The American Library Association’s president Maureen Sullivan was “stunned” when news broke that Hachette may dramatically increase the price of eBooks for libraries.

Sullivan issued a strong statement following reports that Hachette is raising the prices on its backlist eBooks by 220 percent. If the reports are true, 3,500 eBook titles with release dates of April 2010 and earlier will experience these price hikes.

American Libraries Magazine has Sullivan’s complete statement. Here is an excerpt: “Libraries must have the ability to purchase a wide range of digital content at a fair price so that all readers have full access to our world’s creative and cultural resources, especially the many millions who depend on libraries as their only source of reading material.”

The Hachette Book Group reported that its sales dropped four percent during the first half of 2012 in a financial earnings statement released August 30th. Meanwhile, Hachette’s digital sales increased 20 percent in the first half of 2012, as compared with the first half of 2011. The company reported that digital represents 27 percent of HBG’s net sales, which is up from 22 percent of net sales last year.

The company expects higher sales in the second half of the year, due to the typical growth in holiday season sales. In addition, the company expects J.K. Rowling’s The Casual Vacancy to help bolster sales.

Lagardère Publishing’s Hachette Livre reported net sales of around $1.1 billion during the first six months of 2012. Digital is growing within the division, representing 8.4 percent of total net sales for Hachette Livre, which is up from 6 percent for all of 2011. (Via Digital Book World).

On Tuesday we posted about an editor gig at Orbit, and now it looks like the Hachette division is looking for an enthusiastic publicist to join its New York team, too.

In this role, you’ll be asked to develop and implement seasonal publicity campaigns for science fiction, fantasy and Manga, supporting the Yen and Orbit imprints. You’ll need to put your creative thinking cap on to conceive of original plans for key titles, which will include media outreach, as well as industry and author events.

To be considered, you should have two to three years of publicity experience, and a well-rounded knowledge of trade book publishing. Extensive contacts are a big plus, and a passion for science fiction, fantasy, Manga and genre publishing is a must-have. Hands-on team players who work well under pressure should apply here.

For more job listings, go to the Mediabistro job board, and to post a job, visit our employer page. For real-time openings and employment news, follow @MBJobPost.

This week, Orbit is looking for a new editor, and Amazon is hiring a senior manager of site merchandising and product management. HarperCollins is searching for an online marketing manager, and Random House needs an senior publicist for its children’s division. Interested? Get the scoop on these gigs and more below, as well as on mediabistro.com.

• Editor Hachette Book Group/Orbit (New York, NY)
• Online Marketing Manager HarperCollins (Watertown, NY)
• Senior Publicist Random House (New York, NY)
• Publishing Product Manager Bloomsbury Publishing (New York, NY)
• Senior Manager, Site Merchandising & Product Management Amazon (Seattle, WA)

For more job listings, go to the Mediabistro job board, and to post a job, visit our employer page. For real-time openings and employment news, follow @MBJobPost.

Even though it’s highly likely that a memoir from former British Prime Minister Tony Blair is years in the offing, that doesn’t mean there can’t be stories about every permutation and combination relating to such a possible step. To wit, the Bookseller’s Katherine Rushton reports that Blair will meet publishers in London at the start of October, together with Robert Barnett, the Washington lawyer he has instructed to sell his memoirs. Random House and HarperCollins are expected to make bids for the book, and Bloomsbury (in a partnership with Miramax) and Simon & Schuster have confirmed they are also entering the fray. Hachette is understood to have ruled itself out of the competition, although CEO Tim Hely Hutchinson declined to comment to the Bookseller.

As already speculated, Blair’s approach direct to the US is seen as an attempt to bag the biggest deal possible by capitalizing on his popularity there, Rushton explains. Securing Barnett, who won big money for Bill Clinton and Alan Greenspan advance-wise (and also represents James Patterson now) is also likely to inflate Blair’s advance. Rushton also has more in the Telegraph today about the pre-Frankfurt plan for Blair.

The Bookseller’s Alison Flood reports that Little, Brown Book Group has acquired independent publisher Piatkus Books. Founder Judy Piatkus will continue as m.d. until the end of the year, when she will retire from publishing. Piatkus, which has a turnover of around £10m, will become an independent imprint within Little, Brown. It will continue trading at its current premises until the end of October, after which the team will move to Little, Brown’s new offices at 100 Victoria Embankment.

Little, Brown said it would ask “the majority of the directors and staff” to stay with the business. It added that while a small number of staff may not have continuing roles within Piatkus, they would wherever possible be offered jobs within Little, Brown or the wider Hachette Livre UK group to keep job losses “to an absolute minimum”. The news may quell some rumors of Little, Brown’s eventual demise as an independent imprint within the Hachette rubric, but then again, let’s talk again in six months, shall we?

PW Daily’s European correspondent Rüdiger Wischenbart comments on what might seem unusual to US and UK book trade but is common practice in Europe: memoirs and any form of autobiography is automatically classified as fiction. So all that controversy surrounding Gunter Grass’s memoir PEELING THE ONION? It matters, but less than we might think because it’s not considered to be true-blue nonfiction.

So why is that the case? Olivier Nora, head of the prestigious house Grasset, now part of the Hachette universe, adds both pragmatic as well as fundamental pieces to the riddle. On the one hand, he says to PW, only fiction titles can be picked for certain prestigious awards that are often a key to success in France. But, more profoundly, he points to that long tradition of French “auto-fiction”, of “telling the world”, or even, in the words of the poet Louis Aragon, of “mentir vrai” (or, “to lie truthfully”), which all push those narratives towards fiction. Bernhard Fetz, a Vienna-based researcher with the Austrian National Library specializing in all types of biography, is even more succinct: “While Germany, or France, have a mostly idealist tradition in culture, Britain, and hence the U.S., have always had a more pragmatic approach.”

PW Daily reports that Grand Central Publishing division will rename its Warner Business imprint Business Plus, with the new name appearing on titles this September. The imprint will work in tandem with Hachette‘s UK subsidiary, Hodder Headline, to give Business Plus a more international scope and “develop joint acquisition strategies and acquire world rights where possible for Business Plus titles.” Rick Wolff will continue to direct the business imprint in the U.S., while David Wilson, editorial director of Hodder, will lead Business Plus in the UK.

The New York Times’ Julie Bosman has the scoop on the long-awaited name change for Warner Books: as of now (with an official launch at Book Expo in early June) the Hachette imprint will be known as Grand Central Publishing – a move happening just in time for the company to switch offices from the Time-Life Building on Sixth Avenue to 237 Park Avenue, closer to the famous train station. “I was very nervous,” Jamie Raab, the publisher of Warner Books, said in a telephone interview with Bosman. “It’s like suddenly being told that not only are you being sold, but you have to give up the name you’ve lived with your whole life.”

After trying on a host of names for size, Grand Central Publishing, Raab said, conveyed the company’s wide range of readers and the many genres it publishes. It pointedly omits the word “books,” a gesture to electronic and other emerging forms of publishing that go beyond ink and paper. The first books to carry the Grand Central Publishing imprint are expected to be on the fall 2007 list, which includes a novel by David Baldacci, a memoir by Rosie O’Donnell and a graphic novel by Anthony Lappe and Dan Goldman. And the new logo is music to Raab’s ears. “I hated it,” she said of the bulky “W” logo hearkening back to the imprint’s creation in 1970. “It’s a period piece. It probably looked really good in the ’70s.”