German Court Fines Rapidshare
A German court upheld fines of more than 150,000 euros ($197, 325) against file-holding site Rapidshare and its owners, imposed for violating an injunction earlier this year. The injunction was obtained by Bedford, Freeman and Worth Publishing Group, a subsidiary of Macmillan; Cengage Learning; Elsevier; John Wiley & Sons; the McGraw-Hill Companies; and Pearson Education. It prohibits Rapidshare from allowing 148 of those publishers' copyrighted works to be made available digitally on the site. The publishers had learned that most of those works were still available on Rapidshare.com.

Harvard to Publish Liu Xiaobo
Harvard University Press will publish the first-ever English volume of work by Chinese writer and Nobel Peace Prize–winner Liu Xiaobo. HUP plans a 20,000-copy first printing of the book, which is scheduled for early 2012. Liu is currently serving an 11-year prison sentence in China for speaking out against the state.

Penguin Debuts Red Classics Line
Penguin Group Canada launched a new line of Penguin Classics in partnership with the charitable brand "(Product) Red" on December 1, World AIDS Day. Penguin will donate 50% of the net profits of each book sold to the Global Fund, to help eliminate HIV/AIDS in Africa. Penguin U.S. also launched its own (Red) Classics promotion December 1.

Books for Business Store Sold
Sean Neville, former owner of Simply Audiobooks, has acquired the 20,000-sq.-ft. niche business bookstore, Books for Business, in downtown Toronto, a business bookstore, founded 20 years ago.

Eisemann to Holt Publicity
Henry Holt has hired Patricia Eisemann as director of publicity effective January 3. Formerly with the New York Times, Eisemann has a background in book publishing after previously holding an executive position in publicity at Scribner in addition to working at Macmillan.

Hard Case Relaunched
The Hard Case Crime series of mystery novels, which was published by Dorchester, will resume publication in September 2011 with a new novel by acclaimed mystery writer Lawrence Block, whose new book, Getting Off: A Novel of Sex and Violence, will be the first hardcover original to be published by Hard Case. The series will also begin a relationship with a new foreign house, Titan Publishing in the U.K., which is distributed by Random House in the U.S.

DC Comics Reorg
DC's reorganization continues with the appointment of group editor Eddie Berganza to executive editor of the DC Universe. Matt Idelson and Mike Marts have been named editors overseeing the Superman and Batman groups, and Ian Sattler has been promoted to director of special projects and archival editions.