Book View, November 2000

By PT Editors
November 1, 2000
Comments Off on Book View, November 2000

PEOPLE

Vivian Antonangeli, formerly President of Reader’s Digest Children’s Publishing, goes to Grosset and Dunlap as President and Publisher, while Jane O’Connor becomes editor-at-large, working on a part-time basis. . . Ivan Held is leaving Viking, where he is VP Marketing Director, to go to Random House, reporting to Ann Godoff. Word is he will take a publishing role . . . Ed Walters, formerly VP Associate Publisher of Adams Media, has become Publishing Director of Tuttle Publishing. . . It looks like Walter Weintz is moving to S&S, but no announcement as yet. He was most recently at OneBigTable.com with Molly O’Neill and Arthur Samuelson . . . Victor Navasky, whose The Nation is launching Nation Books this fall, has hired Dan Weaver as editor. Most recently at Faber & Faber in Boston, Weaver also did stints at Penguin and McGraw-Hill. The new list will be distributed by PGW under a business arrangement with their Avalon Publishing division. . . Susy Bolotin, recently of Good Housekeeping, but formerly a book editor, has joined Workman as Editor in Chief. Inside.com referred to Workman as a “benign mini-cult,” to which Michael Cader responds in publisherslunch.com, “I know Workman Publishing; I worked at Workman Publishing; it is many colorful things, but it is not a benign mini-cult.”. . . Glenda Howard has left St. Martin’s for Black Entertainment Television’s book division. . . Gordon Hardy has been appointed Divisional VP and Executive Editor for General Reference in Houghton Mifflin’s Trade and Reference group. This is a new position. . . Ginee Seo has left HarperCollins Childrens for S&S as VP, Associate Publisher of Atheneum Books for Young Readers, replacing Jonathan Lanman. . . Also widely reported is the move of Random supereditor Jon Karp to Scott Rudin Productions, and Rob McQuilkin to Boston-based Palmer & Dodge agency.

DEALS


UK publisher Pavilion’s Colin Webb sold The Book of Rock, a hefty tome written by former Virgin Publisher Philip Dodd to Thunder’s Mouth in the US, Glenat in France, and deals to be confirmed in weeks to come from Germany, Spain, Scandinavia (four languages), Portugal, and Brazil. Rough estimates of printing numbers could take the global co-edition to 125,000–150,000 copies. The book is designed by David Costa, whose firm, Wherefore Art, is probably best known today for the megabestseller, The Beatles Anthology. Webb says that part of the enormous co-edition success was that they produced a fully bound proof copy to show publishers — 350 full color, 150 b&w pics, in all their glory.

The option on Joe Kanon’s first novel, Los Alamos, has been renewed, and London-based Renaissance will produce and sell the film, which will be directed by Nick Hytner.

UPCOMING EVENTS


Basic Books is celebrating its 50th anniversary with a discussion at the Helmsley Park Lane Hotel on “The Future of the Public Intellectual,” on November 2nd at 6:30. Basic Publisher John Donatich will moderate. Call Morse Partners (212 734-5134) for details.

•The Washington Post’s Michael Dirda, who in 1993 received the Pulitzer Prize for Distinguished Criticism, has been writing the often highly personal Book World column, “Readings,” one Sunday a month for nearly eight years. Readings: Essays and Literary Entertainments, a collection of his selected columns, has just been published by Indiana U. Press. There will be a wining and signing at The Madison Avenue Bookshop on Wednesday, November 29th, 5:30-7:30.

• Publisherslunch.com is hosting its third luncheon, on Wednesday, November 29, from 12:30 to 2:30 on “Making Money Through Free Media.” Speakers will be Seth Godin, Mike Shatzkin, and horror writer Douglas Clegg, all of whom have experience and expertise on the subject. The price is $100, and the venue, tba.

•PAMA (Publishers Advertising & Marketing Association) is hosting a luncheon on “ePublishing: Why You Can’t Ignore It” on November 16 at the Hotel Intercontinental. Speakers include Roger Cooper, consultant for iPublish, John Feldcamp of Xlibris, and Annik La Farge from Contentville. Market Partners International’s Constance Sayre will moderate. Members’ price is $60, and nonmembers, $75. Email pama_ny@hotmail.com.

INQUIRING MINDS


Notwithstanding media coverage and a Frankfurt party to celebrate, there has been no announcement from Grove/Atlantic about purchasing Edinburgh publisher Canongate, according to Morgan Entriken himself. And no one seems to be able to determine whether this is an acquisition or a merger, as Canongate’s Jamie Byng describes it. Meanwhile Jack McKeown was one of the blowout party’s co-hosts, but whether he’s otherwise involved is unclear, though he did say in an email that “The [Perseus] Group is giving serious consideration to developing a publishing presence in the UK market.” He was more forthcoming on the subject of the Saturday night event, which was “fantastic, although Jamie was prevented from demonstrating his DJ wizardry because the promised turntables never made it to the event. But even the preponderance of European pop music could not keep the crowd from rocking.” Estimates of attendance at the Alte Oper, an ornate building which is still used for concerts (and where the Microsoft eBook Awards were presented), range from 400–800. Given that the party started at 11 pm on Saturday night, when many people had fled the fair, that says something about publishers as partygoers, or the venue or, perhaps, the reputation of the hosts as entertainers.

•When Barnes & Noble originally spun off BN.com, it looked as though the idea was to build another Amazon.com, a virtual bookstore whose stock would climb unencumbered by the demands of — not to mention the taxes levied on — bricks and mortar. But now that B&N stores are actively promoting BN.com and vice versa, instead of looking like Amazon, the Riggios’ book emporia begin to resemble that other rival, Borders, which has been touting its integrated re- and e-tail strategy. The final question to be answered is: Given Bertelsmann’s investment, will a new CEO of BOL expect to play a role in BN.com, as was rumored to be likely? And will BN.com ever hire another CEO, ten months after the last one, Jonathan Bulkeley, resigned?

•Blab Media has announced a strategic partnership with Random House Inc., to create and distribute greeting cards online. The cards will be based on selected RH titles (though so far Anne Rice seems to be the only author represented). Blab offers cards with greetings available in 14 languages, including Arabic, Polish, and Hindi.

DULY NOTED


The winners of Poets & Writers’ annual Writers Exchange competition for the best poet and prose writers from a chosen state (this year’s was Florida) were poet Rhonda J. Nelson and fiction writer Jeanne Leiby. Each received an all-expenses-paid trip to NYC in October to give readings and meet with publishing types that included Norton’s Carol Smith, Ginger Barber, the NYT’s Harvey Shapiro, and judges David Mura and Sapphire. This was one of the most successful competitions P&W has staged, with submissions — at 176 for poetry, and 182 for fiction — 75% higher than in other years. Past winners have included the fiction writers Fae Myenne Ng, Mona Simpson, and Susan Straight, and poets Mike Chitwood and Roger Fanning. Scott Manning tells us that four years ago, the winner of the fiction writing award was Sue Monk Kidd. She read her short story, “The Secret Life of Bees” — and agent Virginia Barber told her that the characters had the potential to be developed for a full-length novel. The unfinished novel of the same name arrived on the agent’s desk this year and she promptly sold it to Viking.

•The Meadowlands Racetrack celebrated the 4th annual running of the Matt Scudder stakes on October 28. Yes, the President of the track is a Lawrence Block fan. Morrow has just released a non-Matt Scudder book, Hit List.

Posted in Book View •

When Agents Become e-Publishers, Who Looks Out for the Writers?

By PT Editors
November 1, 2000
Comments Off on When Agents Become e-Publishers, Who Looks Out for the Writers?

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED AT INSIDE.COM (11/6/00)

Shrewd advocate or two-faced monster? That’s the question currently confronting literary agents, as they depart from their traditional role as authors’ representatives and leap into the bracing — and perhaps perilous — world of electronic publishing.

”We’ve gone into it with both feet and over our hairline,” says Richard Curtis, the agent who many feel has strayed farthest to date into uncharted territory. After hanging out his shingle as an e-publisher , for example, Curtis has proceeded to aggressively seek rights to his own clients’ previously published work, and negotiated for rights with other agents and authors to content for e-books and print-on-demand editions.

It strikes some in the industry as more than a little odd to find an agent — whose mandate is to be the author’s trusted ally — stepping smack into the role of publisher.

It struck Curtis himself that way.

”No one was more keenly aware of the potential for conflict of interest than I was,” Curtis says of the birth of his company, e-reads, which now publishes some 1,200 titles (the e-reads.com site will launch in the coming months). While Curtis continues to do business as a traditional literary agent for such authors as Harlan Ellison, working in the genres of science fiction, mystery and romance, he says he has pre-empted cries of foul play on a number of fronts. He offers full disclosure to his clients, waives his agency commission on revenues generated to those authors by e-reads and gives clients the opportunity to engage other parties to negotiate on their behalf. He also submitted the e-reads contract to publishing attorneys and agents, and ”invited them to whack away at it.” The result, he says, is a ”model for author-friendliness.”

Certainly, the blurring of agents’ roles is nothing new in an industry famous for peculiar cross-relationships. ”We live in a business where levels of conflict are inevitable and everywhere,” says Arthur Klebanoff, president of the Scott Meredith Literary Agency. ”The question is how you deal with them.” Klebanoff, who is plunging into the publishing arena with the coming launch of RosettaBooks, notes that an agent who slogs through contracts to drag out rights reversions, and then digitizes and markets the files as e-books, is arguably offering a valuable service for authors whose books have gone out of print.

As more agents reinvent themselves in a variety of new guises, however, others caution that under the wrong circumstances, authors may find themselves doing business with Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

”A lot of what I’ve seen so far seems ethical,” says Joel Fishman, chief executive at Subrights.com and former owner of the Bedford Book Works agency. ”But if agents start to act like publishers on behalf of their authors, then who’s going to protect the interests of the author? If an agent becomes an e-publisher, then they’re pre-empting any other potential electronic publication of that book. Their incentive is to lock in those rights for their own business.”

And e-publishing also begs the question of quality, says agent Todd Shuster. ”Isn’t there a danger that in the hands of certain agents, material that really belongs in a graduate school writing program is going to get distributed before it should be seen?” he asks. On the other hand, the rise of the agent as publisher may be driven by the flexible roles all parties are playing in a collaborative publishing process, especially when editing is not necessarily being done by editors at publishing houses. ”In some ways, it may be out of necessity that certain authors are looking to their agents to edit,” says Shuster. ”There’s a very positive role that agents are playing now, because they’re picking up the ball and running with it.”

But some question the motives of increasingly self-interested agents. ”A lot of agents are trying to hustle at the tail-end of the whole dot-com bubble,” says Lynn Chu, vice president at Writers’ Representatives. ”But when you look at it carefully, you have to ask yourself, Do I really want to do this?”

For her part, Chu adds that the danger facing authors, regardless of who controls electronic rights, is in a publisher’s refusal to declare a title out-of-print — in effect squatting on electronic rights — with no immediate intention of reviving an all-but-moribund book. ”Authors are finding themselves in the position of losing total control over their rights forever to a publisher who has committed to doing only one thing for a limited time,” she says.

Indeed, it seems that as agents go boldly into the brave new world, authors and their representatives are the ones who have to sweat the bottom line. ”I thought the agent and I were on the same side of the table,” says a source who represents an estate handled by an agent turned publisher. ”But he wants to get as much from me as he can, now that he has his own agenda. I feel like I’m sitting with the wolf who’s dressed in grandma’s clothing.”

Posted in Featured Articles • Tagged , , , , , , , , , , ,

Working the Crowds at PNBA, NEBA

By PT Editors
October 1, 2000
Comments Off on Working the Crowds at PNBA, NEBA

Reports from Regional Trade Shows

Synchronicity was the unofficial theme for the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association’s annual fall conference, which returned to Portland on Sept. 15 – 17 after a three-year hiatus. At the show’s “Celebration of Authors,” for example, the self-deprecating Elwood Reid recounted his strange long trip from life as a “big dumb jock” to literary success with the Doubleday thriller Midnight Sun. He off-handedly mentioned that he owes his career to a tiny independent bookstore in Michigan that jazzed up his writerly ambitions — not knowing that the owner of the bookshop The Shaman Drum, ABA board member Karl Pohrt, was in the audience at the time.

Of course, that coincidence was a mere sidelight to PNBA’s fall program. Attendance of over 600 was up from the Spokane show last year — and included booksellers from 155 stores and exhibitors from 150 vendors. The numbers were down from three years ago, however, and it was clear that employee shortage is a chronic problem in this land of high-tech campuses, putting pressure on many a bookseller to stay home and mind the store.

Among the roster of Friday’s panels was the euphemistically titled “The Changing Role of the Sales Rep,” in which Graphic Arts rep Jim Harris and others noted the downward spiral of fewer stores and reps and the upward spiral of titles in reps’ bags. But the end of the session saw a sort of cathartic reconciliation, with Harris promoting his longstanding belief in “working for the store,” or having reps strengthen partnerships with bookstores via informed title suggestions targeted to a store’s specific market. As for BookSense, the ABA can rest assured: sign-ups came so fast and furious that staffers had to dash out to the nearest Kinko’s to run off more program materials.

Meanwhile, bookseller attendance was also up at the New England Booksellers Association, climbing more than seven percent during this year’s event at Boston’s World Trade Center, held on Sept. 22–25. As at PNBA, the dot-com drain on the talent pool seemed to be on everyone’s mind. As Harvard Book Store’s Carole Horne said, “We usually take as many of the floor staff and managers as possible to NEBA. This year, we just couldn’t because we don’t have them.”

But despite the staffing woes, NEBA executive director Rusty Drugan said that more than 1,538 booksellers were on hand, while overall registration rose six percent to 2,646. Drugan cited plentiful book orders (David Godine boasted that he had written “50 orders” himself) and record seminar attendance. At the opening day luncheon, NEBA awarded, posthumously, the Saul Gilman Award for outstanding New England sales rep to Marc Seagar, a NEBA founder and a popular 34-year bookselling presence. Seamus Heaney received the President’s Award for Lifetime Achievement; Heaney accepted as a “New Englander” (he teaches part-time at Harvard) and donated his $1,000 prize to the Irish Immigration Center.

Despite brisk orders, some publishers noted that the Northeast remains “depressed.” One sales manager mentioned the closing of Lauriat’s, while Waterstone’s and LearningSmith have also shut down in recent years. The venerable Bookland of Maine chain, meanwhile, has been in bankruptcy court this year, and its usual show presence was missed. “But,” said another sales manager, “New England is a briar-patch. Many older communities are just too small for a chain to invade. These stores are professional ‘survivors.’” Of course, non-indies were welcome at the show as well. Borders reps were plentiful, and B&N’s new Northeast regional buyer, Noel Pasco, was sighted in the company of B&N small press director Marcella Smith.

We thank Jennifer McCord and Christopher Kerr for their contributions to this article.

Posted in Featured Articles • Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Packaging Luxe

By PT Editors
October 1, 2000
Comments Off on Packaging Luxe

Want a Williams-Sonoma Cookbook to Go With That $379 Toaster?

No retailer engenders guilty pleasure quite like Williams-Sonoma, the high-end purveyor of “home-centered” furnishings. Universally known for its $159 bottles of balsamic vinegar (“a unique viscosity and sumptuous flavor”) and $379 toasters (“this versatile appliance can also toast a sandwich”), Williams-Sonoma has invented a whole new genre of conspicuous consumption: decor porn. But the San Francisco–based retailer’s commitment to “furnishing every corner of our customers’ homes” has also left no bookshelf unfilled. With some 12 million copies of branded cookbooks in print — 7.5 million of those coming from the sprawling Kitchen Library series — the retailer’s cookbook collectibles have become the must-have kitchen artifact for a certain upwardly mobile demographic.

“They’re like Pokémon for the 45-year-old woman,” says Terry Newell, president of Weldon Owen Publishing, the packaging firm that over the last eight years has brought the likes of Williams-Sonoma Risotto and The Mayo Clinic Williams-Sonoma Cookbook to a solid-maple sideboard near you. It’s not just the compulsive collector, however, that gives this program its interest. Together, Williams-Sonoma and Weldon Owen have worked symbiotically to publish cookbooks that are both custom-tailored to the retailer’s target audience, yet easily repurposed by the packager for electronic or promotional formats. With 16 million people in Williams-Sonoma’s customer database — and the retailer’s growing nexus of catalogs, retail concepts, and websites — what Newell calls “branded packaging” stands at the busy intersection of direct-to-consumer retailing, book packaging, and cross-channel sales.

Beyond Shake-’n-Bake

The road to Pokémon luxe originated in the early 90s with the custom publishing division of Time-Life, as then VP Publisher Susan Maruyama recalls. She signed on Williams-Sonoma and Weldon Owen for the first such deal any of the companies had done at the time, and refers to the project as an “innovative, gutsy business collaboration.” (John Fahey, now CEO of the National Geographic Society, was then Time-Life president.) Maruyama, who is now CEO of San Francisco Internet startup The Hive Group, says that all of the companies made an investment in the joint program, but she and Newell credit the Williams-Sonoma gestalt to the legendary zeal of founder Chuck Williams — and his frequently plundered box of thousands of 3 x 5 recipe cards, assiduously notated over the years. According to Weldon Owen consulting editor Norman Kolpas, the octogenarian Williams remains “totally involved” in the publishing program, reading and approving every last soupçon of cookbook text.

More than 100 titles later, the cookbooks have splintered into series such as New American Cooking and the Savoring line, while the Williams-Sonoma empire has in turn racked up annual sales of $1.3 billion from all its product lines, and is heading toward the $2 billion mark this year. While the publishers like to credit the books’ lavish quality for their success, it’s clear that the Williams-Sonoma series benefits from the chain’s massive, multi-channel infrastructure and humongous brand presence. There are now five direct-mail catalogs (Williams-Sonoma, Pottery Barn, Pottery Barn Kids, Hold Everything, and Chambers), with 192 million mailed last year. Add to those over 350 retail stores — the principal distribution point for Williams-Sonoma books, followed by warehouse clubs and bookstore chains. Then there’s williams-sonoma.com, for which Weldon Owen helped create 500 recipes for the site’s database, and last August saw the launch of potterybarn.com. All in all, the company aims to sell $40 million worth of goods on the Internet this year — which may be possible, given an average browsing-to-buying conversion rate of 8%. The site’s cookbook pages sell both Williams-Sonoma cookbooks and those from other publishers, aiming to be a clearinghouse for cooking lore, and you can search the recipe database by course or ingredient. Each recipe, natch, is accompanied by relevant product suggestions.

All of the company’s books, in fact, are designed with cross-merchandising in mind to drive in-store sales. Bastille flatware, microplane graters, linens, practically everything but the cajun-style meatloaf itself can be conveniently purchased in stores — though the cookbooks almost never overtly refer the reader to Williams-Sonoma products. Cookbook lines also echo retail concepts: the new title The Kid’s Cookbook, for example, should fit right in with those $269 toy stoves available in the Pottery Barn Kids stores (two launched in California last month; observers dubbed them the newest leisure activity for “yuppies in training”), and a dedicated line of Pottery Barn Kids books is forthcoming. Cross-platform synergy is at play in marketing tactics as well — web kiosks are available in most retail stores, while the online services are promoted in catalogues. A customer database of 70 million purchases from 20 million households is just the icing on the old-fashioned vanilla-seed pound cake.

Nonetheless, only about a third of the cookbooks are sold through the retailer’s channels, a proportion that initially had store managers livid at seeing their own books heavily discounted right across the fashion mall at Barnes & Noble. The company says heightened brand awareness has been well worth the cost of selling to chains, and in fact store managers report customers tromping around with cookbooks in hand, seeking relevant kitchen accouterments. As for international sales, they’re split up depending on whether Williams-Sonoma is active in a particular market. Where the retailer operates stores, the books go out under the Williams-Sonoma mark; otherwise, Weldon Owen publishes without the brand name.

Collaboration between the packager and retailer also extends to market research. Store managers pass along observations about which products are moving, and comment on the life cycle of certain fads. Kolpas says that focus groups are de rigueur for books and magazines, recalling a memorable “store intercept” foray while researching the Kitchen Library series. In a Beverly Hills store, a woman was asked how many books in the 25-volume series she had bought. “Oh, I have 50,” she replied. “One set for my Beverly Hills home and one set for my Aspen home.” While perhaps an extreme example, the appeal of continuity-style publishing was not lost on Williams-Sonoma. “It underscored the collectibility of the series,” Kolpas says. “The old continuity clubs may be a dying breed, but the collectors are still out there.”

And that brings us back to the Pokémon phenomenon. “For almost everything we do, we own copyright,” says Newell, explaining that John Owen launched the company 15 years ago with the aim of collecting pictures and words that could be repurposed and reused. (Copyright is now shared with Williams-Sonoma, however, and the two companies have a long-term royalty agreement.) Typically, the packager creates and sells the initial books to Williams-Sonoma, while reorders go to the trade publishing partner. Weldon Owen also uses its Fog City Press imprint to reformat content, such as the recent 100,000-copy printing of Williams-Sonoma Simple Classics, which combined two Chuck Williams titles in a larger format. Fog City titles are printed to order and sold nonreturnable to the general retail trade; almost a million copies were shipped last year.

As for new series, look out for Pottery Barn House next fall and the Pottery Barn Design Library in 2002, while a partnership with The Body Shop is spawning The Body Shop Body Care Series and The Body Shop Make-Up Book, both due out next fall. Following changes at Time-Life in the wake of the AOL–Time Warner fallout, Weldon Owen is currently looking for new publishing partners, particularly to advance brand-specific programs. As Newell puts it, “There are a lot more lifestyle opportunities out there.”

Move Over, ‘Saveur’

And here’s one new twist coming at you. In November, Weldon Owen will be rolling out the new quarterly magazine Williams-Sonoma Taste, which will weigh in at about 75% food, the balance being entertaining and travel. UK-based magazine publisher John Brown Publishing will also have a hand in the project. Circulation for the launch issue will be 240,000 copies, with about 25,000 going to newsstands and the rest sold through the retailer’s distribution channels. Customers can buy a subscription at a Williams-Sonoma store and walk out with a discounted first issue in hand — perhaps the latest novelty the increasingly hybridized magazine biz.

Though Taste could easily be conceived as a sort of pay-per-view catalog, the publishers insist that the magazine is not a vehicle for Williams-Sonoma products. Chuck Williams — who takes the title of magazine founder and editorial adviser — wants the glossy to be of use to customers whether or not they frequent retail stores, and views the magazine as just another way to build customer relationships. Indeed, advertisers are courted with the proposition of reaching a “well-defined customer lovingly nurtured for over 40 years,” with a household income of $75,000. To top it all off, Weldon Owen hopes to carve out a visual niche with a “European-inspired format and design ethic.” In other words, its just the kind of thing you wouldn’t be the least surprised to find on your $145 coconut-fiber doormat.

Posted in Featured Articles • Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

International Fiction Bestsellers

By PT Editors
October 1, 2000
Comments Off on International Fiction Bestsellers

Frankfurt Forecast
St. Martin’s ‘Starting Over,’ Harcourt’s ‘Algorithm,’ Plus Hansel and Gretel in Germany

When the Buchmesse opens its doors on October 18, what are Sub. Rights Directors planning to pull out of their book bags as they cozy up to editors from Europe and beyond? Herewith, a sampling from some of the major players:

The S&S group has a slew of big-name books, including the latest from Jimmy Carter, Kissinger, and Bob Woodward; Stephen Ambrose’s latest, Nothing Like It in the World; Tina Sinatra’s bio of Frank, My Father’s Daughter; Mary Higgins Clark’s most recent bestseller, as well as her co-authored (with daughter Carol) Deck the Halls. Scribner has Kathy Reich’s latest and Sarah Ban Breathnach’s A Man’s Journey to Simple Abundance (published under the new Simple Abundance Press imprint). Free Press will be pushing The Power of Positive Thinking in Business (Scott Ventrella) which, given the original’s long run in Germany, should be a big hit at the Fair.

Holt, meanwhile, is excited about three Jack Macrae titles — Eric Lax’s The Mold in Dr. Florey’s Coat (How Penicillin Began the Age of Miracle Cures); J. Robert Lennon’s novel, On The Night Plain; and Max Phillips’s The Artist’s Wife, a novel about the life of Alma Mahler, “the lovely, aristocratic fin de siècle composer who abandoned her own art to become a collector of geniuses.” Metropolitan Book has New Yorker writer Mark Danner’s Haiti, about American foreign policy and its political consequences in Haiti. Times Books has a great-sounding title, Leadership Ensemble (Lessons in Flat, Flexible, and Fast Management from the World’s Only Conductorless Orchestra), by Harvey Seifter and Peter Economy. Apparently the Orpheus Orchestra has had no conductor for three decades, and the “Orpheus Process” is attracting the attention of the business world. Also coming is Peter Ward and Don Brownlee’s The Ends of the World (The Second Half of the Life of the Earth), a scientific narrative chronicling Planet Earth’s long journey into eternity. It is, claims the publisher, “Sherwin Nuland’s How We Die on a cosmic scale.”

St. Martin’s is bringing Robin Pilcher’s Starting Over (Thomas Dunne), confident that the success of An Ocean Apart — which sold 40,000 hardcovers and 400,000 paperbacks, and was sold to 10 countries — will help. James Brady’s Warning of the War, also a Thomas Dunne book, is being shown, as is Stephen Cannell’s latest, The Tin Collector. Gail Tsukiyama’s as-yet untitled next novel will be discussed, though the mss. is not in yet.

An eclectic list is on tap from HarperCollins, with books by Jacquelyn Mitchard, Jack Lemmon (Regan), Jane Goodall (with Mark Beckoff) and Eminem (Regan), but Brenda Segel predicts that Peter Duffy’s The Brothers Bielsky will be huge. French, Dutch, and Greek rights have been sold, and there are offers in Italy. Miramax has the movie option. Ecco Press’s The Blue Bear by Lynn Schooler is another big Frankfurt book, and Linus Torvalds’ Just For Fun would be, if rights hadn’t already been sold to seven countries, including China and Korea.

Houghton Mifflin looks at the effects of a volcanic eruption in the Andes in Surviving Galeras (Stan Williams & Fen Montaigne), about a 1993 expedition that killed nine scientists. Stan Williams was the only survivor. In The Seven Sins of Memory, Daniel Schacter, chairman of Harvard University’s Department of Psychology, describes the nature and basis of what he calls the “seven sins of memory”: transience, absent-mindedness, blocking, misattribution, suggestibility, bias, and persistence, and offers ways to counter their effects. And Alice Randall reworks Gone with the Wind from the perspective of Scarlett’s mixed-race half-sister in The Wind Done Gone.

Harcourt has a decidedly scientific bent this Frankfurt, with titles like A Hole in the Universe (K.C. Cole) with quotes from Dava Sobel and Oliver Sacks; The Riddle of the Compass (Amir Aczel of Fermat’s Last Theorem fame); The Monkey in the Mirror (How We Combat Our Irrationality With Science), by Ian Tattersall); The Advent of the Algorithm; and Aristotle’s Children (Richard Rubenstein). Like Holt, they have a (nonfiction) book about a composer’s wife — Frida Strindberg — as well as biographies of Albert Speer and Benedict Spinoza, not to mention fiction by George V. Higgins, and Fred Reiken’s second novel Lost Legends of New Jersey.

And a few notes from elsewhere on the bestseller lists: Metaphysics of the Gut, by the prolific Amélie Nothomb, is the author’s 10th novel in as many years and hits #2 in France this month. Nothomb’s previous novel Fear and Trembling was a breakout at over 500,000 copies, and will be published by St. Martin’s next spring. Incidentally, Nothomb will be Stateside this fall promoting a 1993 title, Amorous Sabotage, to be published by New Directions. Her books are short and precise, following the trajectory of her life, and Metaphysics takes her from birth to age 3, a time “when parents view their kids as no more than a digestive tract with feet.” It’s all told in a child’s first-person voice — and apparently done admirably well, according to French reviews.

Also in France, Frédéric Beigbeder rings up a sale with the “potentially explosive” 99 Francs, a novel that delves deeply into the “tendency of advertising to turn us all into morons.” The narrator toils in an ad agency and, following frequent episodes of cocaine-driven self-loathing, attempts to escape but finds it impossible to leave. While praising the 34-year-old Beigbeder’s ambition (the author works in an ad agency and apparently wrote the novel to pull himself out of the muck), a review of the title by a member of one of France’s largest ad agencies naturally finds the book a “mediocre” product. The public apparently thinks otherwise — the ad-biz bomb has arrived to much éclat in France, shooting to #1.

Posted in Featured Articles • Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

E-Conference Meltdown

By PT Editors
October 1, 2000
Comments Off on E-Conference Meltdown

As if your fall calendar wasn’t already jam-packed, along comes a batch of Internet-related conferences and panels. Herewith we report on one recent event, and preview several still to come. First, a cross section of Internet, media, and (broadly defined) educators gathered at Columbia University to address the issues facing the intersection of these markets, at Jupiter Research’s first Interactive Knowledge Forum on September 21. Guggenheim director Thomas Krens gave the keynote, outlining his vision for the Guggenheim Virtual Museum online that would serve as a cultural portal through partnerships with other museums, including the Hermitage in St. Petersburg. Michael Wolff gave the luncheon keynote, which turned into a debate with Fathom.com CEO Ann Kirschner, over whether classroom learning had a place in education. Wolff, ever contrary, claimed it didn’t, while Kirschner — remarking that, as head of Columbia’s virtual university, it was strange she should uphold the role of the classroom — argued that real-world education was as much about “learning how to learn” as about the subject at hand. Finally, a roundtable featuring Martin Nisenholtz, CEO of NYT Digital; Steve Brill (Brill’s Content and Contentville.com); Steve Davis (Corbis); and copyright lawyer Robert Fram discussed copyright and the new, borderless order. In discussing the impending Napster argument before the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, Brill noted that, though books and music publishers worry about copyright, “piracy in magazines is really just the passalong rate, and you brag about it to your advertisers.” In other words, copyright protection is imperative, until you want to boast about the number of eyeballs your content can attract.

Looking ahead, the next couple of months bring AAP’s Introduction to Publishing, Reed’s ePubExpo, Penton Media’s e-Book World and, if those don’t sate you, how about Internet Content East 2000, coming to New York this week? While this last focuses on web-based news and community sites (the former www.internetcontent.net), the previous three are book-centric: AAP’s is a meat-and-potatoes event, dedicated almost entirely to every facet of p-publishing. It features a range of speakers, notably Holtzbrinck’s John Sargent. Go to www.publishers.org. Meanwhile, ePubExpo wins the prize for the most aggressive marketing, and an impressive lineup of speakers, including IDG’s Jon Kilcullen, Wiley’s Will Pesce, Steve Brill, plus reps from several emerging ebook/epublishers. Finally, Penton Media’s e-Book World, which boasts Michael Wolff as its chair, has just mailed its first solicitation, though Jill Campbell, executive show producer, assures us more are in the mail. The site, www.e-book-world.com (now defunct) had the agenda, which included panels of p/e-publishers, from Larry Kirshbaum and Jason Epstein, to Richard Sarnoff and Jon Karp, and on to epublishers like John Feldkamp (Xlibris), Richard Tam (iuniverse) and Maggie Canon (Mighty Words). There are also a number of media pundits from Wired, The New Yorker, Inside.com, NYTBR, and others — about 50 talking heads in all.

Posted in Featured Articles • Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Digital Reference, En Garde!

By PT Editors
October 1, 2000
Comments Off on Digital Reference, En Garde!

“The one thing we know is that information is now ever-present and therefore, in a sense, valueless,” says Kemp Battle, partner in the investment and consulting firm Tucker Capital. And that explains in a nutshell the challenges currently wracking the boardrooms of the world’s reference publishers, who, with their multi-volume encyclopedias and high-price-point dictionaries, are being flung face-first into a digital world by mercenary electronic competitors. Whether they perceive their new competition as a threat — or as a set of opportunities — will make all the difference. “You may make mistakes and you may find it bloody,” says Battle, “but if you’re not doing it, you’re in absolute trouble.” While attitudes at major reference publishers run the gamut from jittery technophobia to digital bravura, most of them have at least engaged the digital marketplace. Here’s a brief update on the field.

“This is our business — online,” says the somewhat sanguine Janice Kuta, who as president of Grove’s Dictionaries has clearly enjoined the battle. The company plans to publish new editions of its encyclopedias and dictionaries online at the same time as print volumes, or, in some cases, before. The process started in 1996 when Richard Charkin took over as the CEO of Macmillan UK. “You’ve got all this wonderful data, now it’s time to go online,” Kuta recalls him saying. “We put the [Grove Dictionary of Art] online within six months, and have been working with it, modifying it, and selling it successfully to institutional markets for one and a half years.”

Now, sales for the online version of Art have “blown conservative estimates out of the water,” in part because it is constantly updated. While the print version has 41,000 articles, the online version started with 45,000; 400 more have been added and 12,000 have been revised. The company’s early experiences with Art have shaped its approach to the second edition of the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, due out in print and online versions next month. Site licenses to Art, meanwhile, have gone to large public libraries, universities, and even the state of Georgia, giving an estimated 100 million people access to the dictionary. “It’s a very different way of doing business,” Kuta says. “It’s much more satisfying, and it’s all new. Though digital business models can be frightening (“knock on wood, there is still a very strong market for print”), the Grove project is taking determined steps to capitalize on its content.

Of course, another strategy to tackling the online marketplace is simply to partner with the 800-pound gorilla. Garrett Kiely, president and publisher of Palgrave (St. Martin’s scholarly and reference division) explains how Holtzbrinck revamped its digital playbook. Several years ago, the tale goes, Bloomsbury UK director Nigel Newton heard Bill Gates talk about English as a global language. Soon after, Newton wrote to Gates, telling him he’d thought of creating a dictionary based on the same idea, and wondering if Microsoft might be interested in it. And thus was born the Encarta World English Dictionary, the well-known joint project with Microsoft. But does it sell? Kiely says that there has been a “very favorable reaction from the market.” However, key accounts report disappointing print sales, citing negative reviews and the wide availability of the digital edition to Microsoft customers for some time as possible reasons. Matthew Shear, publisher, mass market, says that extensive focus groups for the college edition, coming out next July, confirmed that the big sales will be with the print college edition. Kiely says that part of the Encarta payoff has come in the form of a boost in reputation. “We’ve been quickly seen as a major player. It’s very satisfying for us to have people talking about us and Merriam-Webster and the American Heritage in the same sentence. Now we’re in a position of aggregating our material in some way and presenting new products to the market. We’re not committed to any one path; we’re testing the waters and working hard behind the scenes to pull everything else together.”

Also attempting to pull it together is Rand McNally, which has feverishly been at work on its online travel services. Travel is the most researched product online, according to Christopher Heivly, president of randmcnally.com, who’s been focusing especially on moving customers between the retail stores and the website, where they can customize routes and itineraries depending on personal interests. Even though the online business might cut into brick-and-mortar sales, Rand McNally doesn’t worry about “channel conflicts or cannibalization. We’ve put together a team with a charter to create tomorrow’s business, which is web-based but not just about the web. It’s integrated into everything we do.” For example, a customer can buy something from the online store but return it to a retail store. The whole idea is to focus on creating “Rand McNally” customers, not “online” customers, and tend to the “little, basic stuff.” Unfortunately, adds Heivly, for many companies “the dot-com and IPO craze created two separate teams. We’re trying to leverage 144 years of history and brand.” The upshot? “The content game never ends,” he says, noting that he’s pursuing licensing deals with various travel guides so that the site can appeal to everybody from the antiquer to the “20-year-old in a Jeep who listens to Metallica.”

Merriam-Webster has also envisioned its website as a complement — and not a threat — to print materials. The company’s goal, according to publicist Arthur Bicknell, is to become “ubiquitous” as the online dictionary and thesaurus of choice. Merriam-Webster was “the first to go online with a dictionary and thesaurus in 1988, and it was a risk that panned out very nicely,” he says. “A lot of people raised an eyebrow at that, but it turned out to be an educated gamble. What we were after was branding.” With two sites, m-w.com and wordcentral.com, picking up 25 million hits each month, plus licensing deals with AOL, Yahooligans!, Microsoft, and The New York Times, M-W aims to be king of the online lexicographical hill.

In that, they have company in the form of Houghton Mifflin, whose American Heritage Dictionary has made it to the web primarily via licensing deals. The dictionary has been parceled out to EBSCO, Questia, Bartleby-inc.com, Glassbook, and many others, according to David Langevin, vice president and director of sales. The strategy involves partnering with licensing customers to provide products for any digital use imaginable. And, he claims, it’s working. Langevin says that this year the trade and reference division’s electronic publishing group will contribute more than $1 million to the company’s bottom line. But as other giants get into the action — the OED among them — it’s clear that we’ve only touched the tip of the iceberg when it comes to reaping income from electronic reference works. As the saying goes, watch this space.

Posted in Featured Articles • Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Is Borders Set to Gain on Amazon and Barnesandnoble.com?

By PT Editors
October 1, 2000
Comments Off on Is Borders Set to Gain on Amazon and Barnesandnoble.com?

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED AT INSIDE.COM (10/16/00)

For years Borders has been known to publishing folk as a well-run but insular company located in the wilds of Ann Arbor, Mich. It tends to be publicity averse, even secretive in its dealings. Though it had been every bit as aggressive as its main competitor, Barnes & Noble, in creating superstores with their own cafes, selling a wide range of music, and pushing its Walden stores into every mall in America, there has been no showman like B&N’s Len Riggio to tout its achievements. Worse, though management has been generally stable under chairman Bob DiRomualdo, several presidents have come and gone in short order (Phil Pfeffer lasted only five months; current CEO and president Greg Josefowicz is a month shy of his first anniversary).

So when the online revolution came along and Borders had little to say about its strategic e-vision, everyone — including Wall Street — assumed the company’s lost opportunity online signaled trouble for its core business too. An attempt at a leveraged buyout that was announced in March and aborted in July (after a $16-a-share offer was purportedly turned down) did nothing to help that perception, and the market reacted by doing more of what the company doesn’t like: It lowered Borders’s value again. Shares dropped almost 15 percent to just over $13 in heavy trading, and three months later, the stock hasn’t made much progress.

But it now seems that the rumors of Borders’s demise may have been greatly exaggerated. Or, at least, that the company’s conservative approach is looking more and more canny when measured against other retailers’ mad dash to e-tail revenues. For one thing, though its stock still languishes, its competitors’ stocks have had a much more tumultuous year and land not far from where Borders is.

And anyway, says Borders.com‘s content manager and sometime spokesman Rich Fahle, ”We’re all about something different from our competitors.” What he claims Borders is about: Logging on from your home computer to find whether your local bookstore has the copy of The Crucible your son forgot he needed for tomorrow’s English test and, when it does, arranging immediate home delivery of the book; Visiting friends in another part of the country, going into their local bookstore, picking out some books, and arranging to take one with you and have some delivered to your home, then creating and printing out a list of the others to be saved — with reviews — in your personal file on the bookstore’s server for subsequent retrieval; Picking up some CDs, and with a wireless gizmo, scanning in the bar code and choosing which cuts on the album you’d like to preview before buying the recording.

Like other retailers, Borders is, of course, in search of the perfect ”convergence model” of a seamless retail and online customer experience. And while it’s on its way, it’s not quite there yet.

Though a customer can go into any Borders and check for a book, recording or movie that might be available in the store, in the company’s warehouse, or could be ordered, that database cannot yet be accessed from home. And those personal files of your favorite books can’t yet be stored on Borders’s servers. In fact, so far only about two-thirds of Borders’s 300 stores have the necessary kiosks from which customers will be able to access information about individual titles, order out-of-stock books, create a wish list of books, sign up for e-mail newsletters on a range of topics from business books or science fiction, or find which aisle carries a particular category or title. What they do all have now is ”Title Sleuth,” the database of three million books, CDs and videos, which was introduced this summer. And coming to a kiosk near you soon is the ability to search beyond that database, using the well-known Internet search engine, AltaVista.

Though Borders.com may not outshine its competitors — especially Amazon in terms of customer experience — the Borders strategy is to deliver an online experience that is simply ”as good as” Amazon’s because the online does not supplant, but rather complements, the store experience. To this end, and unlike its obvious competitor Barnes & Noble, both online and retail are run by CEO Josefowicz. There is, to hear Fahle tell it, no competition between the retail and the virtual Borders. And each store gets to customize its own kiosks, emphasizing regional books and music, posting a map of that specific store, highlighting upcoming events, and choosing what seasonal merchandise to feature.

So while it may be awhile before this tortoise takes the lead, the numbers are reasonable, and promising. Borders reported $2.9 billion in revenue for 1999, as opposed to say Barnes & Noble’s $3.486 billion. And even when you fold in barnesandnoble.com’s revenues — $202 million — the two retailers don’t seem so far apart. (Important point: All of Borders’s initiatives are being funded out of operating earnings.) Still, some of Borders’s bolder initiatives are still on the drawing board and others — like the promise of a robust print-on-demand program in conjunction with Sprout (in which it owns a 20 percent share) — are in limbo. Also, unlike its competitors, it has few affiliate relationships and no formal partnerships with any of the e-book or e-publishing players. In fact, it has no proprietary publishing program of any kind, reportedly a $100 million plus business for Barnes & Noble.

Maybe what it needs now is some good buzz to get and keep people talking, not just at Borders itself — which has endless official and unofficial boosters now that secrecy is no longer the watchword of the company — but in the industries that sell to the company, and the media that covers it. What next: Greg Josefowicz on the cover of New York Magazine? Maybe it should happen.

Posted in Featured Articles • Tagged , , , ,

Book View, October 2000

By PT Editors
October 1, 2000
Comments Off on Book View, October 2000

PEOPLE


Lots of HarperCollins news, beginning with Larry Ashmead’s announcement that he will retire as of the end of 2001. He turns 69 next July 4, and with “almost all my longtime authors publishing their books next year,” including Tony Hillerman, Simon Winchester, Susan Forward, and Susan Isaacs — not to mention a newer Ashmead acquisition, Michael Korda’s (Country Matters) — the time seemed right.

Meantime, Alison Devlin has left DK to become Exec. Dir. of Publicity at HarperCollins Children’s, and Pam Lutz, from Random, has replaced Bill Boedeker. Martha Reddington has been named VP Special Markets at HarperCollins, replacing Frank Foschetta, who left to become SVP Publishing at Marvel Enterprises. He has hired Lisa Dolin (ex-Morrow special sales) as Publishing Director. And Lisa Queen, formerly Editor-in-Chief of Morrow, has taken David Chalfant’s old job at IMG. Chalfant, meanwhile, has been named SVP Business Development at Siegelgale, where he will be in charge of brand management and extension for media, publishing and entertainment. The company’s clients include The Industry Standard, Reciprocal, Scholastic, and The College Board.

As has been reported over the last few weeks, OneBigTable is shrinking fast, and the principals, including Arthur Samuelson, ex-publisher of Schocken, are looking for a job. (The New York Post insists on referring to Arthur and wife Molly as “the O’Neills”.) . . . Judy Klein has left Bertelsmann’s Booksonline, where she was Editor-in-Chief, to travel. She will go to Africa and from there, possibly to “India and Nepal, then maybe Southeast Asia, wherever my itchy feet take me for the next four months.” . . . Linda Stormes has gone to Book Magazine and, as of October 2 will be managing sales and advertising, with an emphasis on the publishing world. . . . Doubleday’s Art Director, Mario Pulice, went to Little, Brown. . . . Anne Messitte has been appointed VP Publisher, Vintage and Anchor Books, effective immediately. She was previously VP Associate Publisher.

Millbrook’s deal to buy DK Ink has fallen through (for now), but they have hired Knopf’s Simon Boughton as publisher. And Neal Porter is setting himself up as a consultant/packager. The company is Porterhouse, “rare books, well done.” He may be reached at (212) 765- 4774; porterhouse@earthlink.net.

Sandra Zane, formerly Subsidiary/ Foreign Rights Manager at the Dijkstra Agency, has relocated to NY from California to join Franklin & Siegal Associates. . . . Bill Goldstein, Books Editor of NYT Online has been given additional responsibilities. He will oversee the relaunch of the cultural site, and beginning October 6, will review books weekly on NBC Today in NY. . . . Steven Sussman, previously Publisher of Exley Giftbooks and before that, Dorling Kindersley, has opened Siegel/Sussman, a consulting, marketing and sales company . . . . Chip Lovitt, erstwhile of Grolier, has been named Senior Editor of Readers Digest Children’s Books.

Since Abrams bought STC, there had been several casualties, reported in this very newsletter. But now we hear that the top people who were laid off by Abrams have been rehired to their old positions by their French owner, headed by Herve de la Martinière, and that, other than on day-to-day budgeting issues, the company now reports directly to France. An official announcement is forthcoming.

DEALS


Following Bookspan/BOMC’s announcement that it would sell Stephen King’s Secret Windows: Essays and Fiction on the Craft of Writing exclusively as a dual main selection, we asked Executive Editor Arthur Goldwag how this came about. He tells us via email: “This was one of those fortuitous inspirations that began as wishful thinking and then surprised everyone by actually coming to pass. On Writing had us all buzzing about what a good nonfiction writer King is and how welcome a gathering of his occasional essays might be; how intriguing it would be to see some of his juvenilia; how quirky and witty and subversive an extemporaneous speaker he is and how much his fans might appreciate having his best lectures and interviews preserved between hard covers; how brilliant and under-read the chapter on horror fiction in Danse Macabre is and how worthy of reprinting; etc., etc. To our delight, everyone that might have hindered the project helped us instead: Stephen King gave us his blessing (and access to archival material), Susan Moldow and Arthur Greene [King’s agent] were enormously cooperative, Peter Straub wrote an amazing introduction. Kathy Kiernan, BOMC’s director of Book Development, did the lion’s share of research and generally shaped the book. We’re very proud of the result.”. . .

Marshall Editions will become the exclusive brand licensor outside of the US for all children’s books from Discovery Channel and Animal Planet. Dutton publishes in the US.

EVENTS


Well, here he comes again! To coincide with the publication of André Schiffrin’s The Business of Books, Verso’s publisher Colin Robinson organized a panel discussion for the evening of September 29 (Rosh Hashanah!) at the Deutsches Haus (!), to air the grievances which led to Schiffrin’s departure from Pantheon and the founding of The New Press ten years ago. As this coincided with Publishing Trends’ deadline, we asked the panelists to give us a preview:

Harper’s Lewis Lapham is concerned that too many books are being published, and that nothing is failing to find some sort of distribution. He describes the US as a “reasonably literate” society but not a “literary” one. Columbia U. Press’s Bill Strachan takes exception to Shiffrin’s criticism that university presses have gone “commercial.” He agrees that there has been a shift within trade publishing, where each book’s, rather than the list’s, profitability has become the norm, but thinks university presses have not shirked their responsibility to publish certain kinds of challenging titles that trade publishers have been forced to abandon.

All shared the concern that conglomeration in general in the US and globally has led to a uniformity and lack of diversity. And Verso’s Robinson laments that, the larger the conglomerates and the more noise they are able to make with their increased and available marketing dollars, the more likely the small voices of the independent publishers will be drowned out. And, he adds, we live in a very noisy world as it is.

CYBER


Elliott Masie, who runs Techlearn, a company that covers online education, recently posted the following: “A Virtual Day at a Trade Show: Today, as I write this edition of TRENDS, I am experimenting with a new activity: working a Trade Show Booth by Video. For the entire day, I will be in the MASIE Center booth at the Lakewood OLLO event in Denver. My staff are on-site but I am in my office, connected by video-conference, to do “booth duty.” Folks that I know from the industry are stopping by, asking questions and I am in the office, relaxing and sleeping in my own bed tonight. Cool!” When Publishing Trends queried him about this emerging trend, he wrote back: “I think that we are on the starting end… as I respond to you, my booth is set up in Denver and I am the “talent” in the booth… and much better traffic than surrounding booths.” Is it, we wonder, too late to cancel our Frankfurt reservations?

DULY NOTED


In celebration of Grove’s fiftieth anniversary, Morgan Entrekin, Grove/Atlantic’s Publisher, has written a paean to the company and its founder, Barney Rosset, in the publisher’s winter catalog. Entrekin reminds the reader that Grove published a string of first amendment landmarks, from Lady Chatterly’s Lover to Tropic of Cancer and Naked Lunch, but also such works as John Rechy’s City of Night, Che Guevara’s diaries and Timothy Leary’s Jail Notes, and the first works of Tom Stoppard, David Mamet and Harold Pinter. Throughout the catalog there are pieces about iconic writers written by current and well-known Grove authors — Dennis Cooper on Jean Genet; Darcey Steinke on Henry Miller; Larry Kramer on D.H. Lawrence; etc. All in all, it is a memorable catalog.

Posted in Book View • Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Laptops in Book Country

By PT Editors
September 1, 2000
Comments Off on Laptops in Book Country

“A book, e-book, any book!” is the inclusive theme for this month’s New York Is Book Country, and in the spirit of platform promiscuity, e-reading appurtenances will be out in force. For the first time, according to NYIBC president Linda Exman, the fair will feature a New Technology Pavilion to give an expected 250,000 attendees a preview of the latest in digital publishing. Sponsored by RCA eBook, the “tech tent” will host encampments by Alibris, Audible, BookSense, iPublish, and Xlibris, while elsewhere at the fair exhibitors will include web ventures such as BookReporter.com and Zooba.com, the latter an Internet marketing shop that sends consumers personalized emails in any of 46 “content channels.”

Under the tech tent, RCA parent Thomson Multimedia will break out its new line of ebook devices, which it says are the first products introduced at retail with technology licensed from Gemstar. Two ebook models (the latest incarnations of the Rocket eBook and the SoftBook reader) will be on tap: one with a 5.5” monochrome screen and 8MB of memory (it holds about 20 novels), and a second with an 8.5” color screen and an Ethernet port. Both devices have internal modems for direct downloads, and the company says that “thousands” of titles will be available for the readers when they come on the market in October. Suggested retail prices will be announced at the fair.

Incidentally, earlier this year Gemstar and Thomson agreed to plug Gemstar’s electronic program guide into 30 million television products, and the two companies have also fired up a joint interactive venture known as @TV Media, which enables e-commerce via two-way wireless paging that lets you transmit to and from your TV. Gemstar chief Henry Yuen calls it “t-commerce,” and we can only expect to be reading ebooks on the telly and watching Survivor reruns on our reading devices. Actually, it may all be sooner than you think: the RCA ebook comes with Internet audio hardware, ready for action.

Meanwhile, NYIBC will host three e-related panel discussions: On Sept. 20 at 7 pm at Poet’s House, PW’s Calvin Reid and others will debate the impact of ebooks on independent literary publishing, while on Sept. 21 at 5:30 pm, the likes of Larry Kirshbaum and Lou Lenzi, vp at Thomson Multimedia, will ponder the imponderable question “To e or Not to e?” at the General Society Library. A blowout session on “The Future of the Book” follows on Sept. 22 at 5:30 pm at the NYU Center for Publishing. Of course, those events should be considered mere hors d’oeuvres before NYIBC grand marshal Emeril Lagasse’s culinary theatrics on the B&N stage on Sunday.

The 22nd New York Is Book Country takes place Sept. 20–24, with the street fair on Sunday, Sept. 24.

Posted in Featured Articles • Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Popular Posts

Tags

Abrams Amazon Atria audiobooks Barnes & Noble Basic Books Bloomsbury book sales Chronicle Books Crown DK Doubleday Dutton ebooks Frankfurt Book Fair Hachette Hachette Book Group Harlequin HarperCollins Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Hyperion Knopf Little Brown Macmillan Oxford University Press Penguin Penguin Random House Perseus Publishers Weekly Putnam Random House Random House Children's Rodale Running Press S&S Scholastic Scribner Simon & Schuster Sourcebooks St. Martin's St. Martin's Press Stephen King Wiley William Morrow Workman

Categories

Publishing Trends/Market Partners International
232 Madison Avenue, Suite 1400
New York, NY 10016
Phone (212) 447-0855
E-mail info@publishingtrends.com