No Random Penguins after all

Today's news of the merger, via media publishing giants Bertelsmann and Pearson, of the Random House and Penguin publishing imprints, has raised a few eyebrows.  Penguin, it seems, is marrying Random House in order to escape the unwanted attentions of News Corp, whose predatory instincts may be somewhat thwarted by the fact that this is a done deal and the contracts have all been signed.

Random House CEO Markus Dohle has written to his imprint's literary agents to tell them what a promising deal this is.

" ...  In this new partnership with Penguin, we will be retaining the distinct identities of both companies’ imprints [this is good news for brand purists -- there will be no Random Penguins]. You and your clients will benefit from an extraordinary breadth of publishing choices, and editorial talents and experience. Our Random House imprint leadership remains endowed with tremendous autonomy and financial resources to decide which books to publish, and how to publish them. We expect this to continue in our new business.

With our backlist always a priority [ever more so, if you consider how kind the digital publishing scene can be to the long tail], Random House expects the new company to offer an even deeper catalogue, alongside our newly published titles. Our investments in enhancing the supply chain and our marketing support for physical retail will be unwavering, as we continue to transition in the digital space—to seek the most diversified retail marketplace for our titles. And we will be even better positioned to support our authors’ intellectual property and copyrights [this blogger is uncertain as to how two imprints, running effectively in competition with one another, as the next paragraph states, are better positioned to support authors' IP rights, or their own for that matter, than had no merger taken place].

The business combination is all ahead for us. Now, it is business as usual. Random House and Penguin remain competitors ...".

Bloomsbury shows bottle to buy up Tottel

Bloomsbury, the publisher of the hugely successful Harry Potter novels, has paid £9.96 million for Tottel Publishing, the Haywards Heath-based professional and academic specialist. Bloomsbury says it now has a “solid platform” in the professional and academic sector and will continue to expand.

Founded in 2004, Tottel has not captured the hearts of the reading public in the manner in which its founders must have hoped. Its historical name sounded to many modern ears like a cross between "totter" and "bottle", and many authors of law works published under the illustrious Butterworths imprint were dismayed to find that their works had been apparently sold en masse when LexisNexis Butterworths looked as though it were conducting a fire-sale. Readers found the original version of Tottel's website quite unnavigable. The company has recently improved its list of law titles but continues to sell some shockers, together with some very out-of-date titles that do not come with a health warning. Some legal authors have also felt that the company has been less than successful in promoting their titles -- though that is a complaint which, rightly or wrongly, is aimed at pretty well all publishers at one time or another.

Presumably Bloomsbury has done its due diligence and knows exactly what it's getting. If it can calm the nerves of the authors whose period with Tottel has been unsettling and keep them within its stable, £9.96 million may be a fair price -- but traditional books aren't selling like hot cakes any more in an electronic environment and Tottel's list of titles doesn't seem to be available for e-book readers.

For further information see reports in the FT and Telegraph

Open book publishing

From time to time IP Finance has looked at alternative business models for the exploitation of intellectual property rights. One such model has been enthusiastically endorsed by a Cambridge academic, William St Clair, whose new book That Greece Might Still Be Free has just been published through the medium of Open Book Publishers. As William explains,

" ... the book is published in accordance with an entirely new publishing model. It can be read FREE OF CHARGE online anywhere in the world, but is also available to be bought at a reasonable price [IP Finance note: £22.95 hardback, £11.95 paperback] as a traditional - handsome - printed book. It is published under Creative Commons with the author keeping the copyright. We now have 'proof of concept' and also - a phrase I learned recently - 'lap value.'

The book can be purchased from the website or all the usual ways through
booksellers such as Amazon.

... this is a practical counter to the situation we have reached in academic publishing of 'all rights reserved', tiny print runs, and high prices, with copies being accessible in only a handful of well endowed libraries mainly in the United States".

William's involvement goes a little deeper, as he explains:

"... my book The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period [IP Finance note: this book costs £96 from Cambridge University Press] has offered a quantified evaluation of the real world effects of various historic types of copyright regimes, especially the damaging effects of monopoly on prices, access, educational levels and so on.

At OBP we have about 20 other titles at various stages of preparation, including the volume of essays on the history of intellectual property 'Privilege and Property' that derives from the Stationers' Hall conference".

IP Finance wonders whether its readers, particularly those from non-English-speaking countries, have come across any similar types of venture and, if so, how successful they have been in (i) disseminating academic content, (ii) providing an income stream and (iii) resolving any arising copyright issues. Comments, please!