We had such a nice response to Anne Sowards’ post about the books she was editing in 2008 that I thought I would seek out some additional editors that we might not ordinarily think about. Betsy Mitchell is Vice President, Editor-in-Chief of Del Rey Books, a division of Random House publishing. Ms. Mitchell [...]

Peter W. Olson has run Random House since 1998 but will be stepping down in the next couple of weeks due to lowered profits and “steep losses in its American book clubs.” I have no idea what effect that will have on Bantam/Dell or Ballantine, but I’ve always found those houses to offer great [...]

Maybe Oprah inspired the industry or maybe Cory Doctorow and Baen Publishing’s long maintained message is finally breaking through, but the free keeps piling up. This time its Random House who is giving away Beautiful Children, a New York Times bestseller. You don’t even have to give your name or email address away. Just [...]

Random House Children’s Book is releasing the third Christopher Paolini book, Brisingr on 12:01 am, Saturday, September 20. The first printing will be 2.5 million copies. The change was brought about due to booksellers desiring to have a Harry Potter-esque release party.
Via Publisher’s Weekly.

A class action lawsuit was brought on behalf of the readers who purchased James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces. A settlement has been approved reimbursing readers who bought the book before it was revealed that the memoir was fictionalized.
Only 1729 purchasers have availed themselves of the refund opportunity. Random House has reserved [...]

The e-backlist has been a long time in coming. Readers, particularly romance readers, are big glommers and they often are searching for the one book their reading buddy says is a must find. Unfortunately, these books are often difficult to find and very expensive. Publishers are being more responsive by making backlist titles [...]

First Penguin, the Simon & Schuster, and now Random House posts positive marks for growth in 2006. Worldwide revenues rose 6.5% to $2.59B according to Publishers’ Weekly. This is despite the $43.3 million that Random House was owed by AMS.
CEO Peter Olson pegged growth in the North American (all divisions with Crown and [...]

Virgin Books whose catalog includes the racy Black Lace and Cheek Imprints has sold 90% of its ownership interest to Random House UK. For an undisclosed amount of cash, Random House obtains the rights to the Virgin name for all books worldwide (including audio and ebooks) and five titles penned by Richard [...]

Yesterday, HarperCollins rolled out its “Browse Inside” feature that will eventually be available for all its books and could be embedded in blogs and websites.

Not to be outdone, Random House debuted its “Browse and Search” widget.

new InsightBookReader(’preview’, ‘9780345486585′, ‘Drop Dead Gorgeous’, ‘Linda Howard’, ‘0′, ”, ‘http://www.randomhouse.com/cgi-bin/buy_landing.php?isbn=9780345486585′);
I like the Random House Widget [...]

In 2004, Google announced its plan to scan every book printed. They began working with university libraries such as Harvard, University of Michigan, and Oxford.
This caused the publishing industry some great consternation because an author’s work would be included automatically unless the author chose to opt out. Problem was that Google [...]

After emailing Random House about the closing of its ebookstore, I asked Kelley Allen for an interview regarding Random House’s digital publishing mission. She kindly spent some time with me this week discussing digital publishing in general and what to expect from Random House.
What is Random House’s committment to epublishing?
Random House does believe in [...]