Publishers Weekly up for sale … again

Publishers Weekly announced this morning that it’s being put up for sale. Reed Business Information, which publishes over 400 trade publications including PW, Library Journal, and School Library Journal, intends to sell most of its properties in order to escape the uncertain advertising market.

This is the second time that parent company Reed Elsevier has tried to rid itself of RBI: the company put the group up for sale last year, but later took it off the market due to depressed demand. At the time, The New York Times reported on potential buyers for RBI and its publications:

Analysts estimated that Reed Business Information would fetch at least $2 billion. Potential buyers could include Apax Partners, a British private equity group whose Incisive Media division bought American Lawyer Media last year for $630 million.

Some buyers may be more interested in specific titles.

“I think they’ll come out as a group first, and then depending upon market reaction, they may have to bundle some of the publications,” said Michael Parker, a managing director of the merger and acquisition advisory firm AdMedia Partners.

The division’s primary rival, Nielsen Business Media, has also been the subject of sale speculation, although the company denied the rumors.

Are e-book ads the way of the future?

The Internet’s been abuzz with news of some recently filed Amazon patents. A blog post on the Fast Company website looks at two of the patents, which point toward a new future in which ads are embedded in e-books.

The patents are designed to solve a supposed problem: that “out of print or rare books … typically do not include advertisements.” For electronic versions of magazines, the inclusion of advertising makes sense, as this would merely reflect how print magazines are already constructed. But if Amazon intends to use these patents for all materials available on the Kindle, including books, readers will start to get understandably uneasy. From Fast Company:

Would you be happy reading a copy of The Hobbit, only to find an embedded ad for pedicure treatments on certain pages? The framework for this to happen isn’t clear from the patent, though it would be reasonable to expect Amazon to start by offering the ads in books with discounted prices. Or the ads could appear in texts by self-published authors who need to fund their work but don’t have the backing of a traditional publisher. That would be a sensible way for Amazon to get the public accepting the idea, and it would be a great sales hook for Amazon to entice advertisers into the scheme in the first place.

Bookmarks: Stanza acquired by Amazon, and more

Sundry links from around the Web:

• It looks like Shortcovers, Indigo’s downloadable e-book application for mobile devices, has some new competition: Lexycycle, the start-up behind the popular iPhone e-book reader Stanza, has been acquired by Amazon
• U.S. judge orders advertising mogul Peter Arnel to pay back part of a $550,000 advance to HarperCollins
• David Cronenberg is set to adapt a Robert Ludlum thriller for the silver screen

More bad news for American book coverage

It looks like the rumors were true about The Washington Post‘s standalone book supplement. According to The New York Times, Book World will cease publication after Feb. 15.

Book World was one of the last remaining stand-alone book review sections in the country, along with The New York Times Book Review and The San Francisco Chronicle’s Books section. The Washington Post’s move comes as the company, like most other newspaper businesses across the country, has been hobbled by a protracted downturn in advertising.

According to reports from Book World employees, the last issue of Book World will appear in its tabloid print version on Feb. 15 but will continue to be published online as a distinct entity. In the printed newspaper, Sunday book content will be split between Outlook, the opinion and commentary section, and Style & Arts.

Meanwhile, things aren’t looking very good for Quill & Quire‘s counterpart in the U.S., Publishers Weekly. The New York Times is also reporting that PW editor-in-chief Sara Nelson has been laid off, along with 7% of the magazine’s staff.

Ms. Nelson, 52, spent four years heading up the magazine and had become a lively presence within the industry, speaking frequently on panels and advocating forcefully for books in her weekly column.

According to a statement from [the magazine's owners] Reed Business Information … as a result of the restructuring, Brian Kenney, editor-in-chief of School Library Journal, will now be editorial director of that magazine along with Publishers Weekly and Library Journal.

It probably doesn’t need to be said that forcing one guy to edit three magazines is madness. The quality of all three titles is sure to suffer, no?

Litbloggers weigh in on Giller picks

A brief survey of responses to yesterday’s Giller shortlist announcement:

• Bookninja argues that Marina Endicott’s Good to a Fault got the nod by advertising on Bookninja.com
• Oddsmaker Pinnacle Sports places the smart money on Rawi Hage’s Cockroach
• IFOA blogger Andrew Westoll feels bad that Nino Ricci and Steven Galloway were left off
• Alberta librarian Peter Bailey bemoans the lack of Western Canadian nominees

Best book ads ever?

Quillblog recently stumbled across a New York Times slide show of book advertisements from their so-called “Golden Age,” 1962-1973.

Why those dates? The books – and the ads for them – were terrific: fresh, pushy, serious and wry, often all at the same time. There was a new sense of electricity in the culture and in the book world.

Each ad, scanned from a dusty magazine, is accompanied by a paragraph of droll commentary. Highlights include the ad for Cormac McCarthy’s 1968 novel, Outer Dark:

It’s a grinding story about a woman, Rinthy, who bears her brother’s baby, only to have him leave the infant in the woods to die. You don’t get a sense of the novel’s dark subject matter in this perky advertisement, though. It focuses instead on McCarthy’s rugged good looks (he was 35 at the time), and even “pops” his head, giving this ad an ironic, cheerful, proto-Spy magazine feel.

The ad for two Tom Wolfe books, also from 1968, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test and The Pump House Gang, has a couple sitting side by side, asking “Which bestseller should you read first?”

“Honey, my Tom Wolfe book is more zeitgeisty than your Tom Wolfe book.” “Yes, dear, but mine has so many more exclamation points. I counted.” “It’s nice to be both literate *and* happening, isn’t it?” “Do you want to make out?” This advertisement … resembles an ad for coffee, cologne, or condoms as much as it does a typical book ad.

Cellist vs. Cellist

Seems there’s a bit of controversy brewing around Steven Galloway’s novel The Cellist of Sarajevo, which was published a few months back by Knopf Canada. (Read Q&Q‘s review here.) According to the CBC, the real-life cellist Vedran Smailovic, who served as the inspiration for the book’s title character, is now demanding compensation for it, claiming that Galloway never contacted him to seek permission to be included in the novel.

With a stool and his cello, Smailovic once played on top of the rubble from a deadly mortar attack in Sarajevo. In plain view of snipers, he played for 22 days straight — one day for each person killed during the mortar attack.

So does the character in Steven Galloway’s book, published this year. It’s a war tale woven around three characters in Sarajevo and their reaction to a cellist character inspired by Smailovic, whose story has travelled around the globe.

[...]

Smailovic said that if people are making money off tales from his past, he is entitled to a share of it.

“They put my picture, my face, on the front, on the cover with no permission. They don’t ask me — they use my name advertising their product. I don’t care about fiction, I care about reality.”

Whichever way you look at it, this is a pretty sticky situation with no clear-cut answers. It’s hard not to sympathize with Smailovic, but based on the info in the CBC piece, it sounds as if Galloway only ever meant to pay homage to the man, and that he did so in a fairly respectful fashion. The Smailovic character is prominently featured only in the first five pages of the book, he never speaks, and he is mostly used as a thematic device to link the other three characters. Galloway even sent Smailovic an autographed copy of the book, which suggests that he expected Smailovic would like it.

Our guess is that Smailovic probably doesn’t have a very good understanding of how the publishing business works, and is under a false impression that there are Hollywood-style profits coming Galloway’s way. And we kind of wonder if maybe the CBC doesn’t have the best understanding of publishing either, as the piece implies at one point that Galloway should (or could) have offered compensation to Smailovic or the other 25 people he interviewed in researching the book. First of all, it was just background research for a work of fiction, not non-fiction, and second, the CBC would presumably be much more outraged if they discovered Galloway had paid people for the stories, which is one of the age-old ethical taboos of journalism.

As for Smailovic’s concern about being put on the book’s cover, he has more of a case there, but even that is not so cut-and-dried. The cover (which you can see here) is indeed a photo of him, but it’s oriented so that his face and most of his body are cut from the image, as if the cameraman was wandering away from the nominal subject to take in the devastated surroundings instead. In fact, it could be argued that the cover is attempting to show, in visual terms, that the cellist is not the book’s real subject at all, which only helps Galloway’s case.

Book burning, continued

For the 75th anniversary of an infamous Nazi book burning (see Quillblog passim), Canadian writer Stan Persky attended a memorial service in Berlin on Saturday. “I was one of a couple hundred people scattered on spectators’ benches set before a makeshift stage where the modest program of commemorative speeches, readings, and music meandered through a lazy afternoon,” Persky writes in a piece for The Tyee. He also delves into the history of the mass burning, touches on Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, and makes some mildly depressing observations:

There’s one other thing to say about book burning, reading, memory, and forgetting. When I first came to Berlin, almost two decades ago, and rode the subway, the first thing I noticed was that invariably about 80 per cent of the passengers were reading. Everything from weighty tomes to their day planners. Never had I seen a culture that was so visibly engaged in reading.

Between then and now, as we know, reading, especially book reading, has precipitously declined. Sure, when I ride the Berlin subway today, a few people besides myself may be perusing a book. But now there are news and advertising screens installed at each end of every subway car for riders to stare at; people are busy yattering into their cellphones (or “Handys” as they’re calleed here); and ubiquitous iPod earphones are delivering sounds into transit passengers’ youthful heads. It looks like we’ve found a more effective means to displace reading than the bonfires of the Nazis or Bradbury’s book-burning firemen. Why use violence when you can get people to forget about reading through sheer cultural indifference?

HarperCollins U.S. to try new publishing model

In a move that should have people talking at the upcoming London Book Fair, HarperCollins U.S. has announced plans to launch a new-style publishing program. The man in charge is publishing veteran Robert S. Miller, who is credited for building Disney’s Hyperion publishing program.

According to a press release from HarperCollins:

As President and Publisher of the yet-to-be-named entity, Miller will publish approximately 25 popular-priced books per year in multiple physical and digital formats including those as yet unspecified, with the aim to combine the best practices of trade publishing while taking full advantage of the internet for sales, marketing and distribution. Authors will be compensated through a profit sharing model as opposed to a traditional royalty, and books will be promoted utilizing on-line publicity, advertising and marketing.

The references to leveraging the web sound like the usual breathless PR-speak, but compensating authors through a profit-sharing model does indeed sound like something new and notable. Who knows what it’ll mean for the authors in practice, but it’ll probably be an experiment worth watching.

Meanwhile, The New York Times has posted an article examining HarperCollins’ plans, in which it reports that Miller also aims to reduce (or altogether eliminate) costly returns. The article doesn’t make clear how he plans to do this, except to say that:

The new group will also release electronic books and digital audio editions of all its titles, said Jane Friedman, president and chief executive of HarperCollins, a unit of the News Corporation.

“At this moment of real volatility in the book business, when we are all recognizing things that are difficult to contend with, like growing advances and returns and that people are reading more online, we want to give them information in any format that they want.”

Let the sunshine in

This week on Q&Q‘s Job Board:

• Contracts Manager – Westwood Creative Artists (Toronto, ON)
• Production Editor – Firefly Books Ltd. (Richmond Hill, ON)
• Bibliographic Manager – BookNet Canada (Toronto, ON)
• General Books Manager – McGill University Bookstore (Montreal, QC)
• Permission Liaison – Access Copyright (Toronto, ON)

Find great new staff by advertising with Q&Q!