Simon & Schuster—cofounders in photo— is posting a great profit this year despite spending developmental dollars digitizing its entire backlist.
Helped by the sales of self help book by Joel Osteen, Become a Better You, and Rhonda Byrne’s powerhouse, The Secret, sales were up at Simon & Schuster in all divisions resulting in a 9% gain in total revenue ($214.2 million).
Simon & Schuster expects that an estimated 13,000 titles will be converted to digital format by the end of 2007.
Oh, Simon & Schuster, how do I love thee? Converting all of your titles and making them 35% off? You go on with your bad self. Simon & Schuster has had a fantastic year with sales up 16% and operating profits up 90%.
It would be great to see Simon & Schuster drop the DRM and truly be a leader in the e-publishing movement, but I’ll take the digitization of 13,000 titles as a step in the right direction.
Via Publisher’s Weekly.
Moderators note: Also see PW’s report on HarperCollins, which suffered a bad quarter but hopes to do better later in the fiscal year. By the way, the cofounder on the left is Richard L. Simon, singer Carly Simon‘s dad – DR
