By Siobhan O’Leary

Executives at Bertelsmann’s Gutersloh headquarters were recently hit with diminished bonuses (as much as 50% lower in some cases) and salary cuts. Now, the pay cuts are affecting other employees at Gutersloh, says Buchmarkt. They will not be seeing the 2.5% pay scale increase that was planned for this month, and employees being paid over and above the standard pay grades will have their salaries reduced by 4%.

The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung has provided some hard figures from the blog webevangelisten.de concerning German-language Twitter use: In June, the number of active German language users jumped by 34% to 105,000. The number of German accounts registered, active or not, is around 125,000 and 10% of all German accounts produce 61% of all Tweets, reports Buchreport. According to Nielsen, as of May, around 1.4 million people in Germany had visited Twitter.com.

Rowohlt and Random House Germany are betting on the fact that bigger is still better, initiating new ad campaigns on some of the 200,000 oversized 9 sq.-m. billboards in Germany. Buchreport.de reports that Random House plans to feature one new title each month (paperbacks by bestselling authors and/or thrillers) from September to April on billboards in big city subway stations and near large bookstores. Recently, the publisher Goldmann  attempted to take this traditionally stationary medium to the mobile masses by offering a free reading sample to anyone who photographed their billboard with a cell phone and sent it in as a text message.