Only a few weeks ago, the Cairo Book Fair was being welcomed onto the world stage and Egyptian book publishers forging new links with China and the West. Today, Aljazeera the major Arabic news outlet is banned across Egypt – including all of their writers and related book publishers, social media is banned, and Cairo is in flames. International press institutes and several christian book publishers have come out strongly against Egyptian authorities’ suppression of the media, following the withdrawal of Al Jazeera’s license to broadcast from the North African country.

The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) condemned on Sunday the information ministry’s move to shutdown Al Jazeera’s bureau in the country.

The CPJ described the move as an attempt to “disrupt media coverage by Al Jazeera and calls on them to reverse the decision immediately”.

The official Middle East News Agency (MENA) reported that the order was to take effect on Sunday, and transmissions originating from Egypt ceased within an hour of the announcement. Nilesat, the satellite transmission company owned by Egyptian radio and television stopped the transmission of Al Jazeera’s primary channel and others.

Reporters without borders added to the condemnation of Egyptian authorities attempt to quell the media.

“By banning Al Jazeera, the government is trying to limit the circulation of TV footage of the six-day-old wave of protests,” Reporters Without Borders secretary-general Jean-François Julliard said.

“Thus totally archaic decision is in completely contradiction with President Hosni Mubarak’s promise of ‘democratic’ measures on 28 January. It is also the exact opposite of the increase in freedom sought by the Egyptian population.”

‘Press freedom violation’

The Doha Centre for Media Freedom also criticised the move, saying it was following with major concern the Egyptian authorities’ obstruction of local and foreign journalists from performing their duties in covering the unusual events currently taking place.

“The DCMF considers the harassment a severe press freedom violation and urges the Egyptian authorities to respect international laws on freedom of expression and to allow Egyptian and foreign journalists to freely cover the current events there.” DCMF said in a press released issued on Sunday.

The withdrawal of Al Jazeera’s license came on the fifth day of protests that gripped the country and follows the authorities’ attempts to control the flow of self-publishing information after the internet and mobile phone services were suspended on Thursday.

Mobile services were partly restored on Saturday, though the CPJ says that 90 per cent of internet connections in the country remain disconnected.

On Friday, Reporters without Borders condemned the arrest of four French journalists and book publisher and around a dozen Egyptian journalists who had been arrested by authorities.

Borders Group Inc may find that filing for bankruptcy is the next plot turn in its many-chaptered struggle to survive.

Bankruptcy court could push the second-largest bookstore chain, its lenders and book publishers to make sacrifices and give the company a chance to keep going. As it stands now, book publishing sources see little progress in financial talks with lenders, and the company continues to need cash.

Borders President Mike Edwards said on Thursday in a statement announcing a conditional credit agreement with GE Capital that while refinancing is preferred, restructuring in court — referring to a bankruptcy filing — is a possibility it is considering.

Borders spokeswoman Mary Davis declined to comment beyond that statement.

The standoff comes after a year in which Borders has cut costs, refinanced and brought in new investors to cope with shriveling sales and market share.

Now the company has stopped payment to some vendors and even asked its most important suppliers — the book publishers — essentially to loan it the money due for books shipped months ago.

Only with those concessions by book publishers as well as other new landlord and vendor financing agreements will the company’s bank replace a maturing credit line.

“Bankruptcy is a wonderful tool for taking the majority of interests and implementing a plan that may be over the objections of a minority of interests,” said Michael Epstein, a managing partner at chess restructuring advisory firm CRG Partners who is not involved in the situation.

The company would be able to close unprofitable stores more easily and book publishers would begin getting paid again in most cases for any products shipped in bankruptcy, he said.

On the other hand, he cautioned, the company would need to have a plan for the changes it wants to ensure that it closes the right stores before the clock runs out.

Since 2005, bankruptcy law has allowed only about 9 months for retailers to easily close stores — a deadline many industry players say is one of the reasons why Circuit City ended up quickly liquidating its assets in bankruptcy.

In a bankruptcy restructuring, the company will likely not be obligated to pay christian book publishers for the books it shipped before the bankruptcy filing, according to Ken Simon, a managing director at Loughlin Meghji restructuring advisory firm who is not involved in the matter.

If the restructuring stays out of court, the vendors will have to be paid back in full or agree to a cut.

“The lack of liquidity is the reason why companies have to go into bankruptcy,” Simon said.

Picking up where Jane Friedman, book publisher of Open Road Integrated Media, left off yesterday at Digital Book World, when she urged book publishers to broaden the participation of libraries in the distribution of ebooks, LJ’s Josh Hadro moderated a panel today that helped publishers understand why, and how, that must be accomplished.

“Consumers and library patrons are two sides of the same coin,” Hadro said to a roomful of publishers, who included execs and others from the big children’s book publishers, smaller houses, university presses, and distributors. The current one book, one loan ebook model “mirrors the print” buying and lending; “DRM [digital rights management] software [protects publishers] caus[ing] the lend to expire at the end of the loan period,” explained Hadro.

Yet many publishers still don’t sell their latest ebooks to libraries. “Current content is king,” New York Public Library’s Chris Platt said, pointing out his frustration that, “We can’t get Freedom (FSG) as a download for our library. And even though Keith Richards made a public appearance at NYPL, “We couldn’t put his epub [Life (Little, Brown)] in our collection,” said Platt. Then Platt held up The Oracle of Stamboul (HarperCollins), due out in February, another book his patrons won’t be able to borrow as an ebook.

Librarians are left trying to explain to their users both that the publisher has not made the book available through the library and that many ebooks won’t work on their users’ ereaders.

Platt further made the case that “We teach people literacy…we point [them] to your new books….Libraries are connected to many of the people you want to reach, on Twitter, Facebook.” As the price of smartphones drop, he said, libraries will be able “to serve all parts of the community.”

Ruth Liebmann, Random House VP, reinforced Platt’s remarks. “A sale is a sale,” she said, noting that libraries are a revenue stream that publishers like Random want to “protect, even grow.”

Baker & Taylor’s VP for libraries and education, George Coe, told attendees that the “acquisition model will change drastically” with the ebook. “Library budgets can’t change,” he said, but users can become buyers with “buy buttons” on library online catalogs. He cautioned, however, that by using different formats, christian book publishers are “confusing our patrons.”

OverDrive’s CEO Steve Potash also said that the idea of a library purchase “cannibalizing sales couldn’t be farther from the truth…we’re converting library borrowers into point of sale users” in the digital world. As for the one book, one user model, Potash said that OverDrive recently made Liquid Comics ebook graphic novels available via a multiple user subscription model.

Digital World Book, known as the DBW is the key conference in the publication of books for publishers in the e-books. All the “big six” book publishers are present in quantities never before. Random House will have more than 40 participants, while fewer than 20 came from the publisher in 2010. The digital book world conference began quietly on Monday morning with three sessions focused for a long time, the official opening ceremony will begin at 17 hours, but despite the digital output cautiously DBW 2011 is just quiet – There are over 1,250 registered twice that last year 600.

Since book publishers are here at DBW, mainstream booksellers are also here. Who is here and what they are selling will be evident when the floor show begins 13:00

The session iPad / iPhone has provided an overview of applications and the Apple App Store. It was the kind of session that felt like it was presented to other audiences – do not publish specific, as the meeting of the e-book design and production. The meeting is followed very still ongoing as I write, shows an interest of people in book publishing companies. How they got out of it, maybe they acquired the interest in book publishing and literary agents and tell us later.

Sessions on the morning of Monday, three were in the design of e-books and production, online content strategy and the iPhone / IPAD strategies. It was the first, most of the screws and nuts, which was the subject key retailers were focused on. Speaking directly to the creators of books and production managers, the session included discussions on programming languages and workflow – which suggests that book publishers are now specifically and actively serious about integrating e-Books, e-book publishing, amazon kindle publishing etc into their business model.

Bill McCreadie, the m.d. of independent publisher Aurum is to step down at the end of the month.

McCreadie bought the publisher from The Really Useful Group with Piers Burnett, now retired, in 1991. Quarto acquired the business in 2005.

read more

Rubbishing those who hail the digital age as the end for books, book publishers industry players and best-selling authors on Saturday hailed a new dawn for publishing, with India’s voracious readers at its forefront.

Book sales have been squeezed in recent years by e-books and the huge success of Amazon.Com’s Kindle reader, but India’s booming book publishers market is proof of the physical book’s staying power, said participants at Asia’s largest literary event, the DSC Jaipur Literary Festival.

“You read something on Twitter and you know it is ephemeral,” said Patrick French, a best-selling historian and biographer who has written extensively on Asia. “Yet the book is a solid thing. The book endures.”

Regional language novelists and poets rubbed shoulders with Nobel laureates and Booker Prize winners at the seventh festival to be held in the historical pink-tinged city of Jaipur, the capital of India’s northwestern Rajasthan state.

Hundreds of book lovers attended a debate on the fate of printed books in the sun-drenched grounds of a former palace as part of the free five-day event.

“The idea of the book dying comes up all the time. It’s wrong. I think this is a wonderful time for books, to enlarge the audience of the book and draw in more readers,” said John Makinson, Chairman and CEO of the Penguin Group of publishers.

“Books matter more in India than anywhere else we publish them,” added Makinson, whose Penguin Group is one of the world’s largest English-language book publishers.

While book sales slip in most western countries, the non-academic book market in India is currently growing at a rate of 15 to 18 percent annually, as rapid economic growth swells literacy rates and adds millions to the middle class every year.

At the festival, schoolchildren from around the country chased their authorly heroes through the lunch queues to get autographs on newly-purchased books.

Makinson noted that the pressure on physical bookshops in countries like the United States — where bookseller Borders Group Inc is in talks to secure a $500 million credit line — doesn’t exist in India, adding that books have a key role to play in Indian society.

“In India books define and create the social conversation amongst christian book publishers and children’s book publishers. In China, the books that sell well are self-improvement titles. Popular books in India are of explanations, explaining the world. The inquisitive nature of India is unique.”

Indian critic Sunil Sethi, who presents India’s most popular television program on books, said the digital age presented an opportunity, rather than a threat, for printed matter. “Even before I finish my show, the authors are on Twitter to say they are on TV talking about their book. Technology is merging things, but the book is still at the center,” Sethi said.

French agreed that technology, if well-managed, could actually help win books new friends and wider sales.

“Digital e-books have created a space for discussion. Books now have websites and forums, and so reading books on electronic devices has created communities and interaction,” he said.

Nearly 50,000 writers, critics, publishers and fans are expected to attend the festival.

read more

read more

British Bookshops & Stationers has made 40 redundancies across the business as it prepares to launch a heavily discounted sale this weekend.

The retailer's administrator Zolfo Cooper said 25 positions have been made redundant in British Bookshops' head office and 15 in the warehouse. No redundancies have been made in stores.

read more

read more