“Barnes & Noble Inc’s founder pulled the plug on his plan to buy the company’s bookstores as the chain posted a deeper quarterly loss amid plunging sales of its Nook device and e-books and declining business at its stores.”
Category: publishing
Vacated Walmart Store Transformed Into America’s Largest Library
“Meyer, Scherer & Rockcastle transformed an abandoned Walmart in McAllen, Texas, into a 124,500-square-foot public library, the largest single-floor public library in the United States.”
Be It Proposed: Let’s Stop Writing For A Year (The World Would Be A Better Place)
“What if everyone could be persuaded to stop scribbling for a period of, say, 12 months? Of course we would lose some marvellous work during The Year of Not Writing, and that’s not to be taken lightly. But look at the compensations…”
The Dawn Of Audiobooks
“Long before anyone had ever heard of audiobooks, Caedmon Records made a name for itself recording authors reading aloud from their work. Many Americans first heard the voices of their favorite writers through the Caedmon Literary Series, launched in the 1950s.”
The Rise Of The Author-Performer (You Know, Like David Sedaris)
“The desire for readers to see their favourite authors perform relates to the rise of social media – the accessibility of authors on sites such as Twitter leading to a desire among readers to meet them in person.”
An Author’s Deeply Personal Touch, And Her 170 Million Books In Print
The fans “refer to Macomber by her first name. They know her husband Wayne and her underwear-stealing dog Bogie, and her children and grandchildren. Macomber loves them right back.”
What’s *Really* Going To Happen With Books & Bookstores?
Former booksellers, current readers, fans of Amazon, fans of Apple, fans of “creative destruction” – they all weigh in (and you can too).
Ah, The Days Of Martinis And Sexual Harassment And People Buying Books
“In the good old, bad old days of book publishing, screaming matches happened in public, not online; the boss’ philandering was an open secret never leaked to the press, and authors actually had to turn in their manuscripts in order to get money out of their publisher.”
What’s The Market Split Between Digital And Paper?
“There is yet more evidence that fiction sales lean more toward digital than their nonfiction counterparts. For fiction, the digital-print split hovered consistently around the 50/50 mark.”
The “Dawn” Of A Golden Age Of Comic Books
“Digital comics are not cannibalizing print sales, but are in fact expanding the market noticeably, and at a time when sales are up for the industry across the board.”