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News Shorts Staff -- 8/28/00 Bakeless Prize Winners Published | Bankrupt Element Books Slashes U.S. Office June Bookstore Sales Jump 13% | English/Spanish Imprint from Harper Book Group Profits Soar at RD | IDG Acquires HungryMinds.com Questia Media Adds $90 Million in Capital | Powell's Settles Labor Dispute Potter Case Headed for Trial | Lightning Source Adds Penguin Putnam Amazon to Conquer France | Big Loss for BOMC | Obituary Bakeless Prize Winners PublishedThe Bread Loaf Writers Conference of Middlebury College and Houghton Mifflin announced a partnership to publish the winners of the Katharine Bakeless Nason Prizes, sponsored by the college. Beginning in 2001, winners of the Bakeless Prize will be published by Mariner, Houghton Mifflin's original paperback line. Established in 1966, the Bakeless Prize is awarded annually in the categories of fiction, p try and creative nonfiction to emerging writers whose work has not been previously published in book form. Judges for the 2001 awards are Howard Norman, fiction; William Finnegan, creative nonfiction; and Carol Muske, p try. Submissions will be accepted from Oct. 1 through Nov. 15. Winners will be announced in April 2001, and the resulting books will be published by Mariner in the spring of 2002. Houghton's Mariner imprint includes noted authors Penelope Fitzgerald, Anita Desai and Michael Cliff. The Bakeless Prize winners will join a long list of young authors whose careers were launched by Mariner, including Michael Byers, Porter Shreve and Jhumpa Lahiri, winner of the 2000 Pulitzer Prize. --Staff Bankrupt Element Books Slashes U.S. OfficeWith its U.K. parent company declaring bankruptcy earlier this month, the U.S. arm of Element Books has undergone a dramatic overhaul. Greg Brandenburgh, senior v-p and trade publisher, left last month, and the number of employees has been cut to six from a high of 15 just one year ago. The Boston office, which stopped acquiring new titles in December, is in "a transitional state. At this point we're trying to go day-to-day with the company," said Greg Kanter, manager of inventory control. Brandenburgh has gone to Rockport Publishers in Gloucester, Mass., where he is starting the Fair Winds imprint, which will publish 20 books a year on health and spirituality. Working with him will be former Element editorial director of health books Holly Schmidt. In addition, Brandenburgh has been appointed publisher of packaged goods, Rockport's packaging arm, which creates lifestyle books for various publishers. At Houghton Mifflin, which distributes Element's books in the U.S., "it's really business as usual," commented Jed Santoro, v-p, director of trade sales. "The sales force is well aware of the receivership. We still have a contract with Element, and we need to play it as planned." Although HM has plenty of backlist stock, it is less well stocked in terms of frontlist . Santoro estimated that between 10 and 15 spring titles were postponed. Some fall titles are also expected to be canceled or postponed. --Judith Rosen June Bookstore Sales Jump 13%June marked the second straight month in which retail bookstore sales posted double-digit gains over revenues in the comparable months in 1999. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, retail bookstore sales rose 13.3% in June, to $1.15 billion, following a 17.1% increase in May. The entire retail sector recorded a 9.5% sales increase in June. For the first half of 2000, bookstore sales were up 8.5%, to $6.87 billion, while sales for all of retail increased 10.4%. --Staff English/Spanish Imprint from HarperIn response to growth in the Hispanic marketplace, HarperCollins is launching Rayo, an imprint that will publish titles in English and Spanish for and about Latinos. The imprint will publish approximately 12 titles a year beginning in summer 2001. Rayo (Spanish for "flash of lightning") will be led by editorial director Rene Alegria, who will report to Carrie Freimuth, senior v-p and associate publisher of the HarperCollins general books group. For the past year, Alegria has been managing editor for HarperCollins, HarperBusiness, Cliff Street Books and HarperCollins Large Print Books. The goal of the imprint, he said, is to provide a springboard for emerging Hispanic themes and writers. --Staff Book Group Profits Soar at RD Operating profit in Reader's Digest's global books and home entertainment group jumped 149%, to $209.8 million, on a revenue increase of 3%, to $1.56 billion, for the fiscal year ended June 30, 2000. The segment benefited from the inclusion of results from Book Are Fun, which was acquired last fall, as well as from healthy gains in the select editions and young families units. Company chairman Thomas O. Ryder said RD was "enormously encouraged to see operating profit for our largest group increase on such a universal basis in virtually every country where we operate." In addition to strong gains in the U.S.--where the operating margin increased to 10% from 3%--RD operations in Brazil, Mexico, France and Poland all had significant revenue increases last year. For the entire company, sales increased 1% to $2.55 billion and adjusted operating profit rose 54%, to $257.2 million. Ryder called fiscal 2000 a "remarkable year" in which there was no major crisis and where nearly all its businesses in virtually every country it operates in reported gains. "That's something we won't be able to say too often," Ryder added. --Jim Milliot IDG Acquires HungryMinds.com
The acquisition will make IDG's extensive list of branded content (including the Dummies series, Cliff's Notes, and Frommers) available through the HungryMinds.com Web site and accelerate IDG's efforts to offer comprehensive learning online. John Killcullen, CEO of IDGB, said the deal is another step in the company's transformation into a global provider of lifelong, on-demand learning solutions. He said the acquisition "provides IDGB and its strategic partners the opportunity to expedite the distribution of IDGB content across a leading-edge e-learning platform in a fast-growing market." Stuart Skorman, CEO and founder of Hungry Minds, said, "Together, we can move faster to satisfy the expanding demand for comprehensive e-learning solutions and customized promotional opportunities." The HungryMinds.com Web site offers a customized database of over 17,000 online learning courses. The company has over 90 partnerships with Web, media and publishing companies and universities. --Calvin Reid Questia Media Adds $90 Million in CapitalQuestia Media Inc., a Houston-based research service provider set to launch in January 2001 with 50,000 books online, announced last week that it had received $90 million in second-round venture capital financing led by Oppenheimer Funds. Adding the new financing to the more than $40 million announced in April (E-Publishing, Apr. 17), Questia has received a total of more than $130 million over a five-month period when dot-com companies have decried the drying up of venture funds. Questia founder and CEO Troy Williams explained that the need for the large funding was not merely for digitizing of the 50,000 volumes, which he expects will grow to more than five times that number in a few years, but for building the software to completely automate searches within Questia's library. Users of the service will be able to do full-text searches of all the books in the Questia library for free from any computer connected to the Internet. For a variable subscription fee, probably to be based on daily, monthly or annual use, the researcher can then apply a number of tools to the citations gathered, including automated bibiliographic and footnote production in a variety of standard styles. More than 90 publishers have signed on to provide books, mostly backlist humanities titles requested by professors and librarians, for the digital library. --Paul Hilts Powell's Settles Labor DisputeAfter a two-year struggle, Powell's Books of Portland and the ILWU Local 5 announced ratification of a labor contract on August 10. In the last, but happy, chapter of an often contentious unionizing process, the labor contract for the 400 store employees now represented by the ILWU took effect August 14. Workers voted 90% in favor of the three-year contract. Among tenets of the agreement are an 18% wage increase, expanded health-care services and a consistent grievance procedure for dispute resolution. Issues surrounding union security were also granted. Ann Smith, corporate manager at Powell's, told PW that management is relieved to have the process behind them. She believes the contract allows Powell's to remain competitive in the business while establishing some positive models for future growth. "Powell's is a place that is always changing, and that's part of who we are," Smith said. Changes leading to the union began at Powell's in the fall of 1998 in the wake of management restructuring and a 3% cap on annual salary increases. Powell's, founded by current owner Michael Powell in 1970, has annual sales of around $50 million and sells three million books per year from seven different bookstores in the Portland area as well as online at Powells.com. --Barbara R ther
Potter Case Headed for TrialNew York district judge Allen Schwartz has refused a motion by attorneys for Nancy Stouffer to dismiss a lawsuit filed late last year by Scholastic asking that the court issue a judicial declaration that J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter books do not infringe copyright and trademark rights held by Stouffer. Scholastic filed the suit after representatives for Stouffer got in touch with Scholastic claiming that a number of elements in the Potter books, such as the use of the word Muggles, infringed on Stouffer's copyrights (News, Nov. 29, 1999). Stouffer filed her own suit against Scholastic in March in a Pennsylvania court, charging Scholastic, Rowling, Time Warner, Mattel and Hasbro with eight counts of trademark infringement and unfair competition. Scholastic had no comment on Judge Schwartz's ruling. Lawyers for Stouffer were not expected to appeal the decision, in order to get the case before a jury as soon as possible. No court date had been set at press time. --Staff Lightning Source Adds Penguin Putnam Lightning Source has entered into an agreement with Penguin Putnam to digitize the publisher's book list. Under the agreement, Lightning Source will also provide digital rights management and e-book fulfillment in a variety of formats. Lightning Source recently made similar deals with Holtzbrinck Publishers Group, Simon & Schuster and iPublish.com, Time Warner's new e-publishing unit. At the end of July, Lightning Source also announced print-on-demand deals with Bertram Group and Blackwell's in the U.K. Since the beginning of the year, Lightning Source has entered agreements to prepare tens of thousands of titles from major book publishers. Penguin Putnam CEO and president Phyllis Grann said, "Our agreement with Lightning Source is another step for us in achieving our strategy--to provide our authors' works to customers in any format that is copyright protected, user friendly and commercially viable." --Edward Nawotka Let Them Read Books: Amazon to Conquer FranceAmazon.com has announced that it will open its French online store tomorrow, Tuesday, August 29. Yet Amazon may not be as graciously received as it was in the U.K. and Germany, where it also operates online bookstores. According to the Agence France-Presse, Amazon's France project has been "shrouded in secrecy" and the French themselves appear confused as to what exactly Amazon may be selling aside from books. Online sales in France account for only 0.3%-0.5% of overall book sales, compared with 5.4% in the United States. This tiny market is already saturated with online bookstores, including www.fnac.fr, the online arm of the dominant French department store; www.alapage.com, a strong Internet-only book and music site; and www.bol.fr, the French wing of Bertelsmann's European online empire. --Edward Nawotka Big Loss for BOMC With the completion of the Time Warner-Bertelsmann joint venture that formed the giant book club BookSpan, TW has "deconsolidated" the results of Book-of-the-Month Club. This accounting change breaks out BOMC's figures for the first half of 1999. The numbers show that in the second quarter of 1999, BOMC had revenues of $81 million and an operating loss of $4 million. For the first six months of the year, BOMC had revenues of $147 million and an operating loss of $14 million. --Staff Obituary: Ole Risom, 80Ole Risom, veteran children's book editor, died on August 19. He was 80. Risom was born in Copenhagen, Denmark, and emigrated to the U.S. in 1941. After working as the art director for McCall's and Better Living, he made his entrée into children's publishing as the art director at Golden Books, where he remained until 1972. While there, Risom was the first editor to work with Richard Scarry, and Risom went on to coauthor a biography of him. In 1972, Risom moved to Random House, where he launched their mass market publishing program and developed the first paperback original line for children. He retired from Random House in 1990. In addition to editing, Risom also wrote several books for children. A memorial service is tentatively scheduled for early September. --Staff | ||||
News Shorts
Aug 28, 2000
A version of this article appeared in the 08/28/2000 issue of Publishers Weekly under the headline:
