Update: Meet Penguin Random House, The World's Largest Book Publisher That Will Counter Amazon

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Updating our “Random House, Penguin Agree to Merge” blogpost last October: Techcrunch reports that “after the US cleared the deal, the European Commission has officially approved the proposed merger.... As it is seeking “new digital publishing models,” the merger has been widely commented on as a way to counter Amazon’s influence on the ebook market.”

Penguin Random House will become the world’s largest publisher, ahead of book publishers Hachette, HarperCollins, Macmillan, and Simon & Schuster in size.

Read this in full.

The merger awaits approval by Canada and China.

See continuing news coverage.

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B&N Changes PubIt! to NOOK Press, A New Self-Publishing Platform

A report in Publishers Weekly (@PublishersWkly) says “Barnes & Noble is phasing out its PubIt! self-publishing service and relaunching it as NOOK Press, an upgraded ebook self-publishing platform offering an array of new services to authors and publishers.”

B&N is partnering with the self-publishing platform FastPencil (@fastpencil) to supply NOOK Press with its proprietary online authoring technology, while also offering FastPencil authors access to a variety of marketing opportunities via B&N’s NOOK platform.

While B&N is encouraging PubIt! authors to synch their accounts to new NOOK Press accounts, B&N is also planning to phase out new PubIt! accounts and transition new self-publishers to the NOOK Press platform, which essentially builds on PubIt! by adding new services. Indeed, sales of self-published ebooks continue to grow on the NOOK Platform and the company said they represent about 25% of all ebook sales on NOOK devices. According to B&N, PubIt! titles grow by about 20% each quarter and general self-published titles offering through the NOOK are growing by 24% each quarter.

Read this in full.

Read the news release.

Also read our previous blogpost, "Guy Kawasaki's New Self-Publishing Instruction Book."

Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you strategically publish and market pbooks, ebooks, and audiobooks.

Download our white paper, “Tech, Trends, & Retail Success: See the Future and Act Now,” in which we detail the elements of creating extreme retail in-store experiences.

Learn about SomersaultSocial (@SomersaultHelp), our Web-based author online marketing education modules.

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The View of Ebooks from the Inside

In The New York Times Bits Blog (@nytimesbits), tech reporter David Streitfeld (@DavidStreitfeld) interviews Jason Merkoski (@merkoski), a leader of the team that built Amazon’s first Kindle. Merkoski, author of Burning the Page: The Ebook Revolution and the Future of Reading, dispenses with the usual techo-utopianism and says, “I think we’ve made a proverbial pact with the devil in digitizing our words.” And: “Big Brother won’t be a politician but an ad man and he’ll have the face of Google.” And: “It’s hard to love Amazon. Not the way we love Apple or a bookstore.” But he also says:

In 20 years, the space of one generation, print books will be as rare as vinyl LPs. You’ll still be able to find them in artsy hipster stores, but that’s about it. So the great advantage of ebooks is also their curse; ebooks will be the only game in town if you want to read a book. It’s sobering, and a bit sad. That said, ebooks can do what print books can’t. They’ll allow you to fit an entire library into the space of one book. They’ll allow you to search for anything in an instant, save your thoughts forever, share them with the world, and connect with other readers right there, inside the book. The book of the future will live and breathe.

Read this in full.

Also see paidContent’s review, “Former Kindle Exec on Kindle flaws, Nook Strengths, and Google’s Future in Ebooks.”

Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you strategically publish and market pbooks, ebooks, and audiobooks.

Download our white paper, “Tech, Trends, & Retail Success: See the Future and Act Now,” in which we detail the elements of creating extreme retail in-store experiences.

Learn about SomersaultSocial (@SomersaultHelp), our Web-based author online marketing education modules.

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Zondervan Launches New Young Adult Imprint for the General Trade

In Publishers Weekly (@PublishersWkly), Lynn Garrett (@LynniGarrett) reports that Zondervan (@Zondervan), a division of HarperCollins Christian Publishing, is launching Blink, a new YA imprint, with titles debuting this fall.

Chriscynethia Floyd, vp of marketing for Zondervan, said the imprint is designed for the general trade, not the Christian market: “These would be no different from other YA titles published by HarperCollins. They are for anyone, regardless of faith.” She added, “These will be hopeful books. We won’t go as dark [as some other YA novels], but we will touch on very real issues” while striving for a “positive balance and approach” and “[representing] morals and ethical standards.” Five to six titles per year are planned

Read this in full.

Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you strategically publish and market pbooks, ebooks, and audiobooks.

Download our white paper, “Tech, Trends, & Retail Success: See the Future and Act Now,” in which we detail the elements of creating extreme retail in-store experiences.

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The Slow Death of the American Author

Scott Turow (@ScottTurow), author, lawyer, and president of the Authors Guild (@AuthorsGuild), writes in his commentary for The New York Times Opinion Page (@nytopinion) that the new, global electronic marketplace is rapidly depleting authors’ income streams. He says, “It seems almost every player — publishers, search engines, libraries, pirates and even some scholars — is vying for position at the authors’ expense."

Authors practice one of the few professions directly protected in the Constitution (Article I, Section 8), which instructs Congress “to promote the progress of Science and the useful Arts by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.” The idea is that a diverse literary culture, created by authors whose livelihoods, and thus independence, can’t be threatened, is essential to democracy.

That culture is now at risk. The value of copyrights is being quickly depreciated, a crisis that hits hardest not best-selling authors like me, who have benefited from most of the recent changes in bookselling, but new and so-called midlist writers.

Read this in full.

A counter-argument is presented by Jeff John Roberts (@jeffjohnroberts) in paidContent's "No, Scott Turow, Copyright is Not Killing American Authors."

What’s your reaction to Mr. Turow’s assessment? Write your comments below.

Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you strategically publish and market pbooks, ebooks, and audiobooks.

Download our white paper, “Tech, Trends, & Retail Success: See the Future and Act Now,” in which we detail the elements of creating extreme retail in-store experiences.

Learn about SomersaultSocial (@SomersaultHelp), our Web-based author online marketing education modules.

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Christian Book Award Finalists for 2013

The Evangelical Christian Publishers Association (@ChristianBkExpo) has selected 36 finalists in 7 categories for the 2013 Christian Book Awards, honoring Christian publishing’s best books and Bible releases of the year. Each category is comprised of 5 finalists except for Inspiration, which has 6 due to a tie.

One title from each category will be honored as the year’s Christian Book Award winner. ECPA’s highest honor, the 2013 Christian Book of the Year, will be bestowed upon one title from all nominees. 2013 Christian Book Award winners will be named at ECPA’s 2013 Awards Banquet at 6 pm, Mon., Apr. 29, 2013, during the ECPA Leadership Summit at World Outreach Church (WOC) in Nashville, Tenn.

The Christian Book Awards, established in 1978 as the Gold Medallion Book Awards by ECPA, recognize the highest quality in Christian books. Based on excellence in content, literary quality, design, and impact, the Christian Book Awards are the oldest and among the most prestigious in the religious publishing industry. Christian Book Award finalists and winners receive recognition and support throughout multiple retail and media outlets.

See the full list of finalists.

Also see our previous blogpost “Christian Publishing’s 2012 Best Book Covers.”

Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you strategically publish and market pbooks, ebooks, and audiobooks.

Download our white paper, “Tech, Trends, & Retail Success: See the Future and Act Now,” in which we detail the elements of creating extreme retail in-store experiences.

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Mining Books To Map Emotions Through A Century

Both marketing and publishing seek to reach consumers’ emotions. So we found the following research to be interesting.

NPR reporter on psychology, emotion, and the business of emotion, Alix Spiegel (@aspiegelnpr), investigated how British anthropologists used a computer program to analyze the emotional content of books from every year of the 20th century — close to a billion words in millions of books. And not just novels or current event books. Many were books without clear emotional content — technical manuals about plants and animals, for example, or automotive repair guides.

This effort began simply with lists of "emotion" words: 146 different words that connote anger; 92 words for fear; 224 for joy; 115 for sadness; 30 for disgust; and 41 words for surprise. All were from standardized word lists used in linguistic research.

The original idea was to have the computer program track the use of these words over time. The researchers wanted to see if certain words, at certain moments, became more popular.

With the graphs spread out in front of him, Bentley says the patterns are easy to see. "The twenties were the highest peak of joy-related words that we see," he says. "They really were roaring."

But then there came 1941, which, of course, marked the beginning of America's entry into World War II. It doesn't take a historian to see that peaks and valleys like these roughly mirror the major economic and social events of the century.

"In 1941, sadness is at its peak," Bently says.

But words that express emotion are being used less today (except fear-related words).

Read this in full.

Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you strategically publish and market pbooks, ebooks, and audiobooks.

Download our white paper, “Tech, Trends, & Retail Success: See the Future and Act Now,” in which we detail the elements of creating extreme retail in-store experiences.

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Add our Facebook page (http://facebook.com/SomersaultGroup) & Twitter stream (http://twitter.com/smrsault) to your Flipboard account on your iPad, iPhone, or Android. Or download our blog as an ebook to your ereader (http://goo.gl/3nTtN)

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Amazon Buys Goodreads

Amazon (@amazon) has acquired Goodreads (@goodreads), a website featuring user-generated reviews of books. Goodreads, which is one of the most popular among a raft of sites created as a book recommendation engine – members are directed to titles by seeing what their friends are reading, or have recommended – does not currently sell any books, but many in the industry saw it as an ideal sales outlet.

The site currently has over 16 million members, averages 37 million unique visitors a month, and has over 30,000 book clubs.

Read this in full.

Read Goodreads announcement.

Salon (@Salon) says the “brilliant business move” shows Amazon is “determined to monopolize book publishing.”

In just five years Goodreads has grown into the largest outlet for armchair reviewers and readers to share their opinions, as well as a safe space for author-reader interactions. Most members saw Goodreads as an unbiased haven for books, a place where they could profess their bookish love free from the ugly noise of commerce. And the noise has certainly been ugly the past few years, with the closing of Borders and many independent bookstores, the consolidation of the corporate publishers, the e-book pricing wars. In the background of all this ugliness has been the rise of Amazon and their unabashedly thuggish way of doing business

Read this in full.

Forbes (@Forbes) sees the purchase as an assault against Bookish (@BookishHQ).

Read this in full.

TOC (@toc) declares, "Amazon marches on toward global retail domination."

And Huff Post Books (@HuffPostBooks) asks, “What Does It Mean for Authors and Readers?

Also read our previous blogposts, “What's Going On With Readers Today?” and “All About Goodreads.”

Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you strategically publish and market pbooks, ebooks, and audiobooks.

Download our white paper, “Tech, Trends, & Retail Success: See the Future and Act Now,” in which we detail the elements of creating extreme retail in-store experiences.

Learn about SomersaultSocial (@SomersaultHelp), our Web-based author online marketing education modules.

Add our Facebook page (http://facebook.com/SomersaultGroup) & Twitter stream (http://twitter.com/smrsault) to your Flipboard account on your iPad, iPhone, or Android. Or download our blog as an ebook to your ereader (http://goo.gl/3nTtN)

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And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard; especially the Book Discovery Sites tab.