Do it Your Self Penguin Covers

A new twist on the Penguin initiative that allows you to design your own Penguin classic cover.

At MyPenguin several bands and musicians have added their own covers. Razorlight, Beck, Goldspot, Dragonette, Ryan Adams, Johnny Flynn and Mr. Hudson & The Library all chose the Penguin Classic they most wanted to see NAKED... then they did a cover for it.

At left is Beck's cover.

Playboy Archive & Bondi Digital

Update: This post was made a few months ago and this morning The New York Times comments on both the Playboy and the Rolling Stone DVD archive coming soon from Bondi Digital.

Since posting the following, I have seen the packages and they are impressive.


In October, I found myself in a cold gloomy basement antique store in Omaha, Nebraska. It was a fairly large room with variable content including a collection of magazines and books. The books were not special - although there was one first edition I knew was worth over $100 except that some moron had made a square cut in the dust jacket. The magazines included hundreds of Playboy magazines and I wish I had taken a photo of them as they were impressive and in much disarray. No doubt many old geezers like me spent time in that area.

At around the same time, I met David Anthony of Bondi Digital who was just wrapping up an agreement with Playboy Publishing to digitize the entire run of Playboy magazines. It is an exciting project and they hope to have the first products in stores for Christmas. They will approach the project by creating decade long sets of the magazine which will be available on discs packaged in large format book like packages. Each package will also include a booklet reflecting on the content on the disc which will be an exact replication of the print product - cover to cover. The content will be searchable and there will be an index.

"This digital archive is a first in the mass consumer magazine andmen's category," says Hugh M. Hefner, Playboy Founder, Editor-in-Chief and Chief Creative Officer. Playboy magazine has a tremendous legacy. With ourloyal readership, which has always shown a real interest in our archival issues, we knew this would be the perfect opportunity to offer Playboy fans what they have wanted for years."

Given this initiative (it follows Bondi's work with The New Yorker Archive) those interested in Playboy (and you know who you are) will not have to skulk around in basements anymore to find missing issues. By the end of next year the full set should be completed to the eternal enjoyment of all Playboy 'readers'.

Rolling Stone Post

Borders Australian Stores

The Australian Bookseller and Publisher is reporting (via SMH) that KPMG will be circulating the black books to parties interested in acquiring the Australian Borders stores on Thursday. The magazine is reporting that the business unit could be worth over A$200mm and Dymocks may be the leading candidate for acquisition. Angus and Robertson the other leading contender is owned by Pacific Equity Partners which also owns New Zealand retailer Whitcoulls and has stated an intention to form a large retail chain and then float the business on the stock exchange.

ABP also suggested that Australian big box retailers Woolworths and "Big W" may also be interested. Stay tuned.

(ABP is a Bowker property - Hello to all the staff down under).

Harlequin Reports

Torstar the owner of Harlequin reported marginally higher revenues against the same period last year for the Harlequin operating unit. They expect full year revenues to continue to improve against a 'difficult' 2006. Torstar's main revenues are generated by newspaper advertising revenues which continue to fall (as is the case with most North American newspapers). Overall the newspaper group's revenues rose just less than 2% for the quarter versus the same period last year.

Harlequin has been under-going a reorganization which began earlier last year and in the quarter operating profit was up 20% from $10.2mm to $12.5; however, the company also stated that operating profits in 2006 were artificially low due to shipping problems. (Torstar Press Release). First quarter revenues were up $6.2mm but included $5.1mm in exchange rate benefit. Second quarter revenues were up $1.4 including a gain of $0.9mm in exchange rate fluctuation. For the first six months Harlequin revenues are up only $1.4mm at constant rates on total revenues for the six months of $240.4mm (less than 1%). Operating income, where it looks like efficiencies are having some impact is $31.6mm for the first half which represents a 25% increase and an operating margin improvement from 11% to 13%. (There was an $0.8mm exchange benefit in operating income).

Details on the company's operating issues is sparse but it does look like the company continues to have difficulty expanding their revenue base. The lack of revenue growth is clearly the story here with the company struggling over the past several quarters to burst out of the doldrums. They have commented that mass market continues to be a difficult market for them and it would be interesting to hear from the company how some of their new sources of revenue - particularly online - are doing. Some of the things they are doing with online community building and leveraging their brand online are truly exciting and innovative but strangely lacking in the company reports.

Everyone knows this is a company with a tremendous brand name and image: With many other trade publisher's (with far less brand strength) reporting good to strong growth in revenue and operating income in the last few weeks it seems Harlequin are not performing to expectations.

Interview with Jane Friedman

Interview in Forbes with Jane Friedman, CEO Harpercollins.

Forbes: When you look out into the future of publishing, what do you see?
JF: I think the book business is the healthiest I have seen it in a very long time. We are seeing a breadth of titles selling in many different channels of distribution. We are no longer publishing for the independents only, the chains only, the big box merchandisers only, the online sellers only. We are selling across the board. The health is the breadth, diversity and range. That's good for business, and more importantly, it's good for society.

Rest of the interview here.

File Under Any News is Good News

Personally, my interest in the Tour Dey France ended the day after Floyd Landis won last year and we found out he was a doper. The feel good story bleed to death. After watching the tour through the Lance years Mrs PND and myself now have no interest; however, we are unique because Versus (candidate for dumbest brand name change of the year) the cable channel is reporting the highest viewship ever. This proves that any news is good PR and notoriety is paramount.

E-book Reader for IPhone

Via teleRead an application for the IPhone that enables the reading of over 10000 books on the IPhone.

Adam at Exact Editions will be excited.

Note one of the comments (not sure if it applied to the IPhone or not):

Having played around will all the current iPhone ebook “solutions”,
including the one mentioned here, I’m afraid none of them will really fit the
bill for a serious ebook reader. There are two major problems:
1. Lack of local storage. If the book is stored on a server then the reader is pretty much out of luck in areas of poor cell or wifi coverage.
2. Inconvenience. Reading a book in a browser doesn’t work well because you can’t bookmark your page. Several times I’ve had Safari quit on me and then had to re-open the book and scroll through 250 pages to get to my place. Storing the ebook as part of the url solves the local storage problem, but doesn’t solve this one.