Categories: OLD Media Moves

A financial crisis best seller

The Financial Crisis Inquiry Report, the conclusion of a federal inquiry by a 10-member commission, was published on Thursday and has been selling thousands of copies, according to a New York Times story by Julie Bosman and Sewell Chan.

Bosman and Chan write, “PublicAffairs — which, as a publisher of the book version of the Starr Report in 1998, has experience with this kind of thing — initially printed a modest 25,000 copies in paperback. A tome laden with charts, diagrams and condensed testimony, it has competition from a free online version, available on the commission’s Web site, fcic.gov/report. The e-book is available for $8.45 on Amazon; the price of the paperback is $14.99.

“Phil Angelides, the commission’s chairman, was so determined to build excitement that he hired the communications firm of Anita Dunn, President Obama’s former communications director, to orchestrate the arrival, irking some Republicans.

“Producing the book required discretion and speed. The May 2009 law that created the commission directed it to complete work by Dec. 15, 2010. But in November, the Democratic majority in the 10-member commission voted to delay the report until January, partly to give PublicAffairs time to rush the book into print.”