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Now that’s an interesting statement made by the CEO whose dot.com company that is partially owned by Bertelsmann a conglomerate of dozens of publishing houses including: Ballantine Publishing Group, Bantam Books, Broadway Books, Dell Publishing, Doubleday, Doubleday Direct — which owns over twenty book clubs including the Literary Guild, Knopf Publishing Group, The Book of the Month Club, The Random House Trade Group, and Random House Ventures.
Just to be make it even more confusing, Random House Ventures owns a minority stake in Xlbris.com, which is a competitor of iUniverse.com. Another recent bit of news in the publishing industry is that AOL TimeWarner entered into the e-publishing and ebook selling space with iPublish.com. AOL has a strategic alliance with Barnes&Noble on their proprietary service and another one with AOL.com on their open service. When some recent news broke about iPublish and the contract it was offering writers, I called a half dozen agents I know. Not one would go on the record. Why? Each had something negative to say — but none would risk damaging their relationships with the editors at the parent company, AOL Time Warner. And those are just some the biggest players. The list goes on and on. New e-ventures open up weekly, and most launch with alliances already in place. But in the country that boasts free speech as one of its founding principles, very few principals of any publishing company feels free to say what is on their minds, fearing they might damage their strategic alliances. What’s a journalist to do? No comment. M.J. Rose s a journalist who covers publishing for wirednews.com Her novels Lip Service and In Fidelity are available in bookstores both online and off - including B&N. All
Illustrations from www.corbis.com
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And
if that’s not complicated enough, B&N also owns part
of B&N Digital Publishing, which works directly with agents
— in effect bidding against the very publishers whose books
its parent company sells.