History
iUniverse initially focused on business-to-consumer print-on-demand publishing as well as publishing both new and reprinted titles. Soon after they were founded, Barnes & Noble purchased a 49% stake in the company. As part of the agreement, Barnes & Noble was to offer iUniverse titles both in their online bookstore and at their physical stores.
In 2004, porn star and ex-criminal Amy Fisher's memoir If I Knew Then about how she pled guilty to first-degree aggravated assault and served seven years in prison, became the best-selling book in iUniverse's history, selling 32,445 copies up to 2004. Nevertheless, according to a 2005 Publishers Weekly article, out of the more than 18,000 titles published by iUniverse until 2004, only 83 had sold at least 500 copies and only 14 titles had been sold through physical Barnes & Noble stores.
In September 2007, iUniverse was purchased by Author Solutions, the parent company of hedge fund owned rival AuthorHouse. On January 22, 2008, Author Solutions announced iUniverse operations would move from Lincoln, Nebraska to Bloomington, Indiana to be co-located with AuthorHouse. In June 2008, it was announced that Author Solutions would "onshore" iUniverse's Shanghai, China operations—creating more than 140 new jobs in its Indiana headquarters over the next few years.
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Famous quotes containing the word history:
“Let it suffice that in the light of these two facts, namely, that the mind is One, and that nature is its correlative, history is to be read and written.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“As I am, so shall I associate, and so shall I act; Caesar’s history will paint out Caesar.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Literary works cannot be taken over like factories, or literary forms of expression like industrial methods. Realist writing, of which history offers many widely varying examples, is likewise conditioned by the question of how, when and for what class it is made use of.”
—Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956)