Legal
- Big publishers and Amazon move to dismiss booksellers’ class-action lawsuits. Amazon argues that the factual basis for the plaintiffs’ allegations of price-fixing does not exist. Read Andrew Albanese in Publishers Weekly.
- Educational publisher Pearson is suing Chegg. Pearson says the Chegg Study website sells answers to end-of-chapter questions from 9,000 textbooks, including Pearson’s, “using precisely the same unit, chapter, and topic orders and naming conventions for the questions employed in the textbooks.” The complaint states that Chegg’s sale of answer sets “diminishes educators’ ability to use the textbooks” and can lead to reduced sales if educators “reconsider using Pearson’s textbooks as components of their courses.” Meanwhile, Chegg’s online subscription service grew 67 percent last year. Read Andrew Albanese in Publishers Weekly.
Supply chain
- Pre-order delays affecting the UK market. The problems—which affect marquee titles this fall—are linked to Brexit, COVID, and a shortage of drivers. Children’s books printed abroad are particularly in danger of delays. Hachette UK said it was considering training members of its distribution team to become drivers. Read in The Bookseller (subscription required).
- Meanwhile, the US industry braces itself for supply chain disruptions. Right now, the main threat appears to be delays in overseas printing and shipments. Read Jim Milliot in Publishers Weekly.
Trends
- A recent decline in thriller sales may point to how titles are getting categorized differently than before. Books that have traditional elements of thriller and suspense are being categorized as women’s fiction, general fiction, and YA fiction, according to NPD BookScan. Read Porter Anderson in Publishing Perspectives.
- The publishing ecosystem in the digital era: If it has to be boiled down to one thing, then the single biggest issue in publishing is the power of Amazon. Jennifer Howard reviews Book Wars by John B. Thompson. Read at LA Review of Books.
- How books are sold across the political divide (or not). On UK’s Read Smart podcast, you’ll hear Barnes & Noble CEO James Daunt in conversation with Morgan Entrekin, the publisher of Grove Atlantic. They discuss the pandemic’s effect on publishing and also the politics of readership. Listen at Spotify.
Social media
- How TikTok turns backlist books into bestsellers. Yet another look at BookTok and its effects on (primarily) YA fiction sales. Read Sophia Stewart in Publishers Weekly.
- Learn more about the BookTok trend and how the wider world outside publishing sees it. Pulsar, an “audience intelligence” company, says “books are back in the mainstream.” Read at the Pulsar blog.
- TikTok announces Shopify Shop Tab. Have a Shopify account? It’s now easier to sync your product catalog to TikTok to create a mini storefront. Read Andrew Hutchinson in Social Media Today. Note: It is possible to use Shopify to sell print books and ebooks; if you use Lulu, there is a ready-to-go Shopify-Lulu integration. (It would be great if Ingram had something similar.)
- Twitter launches Communities. The move allows for more private conversations among like-minded people, without a stranger butting in from nowhere to criticize you. Learn more.
Libraries
- The New Yorker looks at the “big business” of ebooks. It includes an insightful look at OverDrive plus specific dollar amounts that the NYPL pays for print books and ebooks. Read Daniel A. Gross.
- The US Copyright Office weighs in on Maryland’s ebook library lending law. In short, it’s probably not a law that can stand. Read Andrew Albanese at Publishers Weekly.
- The New York Public Library plans to close browsing access to its picture collection. People are understandably upset. Read Arthur Lubow at The New York Times.
- Is the Dewey Decimal system obsolete? Aside from issues of transformative technology, a librarian argues the system is an example of systemic racism. Read Tali Balas in School Library Journal.
- German ebook sales might be affected by state-subsidized library ebook lending. Online loans make up 40 percent of ebook consumption in Germany; in the past year, the growth rate of such services has been six times that of ebook sales. Read Porter Anderson in Publishing Perspectives.
Culture & politics
- Why translators should be named on book covers: A writer argues that failure to credit the person who chooses every word of the translated book is misguided and unfair. Read Jennifer Croft at The Guardian.
- When did modern poetry begin? Scholars believe they’ve found the “missing link” between the lost world of ancient Mediterranean oral poetry and song and the more modern forms that we know today. Read Alison Flood in The Guardian.
- Why news reporters write the best crime novels. One author says, “Newspaper work is great training in understanding how anything and everything works.” Read Jason Diamond at Inside Hook.
Jane Friedman has spent her entire career working in the publishing industry, with a focus on business reporting and author education. Established in 2015, her newsletter The Bottom Line provides nuanced market intelligence to thousands of authors and industry professionals; in 2023, she was named Publishing Commentator of the Year by Digital Book World.
Jane’s expertise regularly features in major media outlets such as The New York Times, The Atlantic, NPR, The Today Show, Wired, The Guardian, Fox News, and BBC. Her book, The Business of Being a Writer, Second Edition (The University of Chicago Press), is used as a classroom text by many writing and publishing degree programs. She reaches thousands through speaking engagements and workshops at diverse venues worldwide, including NYU’s Advanced Publishing Institute, Frankfurt Book Fair, and numerous MFA programs.