Wiley Reports Blackwell Benefits

Wiley released their fourth quarter and full year results yesterday. From their press release:

Revenue for the fiscal year 2008 increased 36% over the previous year to $1.7 billion. Blackwell Publishing Ltd. (Blackwell), which was acquired in February 2007, contributed approximately $485 million of revenue to Wiley's fiscal year 2008 results. Excluding Blackwell, revenue for fiscal year 2008 increased 5%. Favorable foreign exchange contributed two percentage points to the year-on-year growth excluding Blackwell. On a U.S. GAAP basis, earnings per diluted share for fiscal year 2008 was $2.49, compared to $1.71 in fiscal year 2007. Excluding Blackwell and various tax benefits, adjusted earnings per diluted share improved 15% to $1.89. Blackwell’s performance was accretive to fiscal year 2008 earnings per dilutive share by approximately $0.29, excluding non-recurring tax benefits.
Revenue for the fourth quarter increased 11% to $433 million from $390 million in the same period of the previous year, or 8% excluding foreign exchange. Blackwell's performance was included in the fourth quarter of both years. Earnings per diluted share for the quarter was $0.49 compared to $0.25 in the prior year.

More details here.

Informa UBM Talks Collapse

After the close of the markets in the UK yesterday, UBM announced it had broken off talks about an all stock merger with Informa. Informa's shares have declined 7% this morning even though new potential buyers have emerged. Reuters cites a Times report suggesting Carlyle is behind a new bid but other parties Cinven, Apax, Candover are also potential entrants. At this point the most likely buyer would be Springer which is owned by Candover and Cinven. From Reuters:

A private equity consortium led by Providence is behind the latest bid approach to British media group Informa (INF.L: Quote, Profile, Research), media reports said on Wednesday. The Times newspaper, without citing sources, said that private equity firm Carlyle was part of the consortium and that talks were at an early stage.

Analysts must also be wondering what type of deal UBM would do if this one wasn't to its liking. The company has remained on the sidelines for much of the media buying frenzy of the past several years. It has no debt to speak off but it remains relatively small. Under what circumstances would they consider expanding the company?

Found In Books

AbeBooks has an interesting article about items found in books. My family (well, me and my father anyway) tend to leave boarding cards in books. They turn up some times nosing themselves above the edge of the boards. You take the book off the shelf to peak at the document and it says something like HNL - SFO or BKK - SYD. These always tend to be Pan Am boarding cards although many of my recent books have lots of BA cards - which are virtually all EWR - LHR or return. The older ones tend not to have dates; you are left to contemplate when the travel occurred and who was travelling where. I can sometimes remember but generally the circumstances remain a mystery.

The AbeBooks article is far more interesting;

Adam Tobin, owner of Unnameable Books in Brooklyn, New York, has created a display inside his bookstore dedicated to objects discovered in books. “It’s a motley assortment,” he said. “We’ve been doing it for about two years since opening the store. The display quickly took over the back wall and now it’s spreading to other places, and there’s a backlog of stuff that we haven’t put up yet. There are postcards, shopping lists, and concert tickets but my favorites are the cryptic notes. They are often deeply personal and can be very moving.” Used booksellers often take ownership of books that have been in a family or a household for decades or even generations. “It’s easy to find things in books that are very dated,” explained Adam,” Such as a newspaper advert for elastic bands from the 19th century. My personal favorite is an ad from the 1950s that reads ‘Rinsing Dacron Curtains in Milk Makes Them Crisp, Stiff, Just Like New.’

Read the whole article. If you are like me and immediately on seeing an interesting book in a second hand bookstore you thumb through it in the hope of finding something significant you will be wondering when lady luck will present herself.

I have found and lost at this game myself. As a book buyer at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston we routinely bought job lots of remainders. One day before the store opened, I picked up a photography book from the remainder pile. This book had clearly been in a store somewhere and not simply shipped out of a warehouse. As I thumbed through the pages, the book opened up and there was a like-new sheet of writing paper from The Southern Cross Hotel in Melbourne Australia. Remember I am in Boston and it is 1985. If you will have read this post you will remember that I lived in that hotel as a child between 1973-77. I bought the book and I still have the paper, but how that writing paper got there remains a mystery.

On the downside, I believe I left a Manchester United signed team photo of their 1968 European Cup winning team between the pages of a book consigned to a second hand store. Worth several thousand by now and I just hope the person who found it knew what it was.

Hat tip to QuillBlog

Politicans Royalties

Teleread takes a look at a number of high profile political leaders and wonder's whether they will be influenced on copyright legislation.

But what does it mean when, according to the Post, more than twenty of the 100 Senators are enjoying book-writing income? Oh, well, I suspect that other things count more—such as the Senate being home to dozens of millionaires, not to mention the number of lawyer-politicians.

Richard & Judy Sell Books

The UK has its own book selling machine similar to Oprah's Book Club. The Richard and Judy show's support of books has had an impressive impact on bookselling in the UK. The TimesOnline has a profile:

Franklin admits that, like many other “literary snobs”, he had regarded the start of a book club by daytime television’s supernormal couple with mild derision and not-so-mild scepticism. The audience didn’t read and, if they did, they restricted themselves to Jeffrey Archer and ghosted packs of lies by barely human celebrities. O’Connor’s, however, was a real book, as were others on that list - William Dalrymple, Alice Sebold - and R&J were shifting them like Tesco burgers. In fact, they were shifting them on a scale unprecedented in the long and undistinguished history of book-promotion scams. They were changing the entire market.
Four years and many real books later, the R&J Book Club accounts for 26% of the sales of the top 100 books in the UK, and Amanda Ross, the club’s creator and book selector, is the most powerful player in British publishing. Now, though, the club faces a crisis. Richard & Judy are ending their early-evening run on Channel 4 and moving to a new UKTV channel. Can the club survive the shift from a terrestrial to a cable channel?

Informa and UBM - Update

Informa and UBM are in discussions about a possible merger. It is anticipated that a financial player may enter the ring and compete and currently Apax is the likely contender (Independent).

Meanwhile the TimesOnline has a profile of Peter Rigby Informa's CEO:

No wonder colleagues say Rigby is different. “Peter’s an Alka-Seltzer dropped into water,” says Derek Mapp, Informa’s senior non-executive director. “You can’t imagine him ever sitting still.” You can’t imagine him ever sacking anyone, either. He’s too nice. The smile is handsome, the eyes twinkle, he cracks jokes with flat, near-Manchester vowels. “Born in Southport, now part of Merseyside, but proud to call myself a Lancastrian,” he laughs. Beneath, there must be a flintier core. The son of a painter and decorator, Rigby has built Informa into one of the biggest conference organisers in the world, and a leading technical publisher with titles including Lloyd’s List among its jewels.

Amazon's Tactics

The NY Times reports on the on-going feud between some UK publishers - specifically Hachette - and Amazon.com. Amazon is doing the physical store equivalent of taking the books off the shelves or out of the front window and putting them in the stock room for all those publishers that will not give them better terms. The tactics point to Amazon's willingness to go after the biggest publishers as well as the smaller ones that have fewer resources. From the article:

The struggle comes at a time that Amazon’s power as a bookseller is increasing, with sales growing online in an otherwise tepid global book market. Some publishers fear that with the introduction of Amazon’s Kindle electronic reader, the company will rise into a position to be able to demand more concessions.
“The buy button is their weapon of choice and that’s how they impose market discipline,” said Paul Aiken, executive director of the Authors Guild, an American trade group that also briefly lost the buy icon, for titles sold from BackinPrint.com, a print-on-demand service for infrequently purchased works. “This is such a clear indication that once they have the clout they are willing to use it to the full extent that they can. It’s ugly with Amazon and will probably get uglier.”

Youthful Folly, Jubilance and Hyjinx

I have been looking for a reason to post this clip of Russel Brand who is a UK comedian, writer and actor and now I have it. Brand's book My Booky Wook was a surprising hit for Hachette and he has now jumped to Harpercollins which will release the title in the US. In the UK, his title sold 600K units and topped charts for weeks. The deal also covers an expected sequel. Brand was in the movie Forgetting Sarah Marshal. released earlier this year.

Here is some video from Letterman.

Electronic Publisher Catalogs

Arsen Kashkashian is the Head Buyer at The Boulder Bookstore and has written a long piece on the way booksellers use publisher catalogs. First he explains how the current systems work and then proposes a better way to buy. The full post is definitely worth reading for publishers who strive to understand the bookstore process. He concludes thus,

HarperCollins held a meeting at the recent Book Expo America in Los Angeles with buyers from many of the top independent bookstores in the country to discuss their plans to implement an online catalog in the next nine months. It was a fascinating study in how people react to change. I was leading the charge into the online world with a handful of other booksellers. Many other buyers were much more hesitant to change a system that has worked for them, despite its inherent flaws. To them, the rush to change seemed reckless.My biggest concern is that bookstores are some of the most under-capitalized businesses you'll ever find. Most stores do not have state-of-the-art computers and speedy internet connections. If an online catalog features too many bells and whistles, (HarperCollins is planning on having video and audio components to many pages) it could take too long for bookstores to load the individual pages. Staring at a stuck screen for more than an instant is going to bring the whole appointment to a crashing halt. There has to be a quick-loading basic page, with the exciting, colorful features all offered as something booksellers can access only if they want to learn more.

On a related note, at Bowker we did a number of focus groups with Librarians to better understand their buying process in order for us to potentially build applications to improve efficiency. I was able to attend one of these all day meetings and was astounded by the obvious appreciation for the inefficiency, cost and lost productivity of the process exhibited by the participants (librarians), but at each suggestion of improvement (often made by the participants in the process) the glue of decades of institutionalized processes inexorably pulled us back to the status quo. It was torture.

One of the biggest negative impacts of this inefficient buying process is that it doesn't encourage deviation from a fairly static list of publisher products. (Or over reliance on pre-packaged buys from a wholesaler). Buyers simply don't have time to look at a wider range of material. Of course, having every publisher set up their own on-line catalog is in the long term not going to make buyers happy either because visiting several thousand imprints on the web will try anybody's patience. (And, I am assuming all kinds of order forms and added bells and whistles are included in these sites). Now, if I were a publisher of an industry wide books data base or transaction site wouldn't I be marketing and promoting this 'one-stop shop' solution really, really, really heavily? Probably, but with a lot of changes.

(Hat tip to Nora Rawlinson).

Speaking of Desperation

Border Stores investor William Ackerman is providing some color commentary on the Borders sale process. As a major investor in Borders (over 30%) he is trying to gin up some interest in the bizarre idea that Amazon.com should buy Borders. Is there really so little interest that this idea is posited?

Handicapping the buyers:

Private Equity buy: Pershing to take it private 1:2 Odds on Favorite

Some other PE firm: 3:1 (Pacific Equity Partners, Others)

Follett Stores: 5:1 (Borders would be a good match with Follett College and a concern for B&N/ B&N College)

BAM: 7:1 (Interesting match with BAM store locations. Combo would would be impressive)

Indigo Books & Music: 7:1 (No where to go in Canada what better opportunity will there be to become a bigger more significant player - could be the dark horse).

B&N: 33:1 (Similar odds to the winner of the Belmont so anything's possible. Probably not a real contender unless Borders goes Chapter 11 then they can renegotiate the leases).

Ingram 100:1 (Would they try this again? The environment is significantly different than 1999 but this is a long shot).

WH Smiths: 200:1. They just got out of this market so unlikely they would get back in.

Target: 200:1

Walmart: 500:1

Amazon: 1000:1 (Maybe worth a flutter).

Well that was fun...

Virtual

This video takes video conferencing to a whole new dimension. Quite astounding.

The ‘Cisco On-Stage TelePresence Experience’ was an ambitious collaboration between Cisco and Musion Systems, which took place during the opening of Cisco’s Globalization Centre East in Bangalore, India. Musion seamlessly integrated their 3D holographic display technology with Cisco’s TelePresence’s system to create the world’s first real time virtual presentation. Cisco CEO John Chambers, who was live on the Bangalore stage, ‘beamed up’ Martin De Beer, the Senior Vice President of emerging Technologies, and Chuck Stucki the General Manager of TelePresence, live from San Jose, California. Chambers was then able to have a ‘face to face’ discussion with De Beer and Stucki on the future of Cisco TelePresence, demonstrating first hand the potential capabilities of the system in front of the watching audience.

Hat tip to Brantley.

Jane F - The Blow by Blow

The NY Observer prints their version of events leading to the resignation of Jane Friedman at HarperCollins.

That same morning Ms. Friedman received a phone call from someone at News Corp. asking her to please come see Mr. Murdoch at 4:30 in his office six blocks away. According to one of Ms. Friedman colleagues, who spoke to her recently, the caller did not explain what Mr. Murdoch wanted to talk to her about. And so Ms. Friedman, fresh off a triumphant turn at Book Expo America the weekend prior, and with strong fourth-quarter results expected at the end of the month, went to the News Corp. building and took the elevator to Mr. Murdoch’s office. When she arrived, he told her that he had given her job to her deputy, a talented young businessman named Brian Murray who had been with HarperCollins since 1997. By midnight that night, the entire publishing world knew that Ms. Friedman was out, and her spokeswoman issued a statement announcing that she had decided to retire and would do so immediately.

Some of this rings true from my own experience; maybe I'll elaborate one day although it is no where near as interesting.