HBG Big News This Week: August 26-30, 2019

Following is a recap of major news at Hachette Book Group for the week of August 26-30, 2019:

Bestsellers: Old Bones by Douglas Preston & Lincoln Child (GCP) debuts this week at #2 on the New York Times Print Hardcover Fiction and Combined Print & Ebook Fiction bestseller lists, and at #3 on the USA Today bestseller list.  HBG has 14 books on the NYT list and our distribution clients have seven books on the list.

Audible Captions: last Friday, the Association of American Publishers (AAP) and six other publishers including HBG brought a lawsuit against Audible, seeking a preliminary injunction to prevent them from launching their recently announced “Audible Captions” program.  In a stipulation filed in federal court on August 28, Audible has agreed to exclude works from the six publishers from its Captions program until permission and licensing issues raised in the lawsuit are resolved. The preliminary hearing will take place on September 25. Read more here: Associated Press, PW, Publishing Perspectives, Shelf Awareness.

Major release: Binyamin Appelbaum’s The Economist’s Hour: False Prophets, Free Markets and the Fracture of Society (LB) goes on sale next week, with publicity hits that will build on the momentum created by Appelbaum’s widely discussed New York Times Op-Ed, a major New Yorker feature , and an extensive review in The Atlantic. Upcoming interviews include MSNBC’sMorning Joe, CNBC’s Squawk Box, NPR’s Morning Edition and On Point, with reviews to come in The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, The Economist, The Nation, Barron’s, Reuters Breakingviews, and more.

PBK Science Book Award: Thor Hanson’s Buzz: The Nature and Necessity of Bees (Basic Books) has been shortlisted for the Phi Beta Kappa Society’s Science Book Award, a  $10,000 prize.  The winners will be announced in December.