paper trail

Oct 25, 2012 @ 12:01:00 am

Publisher Benedikt Taschen

Restructuring at Simon and Schuster means that all of the publisher’s imprints will be lumped into one of four groups: Atria, Scribner, the Gallery, or the Jonathan Karp-led Simon & Schuster. It also means that at the Free Press—which is being folded into the Simon and Schuster group—publisher Martha Levin and editor-in-chief Dominick Anfuso have lost their jobs.

Dissent has launched its snazzy new website.

In a characteristically frank conversation with the Huffington Post, publisher Benedikt Taschen discusses the books that have lost him the most money—including books on Diego Rivera’s murals, car crashes, and the Crusades. Taschen also recalls that in 1994, when books that he didn't like appeared in his catalogue, he branded them with a sticker that said, “Sorry, poor book.”

Just because Newsweek is dying doesn’t mean that the rest of print magazines are going down with it. A new report in the Financial Times notes that while Newsweek’s print ad revenue dropped 70 percent between 2007 and 2011, this was actually extreme, and unusual: analysts expect that that magazine ad revenue will increase overall in 2012.

After falling into “into one of the most protracted developments hells in Hollywood history,” the movie adaptation of Donna Tartt’s cult 1992 novel The Secret History was abandoned. But at BookRiot, Amanda Nelson has come up with a visual storyboard for it anyway.

Are independent presses faring better than their big-house counterparts? “These years are the most exciting times in the US for small-press publishers since the 1960s,” Jeffrey Lependorf recently remarked on a Frankfurt Book Fair panel.