BTW News Briefs

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PBS to Host Panels, Livestream Coverage From BEA and BookCon

PBS Book View Now will be expanding its partnership with BookExpo America and BookCon this year to host three author panels and offer livestream coverage of both shows from Chicago’s McCormick Place convention center.

Book View Now is an initiative by the Public Broadcasting Service to stream videos of book festivals and author events. BVN panels at BEA are as follows:

  • Wednesday, May 11, from 2:00 p.m. – 3:00 p.m. on the Downtown Stage: PBS Presents: Women of Fiction, featuring Robin Carr, Gayle Forman, and Susan Elizabeth Phillips
  • Wednesday, May 11, from 3:30 p.m. – 4:30 p.m. on the Downtown Stage: PBS Presents: Children’s Tales, featuring picture book and middle grade authors Laurie Halse Anderson, Aaron Becker, Trenton Lee Stewart, and Mo Willems
  • Thursday, May 12, from 3:30 p.m. – 4:30 p.m. on the Downtown Stage: PBS Presents: Young Adult Reads, featuring YA authors David Arnold, David Levithan, Jennifer Niven, and Chelsea Sedoti

Livestream coverage from BEA will take place on Thursday and Friday, May 12 and 13, and from BookCon on Saturday, May 14, from 1:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m. ET / 10:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m. PT each day.

Coverage will be available online via the BookExpo America website, the PBS website, and the Book View Now website, as well as on many public media station websites and other distribution partners.

NetGalley Blog Highlights Independent Bookstore Day Celebrations

This week, NetGalley’s blog is celebrating Independent Bookstore Day (Saturday, April 30) with a three-part series on independent bookstores.

On Tuesday, April 26,  the NetGalley blog highlighted Independent Bookstore Day events at Wild Iris Books in Gainesville, Florida, the state’s only feminist and LGBTQ bookstore, and on April 27, Houston’s Brazos Bookstore was featured along with its April 30 events. A post on a third bookstore is in the works.

Barnes & Noble Founder Len Riggio to Retire

Barnes & Noble Inc. founder and executive chairman Len Riggio has announced his plans to retire after close to 40 years at the head of the company that he grew from a single store in Manhattan in 1971.

On Wednesday, April 27, the big box bookstore chain announced that Riggio would step down in September, the New York Times reported.

Riggio, who began his career as a bookseller at the NYU bookstore, began purchasing smaller chains in the mid-1970s, acquiring the B. Dalton bookstores in 1986. He took Barnes & Noble public and became its chief executive in 1993, a position he held until 2002.

In recent years, Barnes & Noble has closed 80 of its stores around the country and saw its share price dip. Riggio, who will keep a seat on the B&N board and remains the company’s largest individual shareholder, said that despite these recent setbacks, he is confident that the company will recover when it introduces its new hybrid digital bookstore prototype.

Bargain Wholesaler Book Depot Launches $3M Automation Project

Book Depot is launching a $3 million project that the wholesaler said will make it the first company in the bargain book industry to use state-of-the-art automation to sort through incoming inventory.

The project, to be completed by May 24, will involve installing robotic technology to digitally and mechanically sort through books arriving at the Book Depot warehouse, allowing 100,000-plus books to be sorted per day.

Book Depot buys excess inventory and store returns from all major publishing houses in the U.S. and Canada and sells to customers in 41 countries around the world. The new project will allow more publishers the option to outsource their returns processing to Book Depot’s facility.

IPG Announces POD Deals With Bookmasters and Edwards Brothers Malloy

Independent Publishers Group (IPG) has added Bookmasters, the digital print provider for Baker & Taylor, to its print-on-demand (POD) network. IPG said that the deal makes it the first distributor to work with every major POD solution in the market.

IPG has also deepened its relationship with Edwards Brothers Malloy, the Ann Arbor-based digital and offset book printing and binding company, which has constructed a 17,000-square-foot digital print facility in IPG’s Chicago distribution center. The new Edwards Brothers Malloy facility will handle black-and-white paperback print jobs, with full-color and case-bound capabilities planned for later this year.