1) Digital revenue now 11% or total revenue
2) ‘non-Larsson’ titles revenue rose 83%

In a sign diversification is working, Quercus on Monday reported that turnover from “non-Larsson” titles rose by 83 per cent year-on-year and now comprise an estimated 80 per cent of total revenues. Full results will not be released until later in the year.

Ebook sales rose from 3 per cent to 11 per cent of total revenues in 2011, and Quercus plans to further boost digital sales to more than one-third of total turnover within the next three years

via Quercus looks to life after Larsson – FT.com.

The BA has called for more free parking in town centres and a reduction in red tape to help struggling businesses.

It also argued that charity shops present “unfair competition” to bookshops due to the valuable tax breaks they get. There are more than 250 specialist charity bookshops in the UK, while a further 8,000 charity shops sell books as part of their ranges.

Tim Godfray, the BA’s chief executive, said that bookshops are facing “huge pressures from so many quarters”.

via Hundreds of bookshops face closure – Telegraph.

ON Homer Avenue in downtown Palo Alto is a tiny, two-story building that once housed the maker of Palo Alto Bread. It was here, in March 2009, that Barnes & Noble brought a few new hires to create the Nook. Outsiders weren’t quite sure what the company was up to. The landlord figured that Mr. Lynch wanted to open a store.

What began as an almost quixotic effort to catch up with the Amazon Kindle has now grown into a 300-person operation in the heart of Silicon Valley. Mr. Lynch has hired engineers, software developers and designers, who are today spread among five low-slung buildings.

via Barnes & Noble, Taking On Amazon in the Fight of Its Life – NYTimes.com.

Written under the pseudonym Scarlett O’Kelly, the author gives an eye-opening picture of what she experienced when she resorted to prostitution to maintain her comfortable home and family lifestyle in the face of the financial collapse.

It is significant that a serious publisher like Penguin Ireland is bringing out the book, which is titled Between The Sheets. “This is a detailed account of a real person’s life,” says Penguin Ireland’s managing director, Michael McLoughlin. “We have checked this woman’s story thoroughly and we are satisfied that it’s genuine. What her book reveals is going to shock a lot of people, but it’s important that we all understand the impact the recession is having on our society at all levels.”

via The Irish middle class Mum who became an Escort – Books, Entertainment – Independent.ie.

US retailer Barnes & Noble is “developing a partnership with Waterstones to add the Nook to its locations this year”, according to reports on news site Bloomberg Businessweek which quotes an unnamed source “familiar with the situation”.

via B&N ‘developing partnership’ with Waterstones over Nook | The Bookseller.

The wonderful English novelist Joanna Trollope is the first guest author in the DLR Library Voices series which starts next month. Trollope is the author of 16 highly acclaimed best-selling novels, the latest of which, The Soldiers Wife, deals with the difficulties facing a military wife awaiting her husbands return from a tour of duty in Afghanistan.

via Trollope is star guest of Gleeson – Books, Entertainment – Independent.ie.

High profile authors attending this year include: Sheila O”Flanagan, Lynne Reid Banks, Patrick Gale, Kevin Barry and Christine Dwyer Hickey, Maureen Gaffney, Joseph Woods and Fergus Finlay.

‘This is our 6th Book Club Festival which is organised in association with Ennis Town Council and Clare Co Library,’ said Festival Chairperson Ciana Campbell. ‘What started from small beginnings has grown steadily into a nationally recognised event attracting book club members and readers from all over the country.’

Regular visitors to writing.ie may remember an interview Barbara Scully did with writer Jane Travers last year on the publication of her quirky book, Tweet Treats. You can read the article, Tweet Treats is a Treat For All  here.

We were delighted to hear that this fabulous book was nominated for a Food Writing Award recently and so asked its author Jane Travers to fill us in and tell us all about it.

via Tweet Treats Goes Gourmand.

NBC News has now entered the scramble, becoming the latest entrant in the e-publishing universe. The news organization is launching NBC Publishing, which will focus on turning out enhanced e-books using NBC’s current video and archival footage.

“We have over one million hours of archival video content going back to the ’20s and a really low cost structure to edit it and put it together,” Michael Fabiano, general manager of NBC Publishing, told Digital Book World.

via NBC News enters sizzling e-book publishing world – Political Bookworm – The Washington Post.

But at the same time as Apple is working with incumbents, it is also encouraging others to attack them. Much like the App Store democratised the creation of software and blogging platforms spawned new media companies, the iBook Author and Apple’s online bookstore will open up educational publishing to new companies and to individual academics who want to create their own texts. This will lead to an explosion of new textbooks, many of which will compete with those of existing publishers.

via Apple and digital publishing: A textbook manoeuvre | The Economist.