Tag management company TagMan is on the prowl for new office space, and the company has conscripted CresaPartners’ Jack Petrie to aide in their hunt, he told The Commercial Observer Monday.
TagMan, which currently leases an office space at 260 W. 35th Street, is citing a growing headcount and a future demand for larger space as its reasons for the impending move, Mr. Petrie (pictured) said yesterday morning. Read More
This morning, a writer named Farhad Manjoo wrote an article for Slate called “Don’t Support Your Local Bookseller.” Mr. Manjoo called your local independent booksellers the “least efficient, least user-friendly, and most mistakenly mythologized local establishments you can find.” Read More
Oren Teicher, CEO of the American Booksellers Association, has written an acerbic open letter to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos about the company’s campaign to encourage shoppers to compare prices in retail stores with those at Amazon. The promotion, which starts tomorrow and lasts 24 hours, gives shoppers 5 percent discounts if they use their smart phones to compare prices and then purchase products through Amazon. Books were not included in the promotion, but since books are still a big part of what Amazon does, indie booksellers apparently saw it as a threat.
“We suppose we should be flattered that an online sales behemoth needs a Main Street retail showroom,” writes Mr. Teicher. “Forgive us if we’re not.” Read More
Amazon has started what it’s referring to as “a $6 million annual fund dedicated to independent authors and publishers.” It sounds like a fellowship program but it’s actually a pot of money for luring self-published writers into exclusive short-term contracts with the Kindle store. The more bestselling writers the company can lock into the Kindle (however temporarily), the less appealing rival e-readers will be. This has already gotten some authors into trouble with Barnes & Noble, which has refused to stock print books by authors it cannot sell through its own digital platform, the Nook. Read More
At a congressional hearing today, the Justice Department’s anti-trust authorities confirmed they are investigating the way publishers price electronic books for possible violations, reports The Wall Street Journal. In what’s known as the agency model, publishers set the price of books and allow stores like Apple and Amazon to take a 30 percent cut. This differs from the wholesale model used for print books, where publishers set a retail price that bookstores can choose to ignore. Read More
Chris McGrath, an author who self-published a book called The Attempted Murder of God: Hidden Science You Really Need to Know under the pseudonym of “Scrooby” is now suing an Amazon reviewer, Vaughan Jones, who apparently maligned his book. Mr. Jones also outed Mr. McGrath as the man behind Scrooby in the reviews section on Read More
Earlier this week, a glitch in the Amazon matrix caused some readers of Haruki Murakami’s new novel 1Q84 to mistakenly conclude that the Kindle version of the book is only available for reading on one device rather than the usual six. This turned out to be a mistake, but before the problem was resolved a half dozen readers left one star reviews on the page for 1Q84. Read More
Yesterday Mat Honan wrote a blog post for Gizmodo asking if Amazon was “letting publishers ruin the Kindle.” The blogger had trouble reading Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84 across his array of mobile devices, and decided it was probably because the publisher of the book, Knopf, had decided to ruin the Kindle and restrict books to a single device. He failed to place a phone call to Knopf to see if the synching problem wasn’t due to some lightning storm in the humid Amazonian data cloud. Read More
The fastest way to an emerging tech company’s heart is through its venture capitalist.
Such has been the modus operandi of Jack Petrie, a senior vice president at CresaPartners who has amassed a list of clients that reads like a veritable who’s who of Silicon Alley. He’s found these clients through contacts and clients of his in venture capital.
“I [find] that usually I can connect the dots with a lot of these companies with relationships I have with V.C. firms and people I have met through the community,” said Mr. Petrie, 50. Read More
