Penguin Random House purchasing Simon & Schuster is not the gravest danger to the publishing business. The deal is transpiring in a larger context-and that context is Amazon.
That HC and PRH are the two leading companies for HC is no surprise. HC has long eyed further expansion into book publishing and, as PW previously reported, HC CEO Brian Murray noted at a company Town Hall meeting this summer that the publisher was looking at acquiring S&S. Read more
Penguin Random House parent company Bertelsmann has confirmed that it is interested in acquiring Simon & Schuster once ViacomCBS begins to again actively shop the country's third largest trade publishing house after the pandemic fades Shortly after Viacom and CBS merged, the newly-formed company placed S&S on the sales block.
Profits rose in 2018 over 2017 at four of the five major trade publishers that report their financial information-and the one company at which earnings were down, Lagardère Publishing, reported an increase in profits at its U.S. subsidiary, Hachette Book Group. Read more
On Friday, three of Germany's biggest booksellers, along with its biggest media company and its biggest telecom company, debuted an e-book distribution platform and an e-reader intended to compete with Amazon, Apple, and other e-reader hardware and content providers like Kobo. Read more
‘I always quote Kurt Vonnegut. He said in the early part of his career he was dismissed as a science fiction writer and that critics tend to put genre books, including sci-fi, in the bottom drawer of their desk... It's true. I get the New York Times every Sunday. In 37 novels, I've never had a stand-alone review. I'm always in the crime round-up.
A survey of 787 members of the Society of Authors (SoA) has found that a third of translators and a quarter of illustrators have lost work to generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems. Translators are also more likely to use AI to support their work, with 37% of respondents saying they have done so, followed by 25% of non-fiction writers.
The author Lynne Reid Banks, known for her novel The L-Shaped Room and her children's book series The Indian in the Cupboard, has died at the age of 94.
I launched my podcast Making It Up nearly three years ago with the goal of interviewing writers not for any particular work of theirs, but to talk to them about their lives. I didn't want to ask them what famous author they want to have dinner with or what their top five favorite books are ... yech. Read more
Until we have a mechanism to test for artificial intelligence, writers need a tool to maintain trust in their work. So I decided to be completely open with my readers
'For books are more than books, they are the life, the very heart and core of ages past, the reason why men worked and died, the essence and quintessence of their lives.'