Children’s Books Exempted from CPSIA
On Aug. 1, three years after the August 2008 enactment of the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act, both the House and Senate passed an amendment to CPSIA that exempts “ordinary” children’s books from the law’s testing provisions. The publishing and printing industries had long argued that books have never presented a threat of high lead levels and therefore should be exempt from the law’s testing provisions. The new amendment also removes the requirement for testing products manufactured before enactment of the law, including books produced before 1986, which also were not included under a stay of enforcement.

DiPreta Joining Crown
After the recent news that Carrie Kania was leaving her pop culture imprint at HarperCollins’s It Books, to become an agent, Mauro DiPreta, v-p and associate publisher of It Books, will move to Crown September 7 as editor-in-chief of its Archetype imprint. DiPreta will report to Tina Constable and will oversee all the imprints that fall under Crown’s “branded/category publishing,” which includes, in addition to Archetype, Harmony Books, Crown Business, and Crown Forum.

Also joining Crown, as a senior editor in the trade paperbacks division, is Amanda Patten. Patten arrives from Simon & Schuster’s Touchstone Fireside imprint.

Dickerman Named Executive Editor at Penguin Press
Colin Dickerman has been named v-p, executive editor, for Penguin Press, effective September 6. Dickerman will join the Penguin Press from Rodale Books, where he served as v-p, publishing director. Before joining Rodale, Dickerman served as editorial director, then publisher, of Bloomsbury USA, from 2000 to 2008.

Author Solutions Starts Million Dollar Film Fund
Author Solutions, which has more than 145,000 self-published titles in its library, has started a film development fund with $1 million of seed money to acquire the film rights to books by its authors. The fund will be overseen by Marcus Chait, who currently runs Author Solutions’ film and new media department. Through the fund, the company will identify books it thinks are ideal for adapting to the screen, acquire dramatic rights to those titles, and then invest in developing a screenplay to sell to a production company.

Edwards and Henry Out at Borders
Borders has terminated company president Mike Edwards and executive v-p and CFO Scott Henry. Holly Felder Etlin, a managing director of AlixPartners, who has served as senior v-p of restructuring since February, was named president as of July 29. Glen Tomaszewski, who has been with Borders since 1998, most recently as v-p, chief accounting officer and controller, was appointed treasurer.

Greenleaf Book Group Gets New Investor
Greenleaf Book Group has received a new investment from the private equity firm Noson Lawen Partners. Terms of the new funding weren’t disclosed, but the firm’s Earl Macomber said in a statement that Noson is prepared to make further investments in Greenleaf to expand its product line through internal growth and acquisition. With 47 employees, Greenleaf publishes and distributes titles from independent presses and has either published or distributed over 1,000 titles.