Sales continued to drop at HMV Group, owner of Waterstone's and suitor of Ottakar's, according to
Reuters.
In the year ended April 29, sales at stores open at least a year fell
5.7%, and in the last 16 weeks Waterstone's sales have fallen 5.6%.
In other company news, the original Ottakar's bid has lapsed, and a new
bid will likely be lower than the last 440-pence-a-share offer. The
company expects competition commission clearance by May 22.
This fall Waterstone's will set up its own online bookselling site and
will end its arrangement with Amazon.com. Outgoing CEO Alan Giles
commented: "The Internet is becoming too significant to be outsourcing
it."
---
Check out the winners of the Book Standard's
Book Video Awards, presented last night:
- For The Thieves of Heaven: Alan Van Dyke, North Carolina School of the Arts
- For Stuart: A Life Backwards: Yitz Brilliant, Columbia Film School
- For Shadow Man: Hiu Yan "Emily" Kwong and Michael B. DeWeese, North Carolina School of the Arts
---
Peg O'Donnell is joining Chelsea Green Publishing as sales director.
She was formerly marketing director/children's specialist at National
Book Network and earlier was a sales rep at Publishers Group West
(where she won
Publishers Weekly's Rep of the Year award in
2001), managing editor at Black Lizard Books and a bookstore manager in
Berkeley, Calif. Chelsea Green said O'Donnell is "thrilled to be
working with a publisher whose program is so aligned with her own
personal beliefs."
---
Gregg Sullivan is joining HarperCollins's ReganMedia as director of
marketing and promotions, effective May 17. He had been at St. Martin's
Press, where he began his publishing career in 1997 and worked on media
campaigns for such titles as
The Nanny Diaries,
Running with Scissors and
Atkins for Life.
In a statement, CEO and publisher Judith Regan welcomed Sullivan by
saying, "Gregg has an outstanding track record and has built the
stamina necessary to manage the many challenges of a modern media
company. Plus, he's Irish which means he has wit, a quality that is
always welcome in this madhouse. We are all excited that he is now part
of our team."
---
It's becoming a trend: ABC shows like
Lost and
Commander in Chief are featuring glimpses of books. Sunday night it happened again, when near the end of
Grey's Anatomy, Dr. Preston Burke grabbed a copy of the bestselling
Covenant with Black America edited by Tavis Smiley (Third World Press, $12, 0883782774) to read while eating dinner.
Sara Hoerdeman of IPG, which distributes the book, wrote, "This was unexpected by all, and we
Grey's-addicted IPGers were thrilled to see it."
---
Tokyopop is introducing two children's series: Manga Chapters for 6-9
year olds and Manga Readers for 8-12 year olds, which aim, the company
says, to "make reading fun while promoting language and literacy
skills."
Making its debut in September, Manga Chapters will combine chapter
books and manga. The first of the 96-page books, which will retail for
$4.99, include
The Grosse Adventures: The Good, the Bad & the Gassy by children's author Annie Auerbach and
Agent Boo: The Littlest Agent by Alex de Campi, part of a sci-fi series.
Manga Readers, which will launch in July and retail for $5.99, includes the following initial titles:
Kat & Mouse by Alex de Campi, about two girls who use science and math to solve mysteries;
Mail Order Ninja by Josh Elder, featuring a boy and his ninja companion; and
Zapt! by Keith Giffen and Shannon Denton, about a schoolboy who's also an intergalactic policeman.
Noting that manga wasn't even a bookstore category 10 years ago,
Tokyopop senior editor Nicole Monastirsky said in a statement that the
new lines are "both ideal for reluctant readers and future manga fans."
---
The
Boston Globe
investigates the components of Alloy Media + Marketing, the
parent company of the book packager made famous by the Kaavya
Viswanathan plagiarism scandal. "More than books for reading," the
paper said, "Alloy titles are content packages, with potential for
advertising and cross-marketing," including product placement.
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Bill Henderson, founder and publisher of Pushcart Press, was raised in a Presbyterian family, but lost his faith as a teenager. He rediscovered it decades later when a snowstorm cancelled his usual Sunday morning New York Times-and-bagel routine, and he decided to attend church with his wife and daughter. There, singing a hymn with the few people who showed up, "missing words, mashing notes, but confessing everything to each other in . . . unadorned voices," Henderson was overcome. Six months later he was a church member, and years later, "a cranky, suspicious-of-cheap-doctrine elder." The hymn, whose name he has forgotten, had brought him full circle.