People Mary Albi has been named VP Sales & Marketing in the New York office of the Continuum International Publishing Group. She was most recently VP Sales & Marketing at Phaidon Press . . . Roy Levenson has been named VP Finance & Operations at Barnes & Noble Publishing, reporting to Alan Kahn. He was…Continue Reading
PEOPLE Simon & Schuster’s various imprints have been trimmed over the past few weeks: Rachel Klayman has been laid off from The Free Press, Jeff Neuman has left S&S (and may be reached at neudors@yahoo.com), and Rosemary Ahern (who arrived from Dutton less than two years ago), and Kim Kanner and an assistant have departed…Continue Reading
PEOPLE Change is the constant in publishing at the moment: Bookspan cut its staff by about a dozen people, including longtimers Norm Schneider, VP Marketing, and Nancy Whitin, who oversaw the Specialty Clubs, including The Good Cook, History, Crafters, Country Homes, Military, Stage & Screen, Mystery Guild, etc. Natalie Chapman has been named VP, Publisher,…Continue Reading
The words “disaster,” “nightmare,” and “terrifying” pop up when talk turns to the company-wide software systems that several large US publishers began to adopt in the last decade. In this article James Lichtenberg, President of consulting firm Lightspeed, LLC, finds that the dot-com boom may be over, but for some publishers, the information age is…Continue Reading
As Editors Keep Specializing, Are Generalists Going Extinct? Call it a healthy dose of editorial realism, or call it the Dilbert-ization of publishing. However you spin it, over the last few decades, it seems, that formerly abundant creature of the book-business veld — the free-ranging generalist editor, dismissive of pigeonholes and crossing categories at will…Continue Reading
PEOPLE After 15 years at Reader’s Digest, most recently as VP Global Director, Global Books & Home Entertainment, Alfredo Santana will be leaving the company. He may be reached via email at siempre@attglobal.net or at (212) 781-0632. Santana tells PT that he will attend Frankfurt this year, his eighteenth. Gerry Helferich, who recently left Wiley,…Continue Reading
PEOPLE We will skip over the Thomas Middelhoff debacle, and move on to some moves that are less well covered, including that by a Middelhoff chronicler: The NYT’s David Kirkpatrick is leaving the Book Beat, to cover media, focusing on AOL Time Warner, along with Vivendi, Bertelsmann, and News Corp. His replacement will be named…Continue Reading
“Is copyright a cow in the swamps?” Such was the boffo opening gambit from a Ugandan publisher as the 5th International Publishers Association Copyright Conference kicked off in Accra, Ghana, on February 20. A Ugandan tale, it turns out, tells of two families who hope to enter the dairy industry but squabble over the business…Continue Reading
PEOPLE Phyllis Grann’s imminent departure from Penguin Putnam took almost everyone aback, and unnerved more than a few long-time Putnam folks. In other PP news, Sean Moore has left DK US, where he was VP Publisher of the Adult division. He may be reached at 914 591-3220. David Ford came to New York over the…Continue Reading
Texere may be the Latin word meaning “to weave,” but it is also the name of an international publisher specializing in books on business, technology, and finance that launched in a public-relations frenzy less than two years ago. What happened to the company whose self-stated mission is no less than to become “the most progressive…Continue Reading
