It’s been a long and tortuous road, but it was announced today that Library Journal, School Library Journal and LJ Hotline have been sold to Media Source, which also owns The Horn Book and Junior Library Guild.

Horn Book Editor-in-Chief, Roger Sutton celebrated the acquisition by posting a photo of himself and LJ/SLJ Editorial Director, Brian Kenney at MidWinter with a typically wry Suttonesque headline, Many men have tried to mix us up but no one can.

Kenney continues as editorial director of both magazines, with Francine Fialkoff as editor-in-chief of Library Journal. Ron Shank continues as publisher.

LJ and SLJ were originally put up for sale, along with 45 other magazines, by owner Reed Business Information back in 2008. Unable to find buyers, in what is widely considered a bungled attempt, Reed took them off the table. This past July, they announced they were trying it again. Since then, they’ve sold off several magazines, including Electronic Design News (EDN) and Broadcasting & Cable, and closed others, including Video Business. The magazines were formerly part of Cahners, which published over 150 magazines at its height.

Noticeably missing from the sale is sister publication Publishers Weekly. Some news sources see this as a sign that Reed has been unable to find a buyer for the magazine and predict it will be closed, a step Reed said they would take with any magazines they were unable to sell by mid-year.

It would be a shame if PW was closed, not just because it’s been covering the publishing business since 1872, or because I am one of the former editors-in-chief. Despite a drastic reduction in staff over the past few years, it still has the largest number of reporters and editors focused on all aspects of the business, from printing to bookselling. Several online publications have challenged PW’s coverage, most notably Publishers Marketplace and Shelf Awareness (which, ironically, had its first incarnation as PW Daily for Booksellers; when the management laid off editor John Mutter and closed the publication, they effectively set up a competitor), but PW still does more original reporting than any of them. Successful PW online publications Children’s Bookshelf and Cooking the Books point to opportunities to create other niche publications.

And, with all the magazines Reed is trying to sell off, they simply may not have had the time to work with potential buyers of single publications. The outlook may be murky, but don’t write PW off just yet.

The NYT reports today that publishers’ “conversations with Google have taken a more flexible tone” since the unveiling of the iPad and Amazon’s concessions on e-book pricing.

Atul Gawande, author of the bestselling book, The Checklist Manifesto, appeared on the Jon Stewart show last night.

An ad for the book in today’s New York Times notes it’s “available at booksellers everywhere except Amazon.”

The Checklist Manifesto is published by Holt, a division of Macmillan. Last week, as a result of a dispute over the pricing of Kindle e-books, Amazon stopped selling all Macmillan titles. Print titles were still available on the site, but only through third parties. On Sunday, Amazon announced that they were “capitulating.” However, the titles are still unavailable and Amazon has remained remarkably silent on the issue.

Today, John Sargent, CEO of Macmillan, sent a letter to authors and agents saying they have been in “constant discussion with Amazon” this week but that he “cannot tell you when we will resume business as usual with Amazon, and needless to say I can promise nothing on the buy buttons. You can tell by the tone of this letter though that I feel the time is getting near to hand.”

Now the big guns are coming out.

Shortly after Macmillan CEO, Jon Sargent asked Amazon to change the pricing model for Kindle books, Rupert Murdoch, CEO of News Corp (which owns HarperCollins) expressed his desire to renegotiate terms and claims that Amazon appears “ready to sit down with us again,” according to a story by Reuters.

Another skirmish in the e-book pricing war took place over the weekend. After Macmillan CEO Jon Sargent flew out to Amazon HQ to ask that Kindle pricing be restructured along the lines of the “agency model” offered by the new Apple iBooks store, Amazon not only rejected the suggestion, but retaliated by no longer selling Macmillan titles (which includes the imprints St. Martin’s, FSG, Holt and Tor/Forge); none were available for the Kindle and print editions could only be purchased through third-party retailers. This was covered in many news sources, including the L.A. Times.

On Sunday, it looked as if Amazon had conceded, posting this statement on the Kindle Community area (a somewhat hidden area of the site):

Dear Customers:

Macmillan, one of the “big six” publishers, has clearly communicated to us that, regardless of our viewpoint, they are committed to switching to an agency model and charging $12.99 to $14.99 for e-book versions of bestsellers and most hardcover releases.

We have expressed our strong disagreement and the seriousness of our disagreement by temporarily ceasing the sale of all Macmillan titles. We want you to know that ultimately, however, we will have to capitulate and accept Macmillan’s terms because Macmillan has a monopoly over their own titles, and we will want to offer them to you even at prices we believe are needlessly high for e-books. Amazon customers will at that point decide for themselves whether they believe it’s reasonable to pay $14.99 for a bestselling e-book. We don’t believe that all of the major publishers will take the same route as Macmillan. And we know for sure that many independent presses and self-published authors will see this as an opportunity to provide attractively priced e-books as an alternative.

Kindle is a business for Amazon, and it is also a mission. We never expected it to be easy!

However, as of early Monday, Macmillan titles were still not for sale through Amazon.

What effect will this have on the public perception of e-books? It underscores that only certain titles are available for the Kindle and they can be removed from sale; issues librarians know only too well from dealing with database vendors (e.g., EBSCO & Gale). Corey Doctorow wrote on the tech site, Boing Boing, “this is a case of two corporate giants illustrating neatly exactly why market concentration is bad for the arts.” Futher, he objects to “Amazon draping itself in the consumer-rights flag,” when “Amazon’s ebooks are locked (by contract and by DRM) to the Kindle.” He also points to a post by John Scalzi, All the Many Ways Amazon So Very Failed This Weekend (even if you don’t care about this particular fight, read the post; it’s very funny).

Amazon has worked to give customers the perception that Kindle e-books cost $9.99, but if you are not buying bestsellers, Kindle prices can be quite a bit higher than that. Of the nine titles with full reviews in the current NYT BR, only one is available in a $9.99 Kindle edition; three are not available at all (these do not include any Macmillan titles; curiously, the one Macmillan title reviewed, from Palgrave Macmillan, is available for the Kindle. Guess Amazon doesn’t realize they’re part of Macmillan) and the rest were just $1.13 to $2.83 less than the hardcover price. In one case, the hardcover through a third-party retailer was cheaper than the Kindle version.

But consumers have proven they want the lower prices; none of the titles in the 100 top-selling Kindle titles was above $9.99 when we checked yesterday; the majority of the top “sellers,” 55 titles, were free; 25 titles range in price from $.01 to $9.60 and just 20 titles were at the magic $9.99 price. Clearly, people are still in the experimental phase and not willing to invest in buying content. Amazon sees e-book prices as a key to selling more Kindle readers. So, they’ve rejected the “agency model” (publisher sets the price; retailer gets 30%) even though it would earn them more money per title and get them out of the loss leader business.

One of every 17 novels purchased in the US since 2006 was written by James Patterson. Of course, this is due not only to his popularity, but to his prodigious output.

The upcoming NYT Magazine features the author and describes how focused he is on the marketing of his books; not surprising from the former head of a major advertising agency. In the article, Patterson is matter-of-fact about his efforts to woo his audience, saying,

If you want to write for yourself, get a diary. If you want to write for a few friends, get a blog. But if you want to write for a lot of people, think about them a little bit. What do they like? What are their needs? A lot of people in this country go through their days numb. They need to be entertained. They need to feel something.

The article answers the question of why he produces so many books a year (up to seven hardcovers now). It’s because he learned,

Not only did more books mean more sales, they also meant greater visibility, ensuring that Patterson’s name would almost always be at the front of bookstores, with the rest of the new releases.

In fact, he publishes so many titles in so many formats that he keeps a full-time “brand manager” busy trafficking them through the production process.

And he never misses an opportunity:

…last year, after noticing he wasn’t selling in Scandinavia, he invited Sweden’s best-selling crime writer, Liza Marklund, to collaborate with him on an international thriller. Their novel, The Postcard Killers, is just being published in Sweden and will be out in the U.S. this summer.

In the past week, Amazon has managed to capture headlines for the Kindle, with announcements such as,

• the device is the most “gifted” item ever on Amazon
• “for titles that have a Kindle edition, Kindle book sales are 48 percent of the physical sales,” Jeff Bezos, inteviewed in Newsweek
• on Christmas day, eBooks outsold physical books on Amazon’s site

Most media have taken these claims at face value and have gone on to opine about the future of book publishing, reading, and even writing.

There’s one problem — Amazon’s claims are long on comparisons, but very short on actual numbers.

This was pointed out by Bobbie Johnson, the Guardian’s technology correspondent on Monday. Johnson doesn’t accuse Amazon of lying, exactly, but of using “carefully chosen language.”

The blog “The eBook Test,” is not so polite. In an article headlined, Is The Amazon Kindle An Outright Fraud?, blogger Mike Cane challenged publishers to put Amazon to the test by revealing actual numbers for their bestselling eBook titles.

Figures from the Association of American Publishers show a different picture from Amazon’s. According to their latest stats (unfortunately, only through Oct. of this year), trade market eBooks account for only 3% of sales.

It is difficult to get real figures in book publishing. Sarah Weinman demonstrates this as she gamely tries to make sense of Amazon’s claims at the Daily Finance. As she points out, to understand how important Kindle downloads are to the entire business, we first need to know how many physical books Amazon sells and we don’t even know that.

An anonymous commenter on the eBook Test site gives an insider’s view (assuming, of course, that this person is who he or she claims to be),

I work for a trade house, and while I am not going to reveal my identity or that of my employer, I can tell you that our top Kindle sales of any one title are in the range of about 1000 downloads life to date. I am someone who receives the sales numbers for our titles directly from Amazon and I look at them every week; and, I agree that the actual sales numbers are much LOWER than anyone is pretending to have achieved.

There’s the added question of what do “sales” really mean when applied to eBook downloads. On the Kindle books “bestseller” list, 9 of the top 10 are free. For the entire list at this point (it’s updated hourly), 66 of 100 are free.

The tipping point for eBooks may be further off than Amazon’s announcements would make you think.

On the other hand, all the publicity that Amazon is generating may bring it closer.

I once heard a mystery writer, in a speech to a library crowd, say that he wanted his tombstone to read, “F**K Virginia Kirkus.”

His revenge may be sweeter now that Kirkus is the one with the tombstone.

It’s not surprising that the …

“codgerish” — Washington City Paper

“reliably cantankerous” — New York Times

“famously grouchy” — New York Observer

…Kirkus is not getting sympathy from all quarters, especially from agents and editors. Agent Esther Newberg tells the New York Observer,

…it’s never been a publication worth anything. The reviews were almost always negative and not helpful in any way. And so that’s it. Good riddance.

Tim Duggan, executive editor at Harper, observes in the NYT,

…it’s been a long time since a review there actually moved the needle in any meaningful way.

But David Wright, Seattle Public librarian and RA guru, gives Kirkus its fairest assessment in the Seattle Post Intelligencer (he’s also quoted in the NYT article):

Among its fellows - Publisher’s Weekly, Booklist and Library Journal – Kirkus often held itself apart, slow to join in a chorus of adulation, and often the only eye to catch some promising talent or sleeper sensation in the offing. Its criticism was at times merciless, but its knack for highlighting truly interesting and satisfying books will be deeply missed.

Let’s not be sanguine about the remaining prepub review publications. Three of them — Library Journal, School Library Journal and Publishers Weekly — have suffered several rounds of layoffs and their owner, Reed Business Information, put them back up for sale in July, after a failed attempt the year before. No buyers have emerged yet.

Most of the news stories focus on how booksellers used (or didn’t use) Kirkus, but The New York Observer quotes a previous Kirkus publisher who blames falling revenues on a decrease in library subscribers who “just could not afford it” anymore. More likely, libraries have found it not only more affordable, but more efficient to get reviews electronically from their wholesalers, an issue that affects subscription rates for all the prepub review media.

With libraries an increasingly important segment of the book market and given their heavy dependence on prepub reviews for buying, it’s shocking that anyone in the business does not consider this a loss.

I’m all for efforts to build anticipation for a new book, but I wonder if the game of unveiling a new cover isn’t getting a bit silly. The cover of Stephen King’s Under the Dome is being released in four stages (via Publishers Marketplace).

I date the beginning of this particular marketing technique to Breaking Dawn (or was one of the Harry Potter’s? Chime in if you remember a earlier instance). Then there was the upcoming Wimpy Kid, followed by the reveal of The Lost Symbol (making it the first use of a dramatic reveal for an adult title?)

Below is Under the Dome’s cover as it currently appears on Amazon. Stage one of the real cover is now available here and stage two will be revealed on Friday.

Under the Dome: A Novel Stephen King Retail Price: $35.00 Hardcover: 1088 pages Publisher: Scribner – (2009-11-10) ISBN / EAN: 1439148503 / 9781439148501

The New York Times “Arts Beat” blog reports that James Patterson has just signed a deal with his publisher, Little, Brown, for 17 books through 2012.

“Arts Beat” figures that is a little shy of six books a year, but it’s not clear whether the deal includes paperback reprints, which would require fewer original works. In any case, Patterson can clearly handle the output; his total for the year 2009 is nine hardcovers, one original paperback, and one Manga title:

1. Maximum Ride, Vol. 1 (Manga, with NaRae Lee) (Jan. 27, 2009)
2. Run for Your Life, (Feb. 2, 2009) (with Michael Ledwidge)
3. MAX: A Maximum Ride Novel, ( March 16, 2009)
4. 8th Confession, (April 27,2009)
5. Swimsuit, (Jun 29, 2009) (with Maxine Paetro)
6. Watch the Skies, (July 27, 2009) (with Ned Rust)
7. Alex Cross’s Trial, (Aug. 24, 2009)
8. The Murder of King Tut, (Sept, 2009) (with Martin Dugard)
9. I, Alex Cross, (Nov. 16, 2009)
10. Witch & Wizard, (Dec. 14, 2009) (with Gabrielle Charbonnet)

We heard it at BEA. Now get ready to hear it over and over again; this will be a huge fall book season. Nancy Stewart, Ingram’s lead buyer says that, in thirty years in the business, she hasn’t seen “such a dazzling lineup of quality fiction in a season.”

You can’t help but hope, as Leon Neyfakh speculated in The New York Observer a few weeks ago, that this great lineup “has the best chance of any in recent memory to redeem the industry after one of its darkest years,” a theme echoed by the  AP in yesterday’s overview of the season.

But readers are not likely to have more time on their hands this fall. Will the enormous choice actually reduce the size of the audience for each title?

For libraries, this plethora of titles by big-name authors would be a challenge in the best of times. How are you coping? Are you ordering fewer copies of each title than you normally would? Where are you placing your bets?

Time magazine this week asks “Is Amazon Taking Over the Book Business?”

The conclusion?

Only partially.

Those clever guys at Unshelved may have just topped themselves. For BEA, they’ve put together “Publisher Confidential,” an ebooklet of pet peeves from librarians, booksellers and readers.

Such as:

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For more on the project, check the Unshelved blog.

Reminder: if you don’t suffer from the above problem and are actually looking for catalogs, you can get PDF’s of publishers catalogs from our links to the right (under “Download Publishers Catalogs”).

Who but a cataloger could imagine that someday a “cataloging error” would make headlines?

That’s what Amazon is claiming as the cause of nearly 60,000 titles, many of them gay and lesbian-themed, being stripped of their sales rankings, rendering them difficult to find in searches and creating a PR nightmare.

The Seattle Post Intelligencer reports official responses, as well as one from a former Amazon employee saying that,

A guy from Amazon France got confused on how he was editing the site, and mixed up ‘adult,’ which is the term they use for porn, with stuff like ‘erotic’ and ’sexuality.’ That browse node editor is universal, so by doing that there he affected ALL of Amazon.

Seattle PI business reporter Andrea James has been updating her Amazon & the Business of Online Retailing blog as the story develops.

The errors have now been fixed, but at least one author is not satisfied, feeling Amazon has not apologized sufficiently, nor have they promised to establish safeguards against this situation happening again:

Craig Seymour, “Craig’s Pop Life” blog, My Response to Amazon’s Statement

While I was at Midwinter, I learned the news of the astounding number of layoffs at Publishers Weekly, where I was, until four years ago, the editor-in-chief and a few others at Library Journal, where I was once the editor.

In the process, RBI has also shut down Críticas, “The English-Speaker’s Guide to the Latest Spanish-Language Titles.” I was involved in the launch of Críticas, one of my most cherished projects, since it clearly filled a need. Libraries and booksellers needed help in figuring out how to buy Spanish-language titles and publishers needed a way to reach the market. Críticas served those functions.

We managed to hire a sparkling, talented young staff that put their hearts and considerable intelligence into making the magazine a success. 

So, I am particularly sad to see Críticas go. Hearteningly, Group Publisher Ron Shank, in an interview in Publishers Lunch about the layoffs, said ”the most response I have received personally is from librarians and others around the country who lament the suspension of Críticas…we do have plans to continue review coverage and feature coverage of Spanish-language publishing.”

Adriana Lopez, former editor of Críticas, who has been blogging on the Críticas site, encourages librarians in her latest post to email Ron, to ask him to reconsider closing Críticas, or a least to ensure this area gets the coverage it needs in the other magazine.

It’s also painful to see beloved former colleagues let go. When long-time staff leave voluntarily, their accomplishments are publicly lauded. Unfortunately, when they are laid off, celebrations are few.

Among those laid off, is Daisy Maryles who was at PW for over four decades. Many in the book business can’t imagine PW without her; certainly I can’t. Always an enthusiast for books, she has a keen eye for titles that could take off with a little nudge and she was there to provide the right nudge.

She recognized the rise in interest in religion books many years ago and developed PW’s outstanding coverage. In the process, she helped general trade bookstores, who were afraid to touch that area, become comfortable with titles that generated profits for them. You couldn’t help but get a kick out of seeing this observant Jewish woman navigating her way around the Christian Booksellers Show where she was much beloved.  

Daisy is the bestseller maven, with an amazing mental book database. After years of doing the PW bestseller list, she was always able to look at it in new ways and her annual roundups were an assessment of both popular culture and the shape of the business. She’s a prodigious worker, who never passed on an interesting opportunity because she was “too busy.” She’s also a great skeptic. I felt I had won the Pulitzer Prize when she reacted to one of my ideas with, “I’m not so sure that’s not a good idea.” 

This isn’t the first hit the staff of the three magazines have taken. According to RBI they are laying off 7% of their total employees, and that comes on top of earlier rounds of eviscerations.

Obviously, with this much-reduced staff, it will be necessary to reinvent PW. A community needs a newspaper, whether it’s in print or electronic, to bring it together. There’s still plenty of talent at PW; I know you can find a way to regain that role for the book community.