It’s heavy work in the world of book publishing at present, with Hachette Book Group confirming that they are one of the unlucky publishers that will miss out on payments from the beleaguered Borders, Inc USA, as the bookstore closes a major book distribution plant in the mid-west costing 300 jobs.
Now for the second time in four months, like a game of chess, the leadership has changed at the book publisher of novels by such distinguished authors as Sen. Edward Kennedy and Christopher Hitchens.
Author-editor-producer Susan Lehman has been forced out as publisher of Twelve after taking over in September. Twelve is an imprint of Grand Central Publishing, which announced Jan. 11 in an company email shared with The Associated Press that associate publisher Cary Goldstein will replace Lehman effective immediately.
“Susan Lehman is an extremely insightful, creative and talented editor,” Grand Central executive vice-president and publisher Jamie Raab said in the email. “Unfortunately, the role of publisher just wasn’t the perfect fit.”
Lehman had yet to acquire any new books for Twelve, designed to release just 12 books a year, one every month. But Raab told the AP that obtaining new books was not a factor that toys in her decision and otherwise declined to offer a specific reason beyond saying that being a publisher is “an all-encompassing job” that can take years to learn.
“Had I had more time, I’m certain I could have failed on my own demerits,” Lehman wrote in an email to the AP. “But 12 weeks isn’t enough time to do even that. It’s a wonderful imprint. I had lined up great play chess and non-fiction writers for terrific books I hope will find their way into print. Cary Goldstein has a great job and I wish him well.”
Lehman has worked in a variety of christian book publishers fields, from editing at Riverhead Books to producing television documentaries.
Jonathan Karp started Twelve in 2005, but left in June to head the flagship trade imprint of Simon & Schuster. Twelve’s bestsellers include Kennedy’s True Compass, Hitchens’ Hitch-22 and Sebastian Junger’s War.
Grand Central is a division of the Hachette Book Group – also associated with major children’s publishers and toy shops in New York.
In a move that could signal an expansion of its e-book strategy, Google has purchased the online book publishing company eBook Technologies. Terms of the deal were not announced.
In a note on its web site, eBook said “working together with Google will further our commitment to providing a first-class reading experience on emerging tablets, e-readers and other portable devices.”
eBook Technologies supplies intelligent reading devices and licenses technologies that the company said “enable automated publishing and control over content distribution.” The offerings include an online bookstore, an online “bookshelf,” software that converts content to the format used by the company, and e-reading devices.
The book publishing company is headed by President Garth Conboy, an e-book veteran. In the late 1990s, he was vice president of software engineering for SoftBook Press, which developed one of the first dedicated e-book readers, and he owns several related patents.
The acquisition is the latest public move in Google’s positioning in this new and growing market. In December, Google announced Google eBooks, a service for buying and reading digital children’s book publishers ISBN publications. The service doesn’t require that a user have dedicated hardware, such as Amazon.com’s Kindle, but makes titles available via the cloud.
Google Books, which has developed a large library of public-domain books, has become part of Google eBooks, for a total of more than three million titles available. Of those, some hundreds of thousands are for sale.
As a device-agnostic service, Google eBooks also offers reading apps for Apple’s iOS and the Android operating system, currently the most popular for tablets and among the top OSes for smartphones. Since the titles are cloud-based, syncing between devices is irrelevant — the cloud remembers you.
Ads on Books?
The cloud is also a big bookshelf, so customers can buy titles from Google or its bookseller partners, such as Alibris or a variety of smaller retailers. Titles purchased from any source are stored in a user’s account.
As part of its stated objective to organize the world’s information, Google has also been working with university and public libraries to scan, store and make available their collections. But the effort has run into trouble, first with the Association of American Publishers and the Author’s Guild for copyright infringement, then with the U.S. Department of Justice. A registry backed by a $125 million settlement has been in the works, but there are still legal issues pending.
Laura DiDio, an analyst with Information Technology Intelligence Corp., views Google’s moves in e-books as an “extension of their core market of advertising.” She added that, eventually, Google is likely to offer ads with at least some of the digital reading material, in addition to outright sales.
She also noted that Google is positioning itself to remain a relevant source of reading content via mobile devices, rather than allowing Apple, Amazon and Barnes & Noble to control that access.
