For $300 million, Amazon will be acquiring Audible.com - Amazon issued the press release this morning at 7 a.m. This is on the heels of the departure of COO Glenn Rogers.
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Glenn Rogers leaving Audible
Category:
E-commerce
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Department of Holy Shit
Glenn Rogers, COO of Audible and an incredible, reasonable, smart, kind, awesome, all-around-good-guy-mensch, is leaving the company to go back to consulting. I worked with Glenn when I was consulting at Audible and he is fantastic.Good luck, Glenn!
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Cindy Cunningham now at OCLC
Cindy Cunningham, formerly of Amazon.com and Corbis, has joined OCLC. She'll be managing new partnerships from her office in Seattle, as well as expanding WorldCat's coverage. Hooray!
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Microsoft Wins
Category:
Department of Holy Shit
Microsoft is the winning suitor (Yahoo and Google being the other contenders) in the wooing of Facebook - for $240 million, MS gets a whole 1.6% stake in the company.
1.6%??????
Reports the Times:
As part of the deal, Microsoft will sell the banner ads appearing on Facebook outside of the United States, splitting the revenue with it. Last year, Microsoft struck a deal with Facebook to run banner ads on the site in the United States through 2011.
The astronomical valuation for Facebook is evidence that Microsoft executives believed they could not afford to lose out on the deal. Google appears to be building a dominant position in the race to serve advertisements online. Fearing it might lose control over the next generation of computer users, Microsoft has been trying to match and in some cases block Google’s plans, even if that effort is costly.
“We are now stepping outside what is typically a business decision,” said Rob Enderle, the founder of the strategy concern Enderle Group. “This was almost personal. I wouldn’t want to be the executive that’s on the losing side at either firm.”
....
The Microsoft investment throws the value of the holdings of Facebook investors into the stratosphere. Mark Zuckerberg, the 23-year-old Facebook founder who dropped out of Harvard to build the company, owns a 20 percent share which is now valued at $3 billion. Accel Partners, the venture capital firm that invested $12.7 million in May 2005 and owns 11 percent of Facebook, now holds stock worth $1.65 billion.
Ye gods. Staggering. Just staggering.
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Dept of Holy Shit: Angus & Robertson
Category:
Bookselling
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Department of Holy Shit
Michael Cader reports this morning that Angus & Robertson, the Australian book chain, has sent a letter to the publishers from which it buys its books, saying in effect that if A&R can't sell a certain number of each publisher's titles, those pubs will have to fork over cash to make up "the gap".
Jaw-dropping.
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Dept. of Holy Shit - Sommers leaves SirsiDynix
Library Journal reports this morning that Pat Sommers, CEO of the juggernaut SirsiDynix, has left. Apparently this happened on February 16th. No word on why Vista Equity Partners has chosen not to retain him, what his plans are for the future, or who the prospective replacements might be.
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Department of Holy Shit
Category:
Company News
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Department of Holy Shit
The WSJ just announced that Sirius and XM Radio are merging. Mel Karmazin will be CEO of the newly-unified company. Gary Parsons will be chairman. No word on what the new name will be. The FCC is regarding this dubiously, due to anti-trust issues. The Journal goes on to say:
But the two sides are likely to argue that the proliferation of Internet-based radio, digital music players, and new HD-radio formats creates a vigorous competitive market for such media. Indeed, in surveys, consumers rarely can differentiate between the two companies, which have spent hundreds of millions trying to appeal to them.
For some in our trade, it's reminiscent of the time B&N tried to acquire Ingram Book Group. For others, of course, the analogy to Time Warner and AOL springs to mind. Says one industry insider, "These things never end well."
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