BEA Reduces Exhibit Hours
BookExpo America officials have decided to limit the number of days the exhibit floor will be opened to Wednesday and Thursday at the 2010 convention. Originally, BEA had planned to open the floor from 4 p.m. to 6 p.m. on Tuesday, following a day of educational panels. That idea met with resistance from some exhibitors, who felt it put too much pressure to complete the show setup for only two hours of exhibit time. Exhibit hours will run from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Wednesday and Thursday.
McIntosh Named to New RH Post
Madeline McIntosh, who spent 14 years at Random House before joining Amazon, is returning to the publisher in a newly created high-level post; she will report directly to CEO Markus Dohle. Beginning December 1, McIntosh will become president of sales, operations, and digital, with the heads of those different areas reporting to her. In addition to her U.S. duties, McIntosh will join the RH international executive board, where she will help develop the company’s worldwide digital strategy.
Sales Up at Lagardère
Revenue at Lagardère Publishing rose 8.3%, to 1.69 billion euros, for the nine-month period ended September 30, and increased 5.1% in the third quarter. In the U.S., Hachette Book Group’s third-quarter sales increased 15%, with strong sales of Sen. Edward Kennedy’s True Compass, Uwem Akpan’s Say You’re One of Them, and Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers, augmenting sales of Stephenie Meyer titles as growth in that series, which began to explode last July, slowed somewhat this summer.
For the remainder of the year, Lagardère noted that its publishing division “faces a particularly challenging fourth-quarter comparative,” explaining that in the final quarter of 2008 the Twilight series drove a 6% sales increase for the entire publishing group. While sales for the division still look good, the pace of the sales growth is likely to slow considerably.
S&S Selling E-chapters
Simon & Schuster has started to sell individual e-chapters to its bestselling You series of titles by Dr. Michael F. Roizen and Dr. Mehmet C. Oz. The initiative was developed as part of a broader effort by Dr. Oz to provide answers about health on the “Ask Dr. Oz” section of his Web site. For answers to questions that appear in one of the You titles, S&S created an e-commerce widget that will allow consumers to purchase just the chapter in which the answer was found or the complete book in digital, physical, or audio formats. Prices for the chapters will range from $2 to $3. Currently, the e-chapters are available for sale only through the askdoctoroz.com site.
S&S Has E-galley Service
Simon & Schuster has launched GalleyGrab, an e-galley program to provide digital ARCs to the media. To use GalleyGrab, media sources must register—a process required only once—to access a galley using a link provided to each title. The link becomes invalid on the book’s publication date. Galleys can be read on a variety of e-readers, though not the Kindle.
Sourcebooks Launches Poetry Site
Sourcebooks has launched PoetrySpeaks.com, a Web site that will feature a variety of information about poets and poetry as well as providing the opportunity to buy individual poems directly from the site. PoetrySpeaks.com will sell individual poems for 99 cents for an audio or print download, $1.49 for a combination of text and audio, and $1.99 for video. The company is looking for a retail partner to sell print books, DVDs, and CDs. Other publishers offering material on PoetrySpeaks are Tupelo Press, Naxos Audiobooks, and Marick Press.
New E-reader Components
Microprocessor producer Marvell is teaming with electronic paper producer E Ink to produce a new generation of integrated processors designed to both reduce the price and improve computing performance in new e-ink—screen reading devices slated to hit the market next year. The two companies are producing the Armada series of integrated processors, technology they claim will provide faster screen refresh rates, better power management, and integration of wireless and 3G access. The processor is supposed to eliminate the “blackout” effect when an e-ink page turns.
Weiss Joins St. Martin’s Press
Dan Weiss, whose background includes starting the book packager Daniel Weiss Associates and serving for eight years as publisher and managing director of Barnes & Noble’s Sparknotes.com unit, is joining St. Martin’s as publisher-at-large, where he will report to Matthew Shear, senior v-p. Weiss will work on developing content for Gen Y readers.
