Thursday was deadline day for Apple to file its petition with the Supreme Court appealing a series of rulings that found the Cupertino, California company had violated anti-trust laws and conspired with publishers to fix e-book prices. The lawyers made it under the...
Editorial staff who responded to the annual Publishers Weekly industry survey have a knack for reconciling contradictory aspects of their work. For example, they self-reported compensation that on average fell 18% for men and 16% for women from 2014 levels. Yet three...
In an address to the press conference opening the Frankfurt Book Fair, author Salman Rushdie extolled freedom of speech and expression as a basic human right, common to all and not limited to a few. He also cast the book world as under siege and worried that the enemy...
The quiet in the library these days is reserved for the reading rooms. In the library business world, there is anything but silence. Whether they are public, corporate or institutional facilities, libraries are witnessing wide-scale change as they move from a physical...
The year was 1987. The Iran-Iraq war raged on; the US and Soviet Union agreed to reduce their stockpiles of nuclear weapons; and the first Simpsons television cartoons aired. Also in 1987, President Ronald Reagan swore into office James Billington as the Librarian of...
Subscription services abound online, for music as well as video and film. In recent years, various start-ups also have vied for a role as “the Netflix for books.” Of those who’ve made a mark – Oyster and Scribd, to name two – success has proven a double-edge sword. In...
Where do we go to get our reputation back? That’s the question executives at independent publishing service provider Author Solutions are likely asking. A pair of lawsuits by authors alleging fraudulent business practices at Authors Solutions have recently ended,...
The business side of books dominated headlines this week. At Perseus Books Group, a “For Sale” has returned to its front lawn, after it went away a little over a year ago. At Barnes & Noble, the most recent quarterly sales report makes for grim reading material....
The book world this week is full of news from the ranks of “indie” or self-published authors: Good news for one children’s author, and bad news for several who feel cheated. And for another, the news is definitely in shades of grey. “A potential class action lawsuit...
On Sunday in The New York Times Magazine, author Steven Johnson pointedly asked, “How is today’s creative class faring?” His own analysis of available data drew Johnson to conclude that the much-threatened “creative apocalypse” hadn’t materialized. That contrarian...
