Barnes & Noble is pressing the strategic advantage that they say their physical stores bring to sales of Nook and will roll-out 1,000-square-foot demonstration Nook boutiques across their stores, starting this summer. The NYT says the new boutiques will be adjacent to their in-store cafe's. The company says they will take space away from their music departments to make room for the Nook nooks, and ceo William Lynch "said that the number of books on display in Barnes & Noble stores would not decrease."
Release

Separately, Bloomberg reports that BN "filed two suits yesterday to try to fend off demands by Xerox and Alcatel-Lucent that it pay royalties for patents. The US subsidiary of Alcatel says the Nook violates seven of its patents" and Xerox claims that barnesandnoble.com violated four of their patents. "Neither claim is valid, Barnes & Noble said in its lawsuit."

In other ereader news, Copia has officially scrapped their vaporware line of fugly first-gen and Plastic Logicish e-readers in favor of a promised line of inexpensive iPadish knockoffs and one $99 Kindle klone. Parent company svp Tony Antolino admits to the WSJ, "The iPad disrupted pricing strategy for everyone in the e-reader market, and after the price wars with Barnes and Noble and Amazon, everyone's trying to differentiate themselves from a price-point perspective. We decided to do a revision of our hardware positioning." The new units are promised for "fall," though the company's website still displays the original unreleased line.
WSJ blog

Octopus in the UK will cut 19 people and another 10 have accepted "voluntary redundancy," the Bookseller reports, comprising almost 30 percent of the staff of 104 people.

At Yale University Press, Ileene Smith has been promoted to executive editor-at-large; Tim Shea has been promoted to editor of foreign languages; and Laura Davulis has been promoted to editor, digital development.

Harper Children's vp, director of inventory management and member of their executive committee David Toberisky will retire at the end of the year after 23 years at the company. Sheryl Moore-Anderson will rejoin the division in August as director of children's inventory.

Owner/savior of Aspen's Explore Booksellers Sam Wyly and brother Charles Wyly have been charged by the SEC with an "elaborate sham system" to hide $550 million trading profits, the result of a six-year investigation.
WSJ

Abrams announced the previously undisclosed title of Jeff Kinney's fifth Diary of a Wimpy Kid book, which publishes on November 9, and The Ugly Truth will get a first printing of 5 million copies. Abrams says 35 million copies of Wimpy Kid books are in print already in the US. Last fall's DOG DAYS had an announced four-million-copy first printing and the publisher went back to press for another 500,000 right after the release, with an estimated first-week sale in excess of 750,000 units.

Kinney says in the announcement, "To me, the fifth book is the linchpin of the series. Since Greg Heffley is a cartoon character but also a literary character, I've always wondered if he should grow up or stay in a state of arrested development forever. This book answers that question once and for all."

Adam Friedstein has joined Anderson Literary Management as an agent primarily representing debut literary fiction, literary thrillers and suspense, young adult fiction, and narrative and serious nonfiction. He was previously at Trident Media Group."

At Perseus, vp, business operations Clare Peeters has had her role expanded to vp, corporate strategy and business development. She has "played a critical role in both the creation and the ongoing activities of our joint ventures with both The Daily Beast and The Weinstein Company," as well as the expansion of Constellation.

Ruth Esehak-Gillespie has joined Macmillan's International Sales Division as sales and promotions coordinator, based in New York.

At Kaplan Publishing, Jennifer Farthing has been promoted to the new position of executive director product development; learning materials; Shannon Berning has been promoted to director of product development for graduate, post graduate and nursing/medical/legal projects; Laura Modigliani has been promoted to editor; Adam Hinz moves over to instructional designer; Sunny Hwang has been hired as math and science editor/subject matter expert; and Tracy Clough has been hired as a development editor.