$106MM Charge For Borders and A New Board Member

Strange this is getting reported today by Reuters because this information was noted in the sale announcement last week. Borders will take a $106mm charge most of which is due to the sale of the UK store operations.

An announcement regarding the sale of the Australian operations is expected soon.

Reuters

In a separate Reuters report, Spencer Capital Management which owns about 8% of Borders stock is seeking board representation. From the report,

Spencer said it would seek to have Glenn Tongue, managing partner of fellow Borders shareholder T2 Partners Management, added to the board. The hedge fund advisor said in the filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission that adding Tongue to the board would bring focus to board efforts to maximize shareholder value.

Glenn Tongue is the Managing Partner of T2 Partners LLC and has 17 years experience on Wall Street, most recently as an investment banker at UBS, where he was a Managing Director and Head of Acquisition Finance. Before UBS, he was at DLJ for 13 years, the last three of which he served as the President of NYSE-listed DLJdirect. (From his Bio).

Charkin Goes to Bloomsbury: But What About My Link?

The famous CharkBlog published by Richard Charkin - CEO Macmillan Publishers UK - will be coming to an end as he moves to Bloomsbury Publishing. There he will be executive director responsible for all their operations and he will be a board member. From the press release on his site:

“It is exactly ten years since I accepted the job as Chief Executive of Macmillan and it has been the best ten years of my career. I have been able to work in a company with strong values and traditions owned by a family committed to quality, innovation and autonomy. The decade has seen significant growth in all our diverse areas of publishing and we have been able to do this mainly organically but also with some excellent acquisitions. We are in the middle of a digital revolution and Macmillan has embraced the changes without losing sight of the importance of our authors, our staff, our customers and our history.

He had a link on his site to Personanondata to which I very grateful. I am sure someone else will pick up the Macmillan drum and bang away like Richard and I also believe Richard will start another Blog at Bloomsbury.

Harvest Moon Over Manhattan

A late summer heat wave is contributing to clear skies here in New York.

Update on Winnie the Pooh and Micky Mouse

As an update to the long running battle over royalties for the Winnie the Pooh character, an LA court has declined to reinstate the case that was dismissed in 2004. The daughter of Stephan Slesinger (below) said she would appeal the decision to the CA supreme court and also proceed with a Federal case.
NYTimes


Disney Wants the Honey Jar Too (February 20, 2007)

Disney (although not the plaintiff) lost a court case to have the rights to the Winnie the Pooh characters returned to the family of AA Milne and illustrator E.H Shepard. Disney and the relatives were seeking to overturn an earlier case that said that Clair Milne could not void an agreement that renewed the license to Stephan Slesinger in 1983. Slesinger obtained the original rights in 1930 and in 1961 passed those rights to Disney in exchange for royalties. The Slesinger family have also been fighting Disney for more than 10 years for unpaid royalties which they estimate could exceed a $1.0billion. According to Reuters, Pooh generated over $6.0billion in retail sales in 2005 alone

Harlequin Make All Titles Available For Download

Perhaps time to clear off some space on your MP3 player as Harlequin announced this week that all their titles will now be available for download. Harlequin has pressed ahead in the last two years or so with a number of aggressive electronic publishing and social networking programs and this is a continuation of that process. The initiative will include every line and every title which is about 120 titles per month.

From the press release:

"Women have embraced eBooks," says Malle Vallik, Director Digital Content & Interactivity. "They demand portability, immediacy, availability, depth, breadth and convenience and, by making our entire front list and exclusive digital editorial available to them, we are meeting that challenge. We are meeting the needs of our current audience and reaching a new and diverse base of readers. Seeking innovative new ways to serve our audience continues to be a Harlequin tradition."

Eharlequin.com

Audible Launches Crime Serial in Audio Only

Audible announced the launch of a serialized crime novel, The Chopin Manuscript which will be available exclusively in audio format and via audible.com. Not only is the novel a serial but it is also written by 15 different authors who have each written one or more chapters of the book. The collaboration began when Jeffery Deaver wrote the opening chapter of the work and handed it off to fellow best-selling writer, David Hewson, who wrote chapter two. Other successive authors include Lee Child, Joseph Finder, and Lisa Scottoline. The novel returned to Deaver for the final two chapters and is narated by Alfred Molina.

From the press release:

“I think The Chopin Manuscript is an important literary innovation in three ways,” observed Donald Katz, Chairman and CEO, Audible, Inc. “First, 15 of the most gifted practitioners of a very demanding and technical form of modern fiction – the thriller – came together to create a chapter of a single novel before handing the plot development to the next master. Second, the fact that the novel was written to be produced and published as an audiobook is a step forward for the literate listening category Audible was founded to develop. And finally, the work is being delivered as an episodic, high-tech-Dickensian publishing cycle, using Audible’s technology to automatically deliver a chapter at a time. In a variety of ways this grand experiment deploys technology and new techniques to open up digital media possibilities that can expand the digital audio sector and the literary form in general.”

The title is available only in audio format and available now via the audible.com website.

California Moves On Textbook Prices

More on two pieces of proposed CA legislation on textbook pricing:

Senate Bill 832 by Sen. Ellen Corbett, D-San Leandro, would require publishers to give faculty members a list of book prices in a given subject and information on significant changes in the new edition and also estimate for how long the book will be on the market. The bill would also require publishers to post the differences on the Internet. Assembly Bill 1458 by Assemblyman Jose Solorio, D-Santa Ana, would make publishers summarize the differences between the two editions inside the books and provide wholesale prices on request.

DailyBreeze editorial which agrees with the legislation even though they admit prices could rise which seems to fly in the face of the objective. For anyone familiar with textbook publishing there are a few strange comments in this article.