In Case Anyone is Wondering

It's just been announced that Time Warner is selling its book group to a French conglomerate, Lagardere. (I saw this on Publishers Lunch, a daily e-mail publication, but it should get picked up other places quickly.)

The last time the TWBG was up for sale, I saw people assuming that my employer would be included. So let me try to set the tangled record straight. (Even though it's even more tangled that it was two years ago.)

I'm best known for working on the Science Fiction Book Club (though I've been involved in other bookclubs as well). The SFBC is part of Doubleday Entertainment, which was formed at the beginning of this year as part of the splitting of Bookspan for complicated legal reasons. Doubleday Entertainment is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Bookspan. Bookspan itself is half-owned by Bertelsmann, the German book colossus, and half-owned by Time Warner (the company that wants you to forget entirely about that little "AOL" thing). But we're not part of the Time Warner Book Group, and we never were; Book-of-the-Month Club Inc. (the name of one of the two companies that merged to form Bookspan) was always part of Time Inc., the magazine group at Time Warner. And Bookspan's reporting structure is still through Time Inc., not through the TWBG.

So my best wishes to the Time Warner folks with their new French overlords, but I'll be sitting here on the sidelines for this one.