The Association of American Publishers (AAP) has launched a new internship program in partnership with United Negro College Fund (UNCF).

The program will offer paid summer internships to high-achieving African American students at various publishing companies including: Cengage Learning, Elsevier, Hachette Book Group,HarperCollins Publishers, Macmillan, McGraw-Hill Education, Penguin Random House,  Scholastic and W.W. Norton. These positions will be in a variety of departments at these publishing houses including: editorial, marketing, publicity, sales and digital engineering. Jobs will take place in New York, Washington, Boston, and St. Louis during the first year.

“In an industry where our ideas are our commodity, recruiting diverse talent is a top priority for publishers,” stated Tina Jordan, vice president of AAP. “Attracting African American student interns to the publishing industry is an important step our member organizations are taking to expand workforce diversity and inclusion efforts.”

Publishers book sales for trade (consumer) books were down 1.1 percent from January to August 2015, as compared to the same time frame in 2014, the Association of American Publishers (AAP) revealed today.

Publisher revenue during the eight-month period was $10.4 billion, down 2.3 percent over last year. The metrics include sales data from more than 1,200 publishers including: trade – fiction/non-fiction/religious, K-12 instructional materials, higher education course materials, professional publishing, and university presses.

E-books were down 11 percent in during the timeframe in 2015, comparable to 2014. Hardback title sales were down 7.7 percent year-to-date compared to the same timeframe last year. Here is more from the press release:

Downloaded audio and paperback remain the formats with the most growth. Downloaded audio increased 43.3% in August, compared to August 2014. This brings the year-to-date growth for this format to 37.8%, compared to the same timeframe in 2014. Paperback Books showed growth in all trade categories, and is up 12.2% year-to-date compared to the same time in 2014.

The judge in the Google Settlement case has extended the deadline for talks between the internet giant and the publishers and authors involved.

The deal, which involves a revised book-scanning agreement for out of print titles that may also be in copyright, has already been contested for six years, with five publisher plaintiffs, the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers (AAP) objecting to Google's digital library plans.

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Picking up where Jane Friedman, book publisher of Open Road Integrated Media, left off yesterday at Digital Book World, when she urged book publishers to broaden the participation of libraries in the distribution of ebooks, LJ’s Josh Hadro moderated a panel today that helped publishers understand why, and how, that must be accomplished.

“Consumers and library patrons are two sides of the same coin,” Hadro said to a roomful of publishers, who included execs and others from the big children’s book publishers, smaller houses, university presses, and distributors. The current one book, one loan ebook model “mirrors the print” buying and lending; “DRM [digital rights management] software [protects publishers] caus[ing] the lend to expire at the end of the loan period,” explained Hadro.

Yet many publishers still don’t sell their latest ebooks to libraries. “Current content is king,” New York Public Library’s Chris Platt said, pointing out his frustration that, “We can’t get Freedom (FSG) as a download for our library. And even though Keith Richards made a public appearance at NYPL, “We couldn’t put his epub [Life (Little, Brown)] in our collection,” said Platt. Then Platt held up The Oracle of Stamboul (HarperCollins), due out in February, another book his patrons won’t be able to borrow as an ebook.

Librarians are left trying to explain to their users both that the publisher has not made the book available through the library and that many ebooks won’t work on their users’ ereaders.

Platt further made the case that “We teach people literacy…we point [them] to your new books….Libraries are connected to many of the people you want to reach, on Twitter, Facebook.” As the price of smartphones drop, he said, libraries will be able “to serve all parts of the community.”

Ruth Liebmann, Random House VP, reinforced Platt’s remarks. “A sale is a sale,” she said, noting that libraries are a revenue stream that publishers like Random want to “protect, even grow.”

Baker & Taylor’s VP for libraries and education, George Coe, told attendees that the “acquisition model will change drastically” with the ebook. “Library budgets can’t change,” he said, but users can become buyers with “buy buttons” on library online catalogs. He cautioned, however, that by using different formats, christian book publishers are “confusing our patrons.”

OverDrive’s CEO Steve Potash also said that the idea of a library purchase “cannibalizing sales couldn’t be farther from the truth…we’re converting library borrowers into point of sale users” in the digital world. As for the one book, one user model, Potash said that OverDrive recently made Liquid Comics ebook graphic novels available via a multiple user subscription model.

The iPad 2 release date remains inexact pending an announcement from Apple but in the mean time the world continues to shift from paper and ink books to e-books and are investing in e-book publishing readers like the Kindle, Nook and potentially iPad.

While many iPad users make use of the device as an e-reader, its 1.5 lbs. and somewhat cumbersome shape does not make it the ideal choice for someone who wants to relax with a book. In its quest to be the ultimate book reading machine the Kindle has resisted “features” like a touch screen that adds to screen glare, color that so far requires an LCD screen that shines in your eyes and a range of applications that might be useful but take away from the phenomenal 1 month battery life.

Because of Amazon’s single minded e-reader focus the Kindle has remained the premier tool for its main job, comfortable book publisher reading.

But budget constraints, the desire for fewer devices, users who are not devoted to reading but do it occasionally, make a place for those who want to forgo the Kindle and use an iPad as their exclusive gadget. It’s not completely exclusive of course because they still need a mobile phone and probably a camera and probably a real computer or laptop, but hey, who’s counting?

So Amazon provides its Kindle e-reading applications on virtually all book publishing platforms and christian book publishers‘ platforms  including tablets, computers and smartphones. Serious readers should not rely on the iPad or iPad 2 for that matter. Pick up a Kindle first for a few bucks, curl up with an eBook and consider whether you really need a tablet too.

This week Mr. Rosenthal is celebrating a happy landing. On Tuesday morning, it was announced that come January he will be running his own boutique imprint at Penguin Group USA, arguably the healthiest of the big New York Book Publishers as well as home to a number of the 56-year-old’s former colleagues. Once he gets going, Mr. Rosenthal—whose roster at Simon & Schuster included Bob Woodward, David McCullough, Bob Dylan and Jim Cramer—will be on charge of a small but full-fledged operation at Penguin Book Publishers, with dedicated publicity and marketing muscle and a list totaling somewhere between 24 and 36 books per year.

Mr. Rosenthal, an executive known for his eclectic tastes and blunt manner, has published a long list of authors in his 25-year career, including Bob Dylan, James Carville, Jeffery Deaver and Bob Woodward.

Many of those writers will be fair game as Mr. Rosenthal begins to acquire books for his own imprint, setting up competition between Penguin and Simon & Schuster.

Over lunch on Tuesday at the Half King in Chelsea, Mr. Rosenthal said Penguin president Susan Petersen Kennedy reached out to him shortly after his firing, and had been “aggressive and enthusiastic” in their talks. He is stoked to go work for her, he said: “People at Penguin don’t bitch about their place of employ nearly as much as people elsewhere. Everybody says, ‘The only person you ever want to work for in publishing anymore is Susan.’”

Initially, Mr. Rosenthal considered another path after he was canned—doing something Web-related, for instance, or becoming a packager, a consultant or “a guru of some kind”—but in the end he resolved to stick with traditional book publishing. It wasn’t a self-evident decision, if only because book sales have been falling so severely in recent years that many in the industry are panicked about the long-term viability of their business.

“He has a lot of people he’s been working with for many, many years,” Susan Petersen Kennedy, the president of Penguin Group USA, said in an interview on Monday. “And perhaps at some point, some of them will join him.”

Mr. Rosenthal’s imprint, which has yet to be named, will publish two to three dozen books each year, a mix of nonfiction and fiction.

“I’m going to make lots of trouble,” Mr. Rosenthal said in an interview. “They’re going to let me go after the kind of — I wouldn’t say quirky — but the peculiar stuff that I sometimes like. What they want very much is for me to be able to indulge my passions, indulge my taste.”

For more than a decade, Penguin has focused on creating imprints that reflect the visions and interests of their book publishers, like Riverhead Books, Portfolio and Penguin Press, an imprint created by Ann Godoff after she was fired from Random House in 2003.

Book Publishers have been under pressure from the recession and a depressed retail environment, making it an unlikely time to expand.

“They’re being contrarian, which I like,” Mr. Rosenthal said. “Everybody seems to be having misgivings about where this whole thing is going. They’re obviously making a bet. They’re expanding, and it’s great to be part of that.”

Before joining Simon & Schuster, Mr. Rosenthal had been the publisher of Villard, a division of Random House Book Publishers; the managing editor of Rolling Stone; the executive editor of New York magazine; and, as Penguin noted in a news release on Monday, an employee in the morgue at the city chief medical examiner’s office.

In June, Mr. Ros

Win or lose at the Scotiabank Giller Prize on Nov. 9,it will be business as usual at Gaspereau Press.

For the first time in its 13-year history, the small, Kentville, N.S. book publishers and printing business has a book in the running for Canada’s most prestigious literary award, Johanna Skibsrud’s debut novel The Sentimentalists.

About 800 copies of the book were printed when it was first published a year ago; roughly half sold prior to the novel’s unexpected appearance on the Giller longlist at the end of September. The remaining copies were gobbled up by the time the title made the five-book shortlist in early October. Since then, Gaspereau’s five-person operation has been printing about 1,000 copies a week — the maximum it can handle, given other demands and book publisher responsibilities.

“Whether we win or lose, I’ll continue to make about 1,000 books a week, as long as there is a demand,” says co-owner Andrew Steeves, who runs the business with partner Gary Dunfield.

“One of the problems is that you can’t just drop everything else you do. We’re a local print shop. Long after the Giller goes away, I’ve got other clients. I can’t afford to alienate them. So I have to balance all that stuff.”

This is not remotely the way it will go down if any of the other four publishers with a book in the hunt cashes in.

The Giller, in addition to rewarding the winning author with a cheque for $50,000, is an instant boon to sales. Linden MacIntyre’s The Bishop’s Man, the most recent beneficiary of what is commonly known in the book publishers industry as the “Giller Effect,” moved 75,000 hardcover copies after winning last year and continues to sell well in paperback.

Publishers are ready to capitalize, sometimes within minutes of the announcement of the winner just before 10 p.m. at the gala’s live telecast.

Windsor’s small Biblioasis, which also has never produced a previous Giller finalist, already has a plan to print as many as 25,000 additional copies of Alexander MacLeod’s debut short story collection Light Lifting.

“As I understand it we won’t even have to call the printers, if against all odds we win,” says publisher Dan Wells. “They’ll be watching at the same time and when it’s announced, they can flick a switch and start printing.”

House of Anansi, a mid-sized Toronto publisher, has produced seven Giller finalists but no winners. The company hasn’t settled on a firm number yet for Kathleen Winter’s Annabel, the only book this year to also be nominated for the Rogers Writers’ Trust Prize and Governor General’s Literary Award, but president Sarah MacLachlan expects to order a print run of 40,000 copies, if the book wins.

“You talk to basically everybody that would sell a Giller book — the wholesalers, the chain, the independents — and you ask them what they think they will go through,” MacLachlan says.

“We are making a calculated decision. We’re not doing it because that looks like the right number in our heads. Historically, the repercussions have been big, so we’re like lawyers: We work on precedent.”

HarperCollins Canada, a rarity this year as the lone multi-national subsidiary in the mix, will undertake a similar reckoning in the event that David Bergen’s The Matter with Morris takes the prize.

The decision on how many copies to print will be made early Wednesday morning, but company sales and marketing vice-president Leo MacDonald anticipates something on the order last year’s Man Booker winner, Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, which sold 40,000 copies in Canada. The company’s previous Giller wins came in 2001 with Richard

According to the Wall Street Journal, authors in the age of the digital e-book might face much the same fate as musicians face in the age of the shareable MP3.

An in-depth analysis on the economy of book publishing shows that as sales of hardcover books continues to plummet, book publishers are signing fewer books, and giving ever-smaller advances to the authors they do sign. “The new economics of the e-book make the author’s quandary painfully clear,” writes the Journal. “A new $28 hardcover book returns half, or $14, to the publisher, and 15%, or $4.20, to the author. Under many e-book deals currently, a digital book sells for $12.99, returning 70%, or $9.09, to the publisher and typically 25% of that, or $2.27, to the author.”

Ultimately the smaller margins realized from e-books lead book publishers to consolidate their bets on fewer books that still have a chance of becoming bigger hits in hardcover editions. And as the odds on those bets become longer with hardcover sales in decline, publishers are curbing their risks by offering smaller advances to writers.

“They offer, on average, $1,000 to $5,000 for advances, a fraction of the $50,000 to $100,000 advances that established book publishers typically paid in the past for debut literary fiction,” the Journal reports.

Of course, there will always be fiction. The economy of book publishing companies will likely not stamp out writing itself any more than the decline in music sales has rid the planet of music.

But it could amount to a literary race to the bottom, in which the potential Jonathan Franzens of tomorrow simply won’t have the financial incentive to spend 7 years working on their novels, and Franzen did with both “The Corrections” and “Freedom.”

One of the hallmarks of a digital world is supposed to be proliferation: in an age when anyone can distribute content for free, content is supposed to flourish. When any band can record themselves cheaply upload their music to a Schiel & Denver page for free, music is supposed to unfurl out of the confines corporate record labels. And indeed, over 13 million bands have registered pages on Myspace.

But the question remains, How many of those bands are any good? The landscape of bands with national followings doesn’t seem particularly more diverse now than it did in decades past—the difference is that in the self-publishing digital race to the bottom, fewer than ever are being rewarded financially.

The e-book market however, at least at this point, is different than a Myspace-style digital climate in that authors don’t upload books directly. Digital or not, the environment is still governed by publishers looking to stack their chips on a few possible hits. And the returns from those few hits offer smaller returns than ever.

Ironically rather than letting a thousand flowers bloom it seems that in the digital book space attention is more than ever weighted toward a few select hits rather than a diverse offering. Franzen’s “Freedom” has sold 35,000 copies in just two weeks. Meanwhile the Journal cites 2009 breakout novel “Woodsburner,” which won a number of awards including the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize—it has sold 351 copies to date.

In all of this the one thing that’s still not clear to me is that the cost of producing and shipping the books themselves isn’t addressed. The sale of a hardcover bo

Electronic book publishers are set to revolutionise the way we read. But plot twists may save the paper book publisher from going the way of the dinosaur.

FOR 15 years, pundits have declared the old-fashioned book to be as doomed as the orang-utan. Just as we will one day have to visit the last of that sad species in a zoo, the favourite of some many a book publisher dog-eared paperback is destined for a similar freakshow status. Perhaps along the lines of collectable Wedgwood or silver spoons.

It isn’t only the smug futurists who hold this view: some of Melbourne’s most devoted bibliophiles told The Sunday Age the book is destined to be little more than an ornament as technology increasingly transports Charles Dickens and Dan Brown into the digital age.

If this is true, the local death throes of tree-sourced literature began in May, very quietly, when the Borders website posted the first e-book bestseller list for Australia. For the first couple of weeks, a No. 1 hit meant 20 copies sold. Four months later, Borders Australia and its sister company, Angus & Robertson, have sold more then 100,000 e-books and 20,000 Kobo e-readers, and seen 200,000 e-book applications downloaded free (for iPhone and desktop computer reading) from their websites.

While one rival bookseller queried the Kobo e-reader sales figures, REDgroup, the company that owns Borders and Angus & Robertson, thinks they could have sold more if more of them had been available.

”But for about six or seven weeks we couldn’t get [enough] devices into our shops,” REDgroup communications manager Malcolm Neil says.

”We were just getting orders and managing demand … a huge latent demand.”

Ask local publishers and booksellers what the sales mean for the future of reading and they’ll say: ”We don’t know yet.”

On one hand, the fact that the applications (web-based software) are available free on the Borders website is just one part of an aggressive strategy by REDgroup that, for the moment, is all but locking up the e-book market in Australia. On the other hand, the fact there have been twice as many e-reading applications downloaded as actual books sold by REDgroup suggests the revolution so far is a geek-led phenomenon. If there’s a new gadget going, the tech-nerds will tend to snap it up.

Graham Cottew, a web designer who specialises in risk and compliance management for the finance industry and publishing houses, describes himself as ”an early adopter of technology”, yet he’s only read one e-book so far, The Art of War, and on his iPad, not on a dedicated e-reader. He reckons he won’t take to stand-alone e-readers ”because they’re a one-trick pony. I would never pick a technology that did just one thing.”

As for the electronic reading experience, he says: ”At the time, I really enjoyed it. The simulation of turning pages is great, to publish a book, the clarity of text is fine and I didn’t get any eye strain. And the one thing I haven’t seen mentioned: my wife and I often fight about turning the lights out when I want to read one more chapter. Because the iPad is back-lit, she could have the lights out and I could keep reading.”

Cottew sees e-books as having two advantages over paper books: portability and cost. ”If you are a geek, you always have your iPad with you, which means you always have your library with you. That you’re virtually taking along kilograms of paper with no extra weight is a fantastic advantage.

”The other thing: I’ve just

New York, NY, September 22, 2010— Book Publishers’ book sales tracked by the Association of American Publishers (AAP) for the month of July decreased by 1.3 percent on the prior year to $1.5 billion and were up by 8.1 percent for the year to date.

The children’s book category showed decreases over July of last year, with Hardcover Children’s/YA sales down 19.1 percent for the month with sales of $45.1 million in July, and year-to-date sales are down by 16.0 percent. Children’s/YA Paperback sales decreased 1.7 percent in July with sales totaling $50.0 million; sales fell 5.9 percent for the year to date.

The Adult Hardcover category was down 15.2 percent in July with sales of $74.1 million, although sales for the year-to-date are up by 10.2 percent. Adult Paperback sales decreased 10.1 percent for the month ($111.1 million) but increased by 8.6 percent for the year. Adult Mass Market sales decreased 11.0 percent for July with sales totaling $60.6 million; sales were down by 13.1 percent year to date.

E-book sales continue to grow, with a 150.2 percent increase over July 2009 ($40.8 million); year-to-date E-book sales are up 191.0 percent. Downloaded Audio Books also saw an increase of 38.4 percent over last year, with sales of $6.6 million this July; and the category was also up 35.3 percent year-to-date. Physical Audio Book sales decreased 35.6 percent in July with sales totaling $8.7 million; sales for the year to date are down 0.6 percent.

Religious Book Publishers were down 11.9 percent for the month with sales totaling $37.4 million, and sales were down by 0.4 percent for the year to date.

Sales of University Press Hardcover books increased 20.9 percent in July to $6.0 million; sales increased by 4.6 percent year-to-date. University Press Paperback posted a loss of 2.0 percent for the month with sales totaling $7.8 million, but sales were up 1.5 percent for the year. Sales of Professional books rose 5.0 percent to $123.8 million and were up by 9.9 percent for the year to date.

Higher Education book publisher sales increased 0.2 percent for the month ($926.4 million) and increased 13.5 percent for the year. Finally, the K-12 elementary/high school category posted total net sales of $729.9 million, up 4.2 percent over the prior year, and year-to-date sales of $2.2 billion, a 13.5 percent increase over 2009.

About AAP

The Association of American Publishers is the national trade association of the U.S. book publishing industry. AAP’s more than 300 members include most of the major commercial publishers in the United States, as well as smaller and non-profit publishers, university presses and scholarly societies. AAP members publish hardcover and paperback books in every field, educational materials for the elementary, secondary, postsecondary, and professional markets, scholarly journals, computer software, and electronic products and services. The protection of intellectual property rights in all media, the defense of the freedom to read and the freedom to publish at home and abroad, and the promotion of reading and literacy are among the Association’s highest priorities.

Just in case you needed any more reasons to be convinced why books are great gifts, our friends at the Association of American Publishers have asked some of the most popular and prolific authors to share their reasons why books make great gifts. Enjoy the video below and check out the videos featuring even more authors on YouTube.