding after a moment: “We kind of don’t know what to call ourselves.” Indeed, it seems book distribution companies have embarked on a bit of strategic soul-searching as they vie for what industry estimates place at a billion dollars worth of distributed independent publisher sales every year. “I wish I could think of a better word than ‘distributor’ because I hate that word,” Perlman says. “The word ‘partner’ is horribly overused, but we see ourselves as a partner to our client publishers.” And for CDS, partnership means a certain behind-the-scenes savvy. “Our goal is to be transparent to the process,” Perlman explains. “Do you see ads for Simon & Schuster’s sales department? No. And you’re not ever going to see an ad for CDS.”

Whether as distributors, partners, or the dreaded “total solutions providers,” distribution companies are emerging as the middlemen-turned-marquee players of the supply chain. “Our business with distributors grows every year,” affirms Phil Ollila, vp of merchandising for the Borders Group, “and it has grown faster than our business with traditional publishers.” It remains unclear, however, whether distributors are capturing a larger share of the pie in terms of absolute numbers. “Our business is not up significantly with major distributors,” says Ingram president Jim Chandler. And last year, along with the rest of the economy, the $100 million–plus distributor Publishers Group West turned in a soft fourth quarter, with flat growth for the year, according to president Charlie Winton. Still, Chandler says, “We too value consolidation of sources in terms of the efficiencies that it provides. Distributors are controlling larger numbers of small presses.”

The Full Meal Deal

Distributors got a boost when Random House jettisoned its client distribution business (see PT, 7/99), but their expanded presence in the market is nothing new. “When you look at distribution services, it runs the gamut from pick-and-pack to full-service,” says PGW’s Winton. “We feel we have defined the service standards on the high end of that scale — the full-blown partnership with a publisher.” Now at 115 clients (though Winton says the top 25 clients represent around 80% of PGW’s billings), the company has been selectively adding services to its menu for at least a decade, bringing it into the big leagues. “Most of our competitors nowadays are major publishers looking to fill a niche in their catalog, not other distribution companies,” says Winton. Increasingly, of course, e-capabilities have become part of the full meal distribution deal. On that count, PGW has partnered with iUniverse, which will provide client publishers with e-delivery in various formats, as well as print-on-demand options — and Winton looks forward to a minimum of 500 e-books by the end of the year, up from the 65 titles currently available.

Though you might think e-delivery would threaten distributors’ hold on the marketplace, no one’s too worried about job security yet. “The same reason that a distributor is viable in the printed world, a distributor will be viable in the electronic world,” says Rich Freese, senior vp for sales and marketing at National Book Network. The company has been growing at 30% per year for the last several years, Freese says, with sales jumping from $53 million to $72 million in the last year. Now with about 85 publishers, NBN is developing an “e-warehouse” as a central repository for electronic editions of clients’ books, with electronic initiatives overseen by e-commerce director Larry Fox. The company is still in conversations with various data conversion partners (Ken Brooks’ Publishing Dimensions was among the contenders), and has hired half a dozen employees to tackle Internet marketing and distribution.

Meanwhile, other distributors are focusing on expanding services not in the ether, but overseas. “The most exciting event for us in the last six months was opening up the London office,” says Consortium CEO Randall Beek. Managed by Katherine Bright-Holmes, the London outpost will have 11 UK publishers on board by June. “Overseas publishers need someone like us to teach them how this country works,” Beek says. As the market continues to globalize, Beek envisions a “Consortium International” division that would manage publicity and promotion for its foreign clients. He’s also looking at foreign language distribution, particularly in Spanish. Now at about 70 clients (Consortium picked up City Lights in January), 40% of the company’s business comes from nonprofit literary publishers. It has partnered with Small Press Distribution to coordinate coadvertising, linked websites, and perhaps a co-marketing campaign. And in the remote distance is the ultimate service expansion. “Maybe in our future is selling more directly to individuals,” says Beek. “I’m cautious about that because I don’t want to be perceived in competition with our booksellers. But a lot of bookstores don’t take a position on a lot of our books.”

‘It’s the Book, Stupid’

There’s a severe shortage of parking places at CDS’s 300,000 sq. ft. distribution facility in Jackson, Tennessee, indicating either scrimping on asphalt or a staff at capacity. “We’re experiencing a boom in independent publishing,” Perlman says by way of explanation. “Due to the superstores and the Internet, there is unprecedented access to the marketplace. And we see ourselves as the facilitator of that process.” Aiming to “provide all the noncreative services to publishers,” CDS has been fine-tuning its distribution facility (acquired from Random House), which Perlman says can ship 500,000 books a day; every order that comes in by noon goes out by business close.

With 12 active clients (another half dozen are due to be signed within the next six months), Perlman says the key differentiator is not efficiencies of scale — though CDS has them — but a certain bedrock passion for the products in question. “Everyone asks us what our volume requirement is,” he says. “But the truth is that we do business with some very small companies. We choose clients based on the books. I like to say, It’s the book, stupid. The book and its marketing program have got to be leading the way.”

Perlman notes that the trend toward full-service partnerships has been mirrored in other industries. For example, IBM’s revenue and profit growth has come from sales of services, not hardware. And major brokerage firms have gotten into the business of clearing trades for smaller brokerage firms. As financial and technology companies morph into “total solutions providers,” so distributors push for ever more expansive partnerships. Not to mention the fact that the infrastructure has become increasingly data-intensive, with EDI, purchase-order acknowledgement, and advance-ship notification mandated by the most powerful retailers.

Better, Not Bigger

There are contrarians, to be sure. Eric Kampmann, president of Midpoint Trade Books, says that instead of service expansion, his company took an opposite tack: “We got rid of the sales force. This office is made up of three people, and we talk to our publishers every day.” Now finishing its fifth year of business, Midpoint has topped $10 million in sales and attracted 150 client publishers (with 20 in the UK, which account for around 10% of the company’s sales) on the philosophy that a model needed to be developed that would not imitate the sales, distribution, and marketing functions of the biggest publishers. “That seems to be the mistake made by many distributors,” Kampmann says. “It escalated their costs while not insuring appropriate sales volumes.” Midpoint targets superstores, Internet retailers, and wholesalers. “We focus only on those types of accounts,” says Kampmann. “We did not hire a sales force, commission or otherwise, to call on every territory in the country. Instead, we reach every account through wholesalers. We encourage all our accounts, including B&N, to use wholesalers.” Kampmann now aims to persuade larger publishers that his model can work for them as well. “As we grow we think we’ll be a leader in bringing the cost for using a single source of sales and distribution down below what is now being charged,” he says. Midpoint sells on a monthly basis to accounts, deliverable from its 80,000 sq. ft. warehouse in Kansas City; select mass merchandise accounts may soon be added to the sales package.

As the industry continues to evolve, distributors and their clients alike may come to appreciate the value in remaining sharply focused on the essentials. “There are things we do better than publishers,” says Consortium’s Beek. “We ship books better. We bill better. We collect money better. These are still valuable services for the foreseeable future. They’re not sexy and they’re not earthshaking. But the infrastructure is very important.” And for publishers with lucrative client distribution contracts, the bottom line seems to be this: As distribution companies get better at delivering and servicing that infrastructure, publishers would be well advised to keep a close eye on their market share.

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All Crisis, All the Time

By PT Editors
February 1, 2001
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In an address to the Publishers Lunch Club last month, industry veteran Tom McCormack looked back on forty years in publishing, finding that the more things change, the more they stay the same. Here’s a condensed version of his remarks.

When I first came down to New York, some folks asked me why I was going into a doomed industry. Couldn’t I see that television was going to kill book-reading dead? In the years since, I’ve heard again and again that the industry had struck an iceberg. I was told we were holed below the waterline by videos, CD-ROMs, computers, and even books themselves — which is to say that in 1975, Walter Meade of Avon mass market told me to get out of hardcover fiction because in five years there wasn’t going to be any. Later I was told — and also did not believe — that Barnes & Noble would assassinate publishing as we know it.

In fact, of the changes I’ve seen, many have been merely an increase or decrease in size. Take chain stores. They’re not new; my first employer had the Doubleday bookshops chain, though it was a small one. The media today notice and decry the rise of mega-publishers, but those of you with keen memories can testify that, throughout the forty years, small or fading publishers were constantly being acquired by bigger brethren — John Day, Sun, Orion, Crowell, Lippincott, Rawson, Atheneum, Pantheon, Schocken, Scribner’s. But new publishers have always been born at a greater rate than older ones were dying.

We’ve seen the decline of the importance of independent bookstores. But do you want to know something? Nobody in this nation knows for sure how many independents there are today. When I last tried a count in 1996, there were more independents than in 1986. And there were more in ’86 than in ’76 — and so back through this century. It always makes the news when an indie goes out of business, never when a new one is opened up. I remember two years ago, there was an elegiac article when a certain indie closed its doors. That same week, three new stores opened in New York — and you never read a word about it.

Here are three more constants in our industry. One: The alleged pundits, and the industry statistics they rely on, are consistently wrong. Two: We as an industry have always been very bad at wooing the right personnel. I mean this in two senses. We’re weak at filling the bottom jobs — that is, at recruiting the best and the brightest coming out of college. And we’re even worse at filling the top jobs. Take down an LMP of eight or ten years ago and read who the CEOs and eds-in-chief were. Recall how, when they had those jobs, they looked like they knew something. Notice how many aren’t there anymore. The third consistent fact of life in the book industry involves the media. The good news is, The New York Times is the best newspaper in the world. The bad news is, The New York Times is the best newspaper in the world. The basic fact is the media know next to nothing about our business. The only difference from 1959 is that back then at least they never pretended to understand the business side.

One regrettable change we might agree on has been that so few of the large-house CEOs of today came up through editorial. In the earlier years at St. Martin’s, even when I was a CEO, I was an editor. In 1977 I signed 111 books, and one of them was The Far Pavilions by M.M. Kaye. I took Mollie’s fifteen-hundred page manuscript off to the hills of Pennsylvania, and worked on it for three weeks. By my final years in publishing, however, my annual signings were down to 25, and I was lucky to edit ten of them. Why? Because St. Martin’s — which billed $2 million in sales in 1959 — was approaching $300 million by the late ’90s. I was drafted onto the boards of seven companies around the world. I had little time left for sitting down with authors.

In looking forward, for a quirky new perspective, think of the rise of online bookselling as analogous to the rise of book clubs between the wars. The clubs serviced people where there weren’t any bookstores. As more retail outlets were created, club growth flattened. One of their responses was to develop niche clubs. I remember once selling a St. Martin’s title to The Waterfowling Book Club. That one club took four times more copies than we placed in all the bookstores in America. Online selling is a new and severe threat to clubs, but it won’t kill them. What clubs continue to do for their members is winnow and select.

In the end, the history of our industry reveals that change was always with us, and that suggests it always will be. We’ll get bigger, and more efficient, and new stuff will arise. But remember: We always notice change. We’re slower to notice what stays fundamentally the same.

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International Fiction Bestsellers

By PT Editors
February 1, 2001
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Time Regained
Eco Back in Italy, Dahl Redux in Spain, and Harry Potter Everywhere Else

Umberto Eco is at it again. Romance, that is. His fourth such novel to date — featuring the picaresque adventures of the title character, Baudolino — has hit the stands in Italy, and we’re told its pages are bursting with tall tales of “imaginary Italian” and “mysterious lands inhabited by monsters.” Oh, and there’s a love story in there, too. Baudolino is a boy living in the 12th-century countryside near Marengo, and, as Eco explained to La Repubblica, “is a little rascal, similar to the scoundrels that exist in many indigenous mythologies: in Germany they call him Schelm, in England the Trickster God.” The first chapter is told as written by Baudolino directly onto parchment when he was 14; Eco said he got a kick out of concocting the region’s vulgar form of Latin, “about which we don’t have any documentation. I enjoyed myself a lot.” Nonetheless, claims Eco, it’s not a book for lexicographers. “There are no advances in philology here,” he told the paper. “These are not pages of erudition, they are pages of comedy.” The book is due out in the US in fall 2002 from Harcourt. In related news, Foucault’s Pendulum has finally been optioned to Fine Line Features, with production set for late 2001.

Also in Italy, for what it’s worth, James Hillman has nipped the list at #9 with The Force of Character, a nonfiction look at old age. The value of aging, Hillman writes, is that “we become more characteristic of who we are simply by lasting into later years.” The idea — as those who read Random’s US edition will recall — is that the aging process is meaningful: lapse of short-term memory lets us savor the past, while weakening stamina enhances our ability to notice the little things. Seems like this one’s due for a breakout on Italy’s version of Oprah.

In the UK, Wendy Holden is fresh off the back forty with Pastures Nouveaux, in which artist Rosie longs for a peaceful country cottage, but is rudely awakened from her dreams when she realizes that village life actually resembles a pastoralized looney bin. Holden is a journalist and former editor at Tatler magazine who’s now at the Mail on Sunday. No US publisher was under contract for the new one at press time, but her past two books have been pubbed in the States by Plume (Bad Heir Day is due out in the US this summer). See Jonathan Lloyd at Curtis Brown for rights. Also in the UK, veteran conspiracy scribe Colin Forbes returns with Rhinoceros, in which perennial characters Tweed, Paula Grey, and Bob Newman are back on the trail of five heads of state who are plotting to unleash a wave of civil uprisings upon the Western world. The twist? They’re conspiring over the Internet. No US publisher had signed on as yet, though deals were made in Germany (Heyne) and expected shortly in Holland, Sweden, Israel, and other lands far and near. See agent Carol Heaton at Greene & Heaton.

An oddity in Spain this month: Superzorro turns up by the late childrens’ author Roald Dahl, better known for the long-playing hits Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and James and the Giant Peach. The work is actually Fantastic Mr. Fox, in which three farmers, each one meaner than the other, try all-out warfare to get rid of Mr. Fox and his family. As one reviewer put it, the book “tells the story of clever Mr. Fox, his adoring wife, and their four small children, who outsmart three of the nastiest, ugliest, and ultimately dumbest farmers ever to raise poultry.” The book was published in 1970 by Knopf. Dahl’s agent is David Higham Associates. Also in Spain, back from the past is Katherine Neville’s The Eight, the 1988 cult classic inspired by the author’s work in North Africa as an international consultant to the Algerian government at the time of the OPEC embargo. The book is a sort of postmodern thriller set in both 1972 and 1790, and deals with computer expert Catherine Velis, who receives an assignment in Algeria, which is complicated by a diabolical global chess game. Now on the Spanish list at #6, the book was published in the US by Ballantine, and has been translated in some 15 languages.

In France, Tahar Ben Jelloun’s That Blinding Absence of Light is the latest from the celebrated Morocco-born author. Ben Jelloun emigrated to France in 1961 and won the Prix Goncourt in 1987 with his novel The Sacred Night (he was the first North African to win the prize). The author had a global hit with Racism Explained to My Daughter, which was translated into more than a dozen languages and sold more than 300,000 copies, and he has been investigating the continuing problem of European-Arab relations. Seuil has published the new one. On a more predictable note, Armistead Maupin hits the French list — battling at least two Harry Potter titles for the distinction — with The Night Listener, Maupin’s semi-autobiographical novel about a storyteller for a long-running PBS series featuring people “caught in the supreme joke of modern life who were forced to survive by making families of their friends.” (It was out in the US last year from Harper.) And a last tip in France: Patricia MacDonald, who is on the list with Last Refuge, is “huge in France,” though she’s never made it in the US, our source reports. MacDonald has previously published Lost Innocents and The Unknown; see agent Jane Rotrosen.

And in a brief note from Switzerland, word comes to us that Swiss author Urs Widmer has broken the 100,000-copy mark with his latest novel, Mother’s Lover, which Diogenes published last August. The Zurich-based Widmer is known for his books Love Letter for Mary and In the Congo, the former containing a love letter that is itself written in English, though embedded in a German text consisting of the brief narrative frame and the “author’s” comments that interrupt the love letter on several occasions. At press time rights had been sold to France (Gallimard), Italy (Bompiani), Holland (Byblos), and Denmark (Fremd). See Hedwig Janés at Diogenes for a synopsis and rights information.

In other news, you’ll be relieved to know that one prominent US Senator will be covering some of the family legal bills care of a few international rights deals. Heard on the street (though no one was confirming anything at press time): Hillary Clinton’s book was going to Headline UK for $1.3 million, to Fayard in France for $400,000, and deals were completed in Germany and Finland, with Holland still being negotiated. All that’s on top of the rumored $8 million deal with Simon & Schuster in the US.

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Dominoes Fall in Deutschland

By PT Editors
February 1, 2001
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As the year drew to a close in Germany, so did the long-running speculation about who would pick up the venerable Heyne Verlag, which for years was subject to rumors about an imminent sale to one of the four major players in the country: Bertelsmann, Holtzbrinck, Bonnier, and in the end the winning bidder for Heyne, the Axel Springer Group. The endgame for Germany’s largest privately owned book publisher has raised anxiety over consolidation — there’s “a lot less competitive publishing compared to a year ago,” one observer says — and has been seen as the end of an era, as sole owner Rolf Heyne died of cancer two days after the December sale. But it also heralds a sort of watershed for mass market publishing in Germany, and offers a formidable threat to Bertelsmann’s Goldmann, setting the stage for intensified jockeying among giants in what by all accounts is a profit-imperiled market.

Heyne will be folded into Springer’s Econ Ullstein List group to create the merged Heyne Ullstein, to be headed by Christian Strasser. This in itself is a sequel to the events of 1999, when Springer combined previously separate book publishers in Munich and Berlin to form the new group Econ Ullstein List. List was positioned as a literary imprint; Econ as non-fiction and business; and Ullstein as the platform for the mass market, where it had already been a contender. Add to this the fact that Springer has been keeping the flames burning at its long-running Cora line, a joint venture with Harlequin, which turns out some 500 novels a year and counts sales of 600 million pocket romances in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland to date. “An active sales strategy will be adopted,” the company reported, “above all in the paperback segment,” and licensing partners in Germany and abroad have been put on notice to keep the deals coming.

The Heyne merger now gives Springer’s book group a turnover of around $160 million, placing it second to Bertelsmann’s Random House Germany group, which posts turnover in the $197 million range. It’s quite a jump for Springer, whose 16 book publishers reported sales of 12.3 million copies in 1999 — 89% of those sold in Germany — for a total of DM151 million in 1999, up from DM92 million the year before.

In the last few years, turmoil has been no stranger to the top German houses — “Holtzbrinck has been changing managers like Kleenex,” one agent observes — and the Springer Group itself has sneezed through four different chairmen since 1991. It is due to take on a fifth, Mathias Dpfner, when he picks up the reins from August Fischer next January. Heirs to the Springer family control 50% of the company (the Kirch Group has a 40% stake), which still publishes Germany’s largest daily newspaper, Bild, and which took in a total of $2.6 billion in revenues in 1999.

By comparison, Bertelsmann’s total turnover was some $16.5 billion. For its part, the company managed to rattle the German market a bit when it announced that its Munich-based book group would take the Random House name, under the direction of Peter Olson, who formally takes over global book operations in April. As for the bigger picture, Bertelsmann AG has announced that within the next three years it intends to pump up its return on sales to 10% from the current 5.7%, a decision that was thought to have some bearing on the reported “difficult situation” regarding its stake in the joint venture Barnesandnoble.com.

For a difficult situation, however, you don’t have to look further than the German market itself, where sales remain flat but the number of titles keeps rising — from 45,000 in 1990 to more than 60,000 in 1999. Including rereleased editions, the number of new titles per year now tops 80,000, according to a report by the Deutsche Presse agency. But total German sales rang in at $8.3 billion in 1999, up a slim 1.5% from the year before. This has obviously set off profit alarms at the largest publishers. A German trade magazine reported that Bertelsmann’s book profits were an anemic 0.7% of sales in the 1999-2000 year. And at Holtzbrinck, subsidiary houses Rowohlt, S. Fischer, and Droemer-Weltbild were reportedly treading water, prompting rescue efforts from hastily retained management consultants.

But Marcella Berger, vp dir. of subsidiary rights at Simon & Schuster, thinks it’s premature to say how the German market will shake out. The most notable impact on American publishers thus far, she says, has been the extraordinary strength of the dollar against the mark. The weak currency makes German publishers seem cautious. On the other hand, it may be that competing divisions are loath to bid against each other, contrary to stated corporate policy. For now, it seems safe to say this: Germany has always been a major market, but it may turn out to be a little less major in the foreseeable future.

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