UPDATE: comiXology CEO David Steinberger has responded to the controversy (read his complete statement below): “After hearing from Apple this morning, we can say that our interpretation of its policies was mistaken. You’ll be glad to know that Saga #12 will be available on our App Store app soon.”

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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Will you watch the awards announcement on the news program hosted by Joe Scarborough, Mika Brzezinski, and Willie Geist (pictured)? The winners will be revealed at a gala ceremony on November 14 in New York City at Cipriani Wall Street.

Here’s more from the National Book Awards site: “The twenty Finalists for the National Book Awards in Fiction, Nonfiction, Poetry, and Young People’s Literature will be announced on MSNBC’s Morning Joe … on Wednesday, October 10. Chairman of the National Book Foundation’s Board of Directors, David Steinberger, will be a guest on the show, which airs from 6:00 to 9:00 am ET.”

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According to research from AppData, Inside Network’s data service that tracks app and developer leaderboards, Comics is the No. 1 top grossing iPad book app, followed by DC Comics at No. 2., the Marvel Comics at No. 3 and at No. 10,  The Walking Dead comic app.

At the Publishing App Expo on December 7-8, Steinberger will join our “Real Life Business Models for Apps” panel. If you only want to focus on this topic, you can save by only registering for our one-track pass and attend the App Strategy sessions.

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The book will come out in April 2011. Weinstein Books publisher Judy Hottensen and Perseus Book Group CEO David Steinberger acquired the book. Brzezinski (pictured, via) published her first book, All Things At Once,  through the same publishing partnership.

The book will feature interviews with  President Barack Obama‘s senior adviser Valerie Jarrett, writer and director Nora Ephron,  broadcaster Joy Behar, and others. Brzezinski had this statement: “Knowing my own value has been a personal career obstacle and after talking with some of the most successful women out there, I know I’m not alone with this struggle.”

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9:29 David Steinberger, chairman of the National Book Foundation is on stage talking about how the judges decide on the winners. It happened today at lunch.

9:32 Steinberger is thanking all of the former winners and the sponsors.

9:34 Steinberger is naming the winners of the Innovations in Reading Prize from earlier in the week. Find out more here.

9:39 Andy Borowitz is back on stage to introduce Tor Seidler who is presenting the award for The Young People’s Literature. There were more than 200 novels in the category.

9:42 The winner is Kathryn Erskine for Mockingbird.

9:44 Cornelius Eady is taking the stage to present the award for Poetry.

9:50 The winner is Terrance Hayes for Lighthead.

9:52 Marjorie Garber has taken the stage to present the award for Nonfiction.

9:54 The winner is Patti Smith for Just Kids. Smith says she always wanted to have a book of her own since she worked in a book store as a kid. “There is nothing more beautiful in our material world than the book.” She says never to abandon the book.

9:58 Joanna Scott is taking the stage to introduce the award for Fiction.

10:04 The winner is Jaimy Gordon for Lord of Misrule. Gordon: “I am totally unprepared and I am totally surprised.”

10:06 The awards are over, thanks for following our live blog.

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The cuts affected three percent of the company’s total workforce, and the company plans “a furlough program and executive pay cuts” this summer.

While Perseus did not respond to GallyCat’s request for comment, the PW article notes that Perseus president David Steinberger wrote a letter to employees explaining “it has become clear that we need to take additional steps now in order to be financially prudent and pursue opportunities to grow.”

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Her husband kept pace, urging the CEOs to “sue the hell” out of Google over the search engine’s controversial book-scanning initiative. Perseus Books CEO David Steinberger plugged his initiative to crash-publish “Book: The Sequel” in 48-hours during BEA. “This is the way you have to behave in the future,” he declared. Simon & Schuster CEO Carolyn Reidy disagreed with this timetable for print books. “But you have to convince retailers to buy the [print] book–that takes six months.”

Macmillan CEO John Sargent worried about new media campaigns: “The majority of viral marketing doesn’t sell a ton of books,” he complained, referencing a hit viral video his company produced that only resulted in, by his estimate, sales of 210 books. He still thought the best bookselling strategy was a combination of word-of-mouth and front of store placement at bookstores around the country.

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• Perseus Books Group has formed six publishing divisions built around Avalon Travel, Basic Books, Da Capo, Public Affairs, Running Press and Vanguard imprints.
• 24 positions eliminated, with as many as 21 other employees could lose their jobs if they are not willing to relocate or take on new roles
• Carroll & Graf and Thunder’s Mouth will cease to exist as imprints after this fall, with William Strachan, editor-in-chief of Thunder’s Mouth and Carroll & Graf, and C&G senior editor Don Weise among the editors being let go.
• Avalon’s New York office will be closed sometime this summer and employees will be moved to Perseus’s headquarters on Park Avenue.

Will there be more news? There has to be, because the fate of former PGW employees and publishers hasn’t even been addressed yet, and one must believe they will be at some point.

More tellingly, the impending shutdown of C&G and Thunder’s Mouth should call into question whether Perseus has any longterm plans to publish fiction. Will Balliett, former executive editor of both imprints, now moves to Da Capo in a similar position. But that imprint is not known for publishing fiction. Basic Books is absorbing Nation Books (which sometimes does fiction) and Vanguard, already established as a place for formerly bestselling novelists to go for a career refresher, will likely continue what it’s doing, but what of C&G’s extensive mystery fiction publishing program, or the backlist reissues that Thunder’s Mouth does? Steinberger might say that “[e]ach of our imprints needs to have a distinct identity, and we didn’t feel that was the case with Carroll & Graf and Thunder’s Mouth,” but without any concrete evidence in place, one really has to wonder.

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But here’s where the fun part starts: although Perseus will have a PGW booth at BEA and a PGW catalogue, the company does not now own the PGW name, which is still being used by AMS. But since “Transition Vendor” probably won’t go over well with the BEA-niks, and there are still summer titles to be hawked, PGW it is – unless AMS raises a stink about the name, which seems unlikely.

Meanwhile, Radio Free PGW reports on why the revised offer for non-consenting publishers is still not necessarily in their best interests and how they could file for damages. “This little problem with damages is the main reason why the Judge awarded the deal to [Perseus], because the PGW estate would have had greater exposure to damage claims if NBN had won. AMS knows this all too well, since their investment brokers were the ones whose testimony may have sunk the NBN offer.”

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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

But National Book Network isn’t counting themselves out yet. CEO Jed Lyons announced the company is raising the payout to publishers to 100% of monies owed and dropping NBN’s $1.2 million claim against AMS, as well as another unsecured claim. NBN has agreements with 118 publishers, representing 42% of PGW clients, excluding Avalon, which is being acquired by Perseus.

And the 11:30 hearing will also address distributor Baker & Taylor ‘s plans to take control of the non-PGW-related bankruptcy holdings of AMS. Michael Cader noted in Publishers Lunch yesterday that “doing some reverse math” revealed some interesting findings. “In their January 24 court filing, [AMS] declared accounts receivable of $147.5 million and inventory of $72.5 million. But in the B&T letter of intent, accounts receivable have plunged to $65 million — implying that accounts have paid down their payables by returning up to $82 million worth of books.” That’s a whole lot of money unaccounted for, and it’s not even taking into account how much money Wells Fargo has first claim on. Radio Free PGW has much more on B&T’s offer and why, in his opinion, it’s the “recipe to make stinkbug pie.”

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“We respect the process and we’re just looking forward to moving forward as quickly as possible,” Perseus CEO David Steinberger told PW Daily. “We’ve always said it’s important for the PGW community to get a decision quickly.” For his part, NBN head Jed Lyons was pleased that the judge had given the company the needed time to complete its documentation. He noted that the judge said that “facially” NBN’s offer appeared to be higher and better.

In other news, the so-called “mystery buyer” for Advanced Marketing Service’s holdings is none other than book distributor Baker & Taylor . The two parties must complete an asset purchase agreement and then file a motion with the bankruptcy court for a hearing to determine if there are other suitors interested in bidding on the company. The parties expect to request a bidding procedures hearing before the bankruptcy court on February 16, and would hope to close a deal by March 15.

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Shelf Awareness has comments from both sides of the PGW bid party. David Steinberger, CEO of Perseus Books Group, said that after “an
extraordinary weekend,” the company has signed up PGW publishers
representing about 85% of PGW revenue, well above the 65% threshold
level set when it made the initial offer a month ago. He noted, too,
that Perseus had changed the offer slightly, “introducing an early exit option” that will be applicable to all publishers that have signed with Perseus regardless of when they signed. “We feel that any further delay in the process would be very unfair to the PGW
publishers and PGW staff who have suffered enough.”

But NBN President Jed Lyons told the online broadsheet that that the
distributor has contracts with more than 70 PGW publishers. “We’re very pleased considering we’ve only being doing this three days. It’s
extraordinary.” He noted that because Perseus is buying Avalon and
because Grove/Atlantic is a strong Perseus supporter, “probably a third of PGW revenues has been off limits for us.” (Speaking of Avalon, Charlie Winton, the company’s president, gets a big write-up in the LA Times as they finally get on the AMS bankruptcy bandwagon.) In addition, Lyons said he had sent PGW publishers a statement from Fortress Investment Group, whose Drawbridge Long Dated Value Advisors of New York is providing financing for the deal.

Radio Free PGW, as always, has the updates and insight, but today’s nugget comes by way of PGW publisher Vicki Lansky: “I have often found that life’s most important decisions/choices are based on incomplete information (marriage, having a family, believing in god, starting a business, figuring out the right distributor). I’m going to let the court make the best guess it can. Too many unknowns. (My guess is that neither would be perfect.) Having a distributor is better than not having one, that is all I know. I think we’re lucky that 2 companies are willing to slug this out over us. We could have no one interested in bailing PGW (and in effect, us) out. I hope however this works out, it works for you.” And that sentiment sure works for us…

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As the runup to the February 7 bankruptcy court hearing date for objections to Perseus’s offer continues, so too do the rumors and speculation. Yesterday PW Daily reported that AMS’s primary lender, Wells Fargo Foothill, “received at least two promising going concern offers for the AMS business,” though the bidders were not named. And both Edward Champion and Radio Free PGW offer items about dealings within Perseus’s distribution chambers.

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