Adobe Announces New $25 Billion Stock Repurchase Program

The Association of American Publishers released its StatShot report for October 2023 reflecting reported revenue for Trade (Consumer Books), Higher Education Course Materials, and Professional Publishing. Total revenues across all categories for October 2023 were up 1.8% as compared to October 2022, coming in at $1.2 billion. Year-to-date revenues were up 0.7%, at $10.6 billion for the first ten months of the year. Trade (Consumer Books) revenues were up 1.3% in October, coming in at $975.0 million. In terms of physical paper format revenues during the month of October, in the Trade (Consumer Books) category, Hardback revenues were down 2.3%, coming in at $441.8 million; Paperbacks were up 5.5%, with $301.1 million in revenue; Mass Market was up 44.4% to $10.4 million; and Special Bindings were up 3.7%, with $25.8 million in revenue.

The U.S. Postal Service reported service delivery performance scores for the first week of the fiscal first quarter started in October that showed continued gains across all First-Class, Marketing and Periodical mail categories. For the period Oct. 1 through Oct. 8, first-quarter-to-date service performance included: *First-Class Mail: Delivered 91.0 percent of First-Class Mail on time against the USPS service standard, an improvement of 3 percentage points from the fourth quarter. *Marketing Mail: Delivered 92.8 percent of Marketing Mail on time against the USPS service standard, an improvement of .3 percentage points from the third quarter. *Periodicals: Delivered 84.4 percent of Periodicals on time against the USPS service standard, an improvement of 2.3 percentage points from the third quarter.

Last year was a bad one for newspaper staffs. A full 31% of papers with Sunday circulations of 50,000 or more experienced layoffs, and 11% had multiple rounds, according to a new Pew Research Center analysis. In contrast, 27% of papers saw layoffs in 2019, up from 18% in 2019. And many of them took hits. The largest papers — those with Sunday circ of 250,000 or more — were the hardest hit, with 55% suffering staff cuts. The year before, the pain was roughly similar across groups.