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The three words repeated often in Scholastic's earnings report for the successful fourth quarter and fiscal 2012 year -- The Hunger Games -- should come as no surprise.  The trilogy of books by Suzanne Collins has now sold more than 50 million copies to date in print and digital formats, the company also announced Thursday morning (23 million copies for The Hunger Games, 14 million for Catching Fire, and 13 million for Mockingjay.)

Those sales are so remarkable that, while celebrating the big revenue and profit gains, Scholastic tempers expectations for the next fiscal year as sales of the books moderate.  For now, as CEO Richard Robinson said in an announcement, "the remarkable success" of The Hunger Games trilogy "again drove substantially higher results" and "demonstrated the broad appeal of a superb story, well marketed and sold," as the company recorded a strong fourth quarter and a good year overall.

The Hunger Games film garnered actress Jennifer Lawrence her first Academy Award nomination.

Penguin Buys

Author Solutions

In the first significant investment by a major trade publisher in self-publishing, Pearson announced recently that it has acquired self-publishing service Author Solutions from Bertram Capital for $116 million in cash.  ASI was created in 2007 from the merging of iUniverse, AuthorHouse, and other self-publishing services.  According to a spokesperson, the buy "gives Penguin a leading position in this fast-growing segment of the publishing industry and brings significant opportunity for the two companies to collaborate.  Penguin will gain access to ASI's expertise in online marketing, consumer analytics, professional services and user-generated content" while Author Solutions "will benefit from Penguin's design, editorial and sales skills, and its strong international presence as it looks to expand outside the US."

Penguin Group CEO John Makinson said "we jumped at" the opportunity to buy ASI.  He sees self-publishing as something "that's not only entering the mainstream" but is "converging with what you might call the traditional model."  He said he hopes they can "explore opportunities that lie somewhere between self-publishing as presently defined and 'Penguin publishing'" with "curated publishing" imprints that "draw on user-generated content rather than the agent community."

Makinson admitted they "haven't thought in detail" how the acquisition may affect Penguin's start-up division, Book Country, but he expects it will benefit by "gaining access to all of the functional skills within ASI." 

ASI, which employs 1,600 people in Bloomington, ID, and the Philippines, said it had generated total revenues of $100 million in 2011.  Weiss said their revenue divides approximately into thirds: one third book sales, one third publishing services, and one third marketing services.  The company's back-office and technology infrastructure will be integrated into Penguin over the course of the next year but will continue to operate separately from Penguin.

Makinson said he looks forward to "accessing the enormous author base" of ASI as well as coming to "understand how rich and detailed their understanding of consumer data" is.

Inside the NYT Book Review:

Editor Sam Tanenhaus

by Noah Charney

Sam Tanenhaus, the editor of the New York Times Book Review and the author of The Death of Conservatism and Whittaker Chambers: A Biography, talks to Noah Charney about a typical day at work and what he looks for in a great piece of criticism.

Where do you live?

In Tarrytown, New York. My wife found employment in Westchester when I was jobless and writing a book, so we moved up from Manhattan and stayed. It’s now been 22 years.

Describe your typical day at the review.

It’s a sequence of routines, though they vary depending on the day. Today, for instance, three colleagues and I discussed galleys of eight to 10 books, and settled on potential reviewers for each. Next we’ll review letters and see which we might publish. I’m having lunch with a colleague (at another section of the paper) at 12:30. We have our headlines meeting at 2:30—the copy editors present choices. I am leaving early because I teach a lecture course (at the New School) at 4 p.m.

How many books do you read each month for the review and for pleasure?

Depends what you mean by “read.” I look at half a dozen for the job, then typically another dozen or so for various writing assignments, and perhaps half a dozen more for my current book project. For pleasure and edification, I’m slowly making my way through Henry Adams’ very long history of the Jefferson and Madison administrations.

How many books per month are sent by hopeful publishers for review in New York Times Book Review?  How are books selected for review?

Several hundred, at least. The number varies by season. We review about 1% of the total sent to us. We select by reading the galleys. Most of this is done by our exceptional staff of “preview editors,” my very smart colleagues. Each reads at least 1,500 advance galleys a year. Multiply that by the five to 20 years they’ve been on the job, and you’ll get the idea these people know a good deal about books.

The Daily Beast

Joy Press named L.A. Times Books and Culture Editor

by Carolyn Kellogg

Today the L.A. Times announced the appointment of Joy Press as Books and Culture Editor. The memo about the appointment, from L.A. Times Editor Davan Maharaj and Assistant Managing Editor for Features Alice Short, follows.

We are delighted to announce that Joy Press, who has had a distinguished career as a writer and editor on a variety of cultural and entertainment topics, is our new Books and Culture Editor. Her presence will allow us to expand our coverage of publishing and literary culture, with a special emphasis on ramping up our digital content.

Joy has been Calendar’s pop culture and deputy television editor for 2 1/2 years. During her tenure, she developed a Sunday TV page and played a major role in growing our successful Show Tracker blog, which doubled its readership and has become a key site for television news and series recaps.

As an editor she expanded our television coverage, with stories on topics including the rise of Web television, the profusion of female TV creators, the suicide of a “Real Housewives” husband and the afterlife of a reality TV star.

LAT

Compliance Year’s Most

Controversial Film

Based on a true story, the provocative indie film Compliance has caused walkouts and post-screening shouting matches. MarlowStern examines the real-life incidents that inspired the film and speaks with the film’s director and star.

When the curtains were drawn and the lights went up following the premiere screening of Compliance at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, the cramped movie theater—embedded in a library, no less—erupted in chaos.

“Sundance, you can do better!” an irate woman shouted, “This is not the year to make violence against women entertaining.”

Directed by Craig Zobel, the indie film follows a female manager (Ann Dowd) and several other members of a ChickWich fast food restaurant in rural Ohio as a man posing as a police officer phones and instructs the investigation of a teenage female checkout clerk (Dreama Walker), who he’s accusing of theft. After a series of psychological manipulations a la Michael Haneke’s Funny Games, including threatening her with jail time, forcing the detained woman to address him as “sir,” and the occasional friendly rationalization (“Look, I don’t like this as much as you do”), the girl is forced to submit to a strip search and, ultimately, commit a lewd sex act.

“People have these complicated relationships with authority,” Zobel told The Daily Beast. “I don’t think people do it out of malice, but I think people will do things that are even against their own morals if coerced.”

Compliance was shot in 15 days in a fast food restaurant in New Jersey for under $1 million (Zobel agreed not to disclose the name of the franchise). Thanks to the naturalistic performances and minimalist filmmaking aesthetic, audiences are forced to assume the role of complicit voyeurs—silent witnesses to a depraved series of acts performed on a scared young girl, like those who did nothing while Kitty Genovese was stabbed to death in public in 1964. The New York Times called the film “a slow-motion punch to the groin,” while Time went one step further, branding it, “Sundance torture porn.”

"Sandra [the movie’s fast food restaurant manager] worries about losing her job so that means you fall in line and do what’s expected of you,” Ann Dowd, who plays Sandra in Compliance, told The Daily Beast. “It’s about the pressure to survive.”

“As far as the exploitation of women is concerned, when you’re talking about power and the way that people use authority over others, it’s very hard to have that conversation be nuanced without discussing gender and the way that it’s used,” says Zobel. “I don’t think the film is trying to celebrate that in any way. So when people don’t meet me there on that, it’s a shame. I wasn’t trying to be a misogynist.”

Zobel studied a notorious series of social psychology experiments conducted in the 60s by Yale University psychologist Stanley Milgram. He devised this study during the 1961 trial of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann to answer whether Eichmann and his Holocaust accomplices had mutual intent, i.e., whether the soldiers following orders were just as morally bankrupt as Eichmann himself. Subjects were assigned the roles of “teacher” and “learner” and placed in separate rooms. All subjects were then instructed to administer an electric shock on the unseen person, and were commanded to amp up the voltage regardless of the consequences. Most subjects applied the maximum 450 volts on their “victims” (no shocks were actually administered). Milgram summarized his findings in a 1974 article entitled The Perils of Obedience:

The Daily Beast

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