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News stories from the book world in October 2012

October 2012

Random House and Penguin in mega merger

29 October 2012

There's no doubt about the top story this week. The news that Random House and Penguin are negotiating a merger came out of the blue. Both companies are large, with Random House currently the biggest UK publisher with 16.2% of books sales, and Penguin with 10.9%, giving them a combined 27.1%. In the US the merger would give the combined entity slightly less of the total at 25%.  Read more

Romance rides high in ebooks

22 October 2012

New imprints are being set up to publish genre fiction in ebook form.  Read more

Frankfurt trends

8 October 2012

 A report on ebook statistics and trends to be launched at the Publishers Launch Conference which precedes the Frankfurt Book FairWorld's largest trade fair for books; held annually mid-October at Frankfurt Trade Fair, Germany; First three days exclusively for trade visitors; general public can attend last two. next week suggests that some of the wilder predictions about ebook adoption have been off the mark.  Read more

Rowling grabs the headlines

2 October 2012

 It almost seems as if the only thing which has happened this last week is that J K Rowling has published her first adult novel. There's been no escaping the coverage gleaned by the media from a generally unreachable author.   Read more