This Week In Indie Bookstores
Indie bookstore news from across the country and around the world!
...morePosts Tagged: ebooks
This Week in Indie Bookstores
Just announced today: beloved Brooklyn bookstore BookCourt is closing after 35 years in business. Independent booksellers were the focus of a panel at the Miami Book Fair—discussion focused on how big business was surprised that small business strategies could be useful in selling books. Kyoto, Japan is home to a bookstore hostel with eighteen bunks built into […]
...moreDigital Ownership
In an article for Quartz, Christopher Groskopf dispels a myth many of us believe—in fact, we don’t own our ebooks. Or our software. Or digital movies, music, and games. Instead, we purchase licenses that allow us access to a particular product. Often these licenses are governed by terms of service agreements that give considerable power to […]
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The Rumpus Interview with Becky Tuch
Becky Tuch discusses founding The Review Review, motherhood, creativity, and the future of literary magazines.
...moreThis Week in Indie Bookstores
Dan Dalton over at BuzzFeed sleeps in the Airbnb bookshop. Britain’s Waterstones is giving up on ebooks and outsourcing digital titles to the Japanese service Kobo. A store in Mumbai Central Station in India has been going strong for more than 135 years.
...more140 Characters or More
Make sure no one else is awake. Turn off the lights. Your windows can stay open. Now turn on your phone and begin reading. Repeat as necessary each night. Do not stop until the very last word of the very last volume. For the Atlantic, Sarah Boxer recounts the unexpectedly Proustian experience of finally finishing In […]
...moreWeekly Geekery
Spelling is important even when you are stealing money. An app for your mental health. Google wants to blend physical and digital books. Music unites us.
...moreNo More Book Shaming
It’s no secret that libraries have had a rocky relationship with publishers since the ebook boom began in the late aughts. Publisher’s Weekly suggests three ways the two could work to heal the rift, but one of the suggestions is surprising: librarians need to stop “book shaming”: What today’s library elite seems to forget is […]
...morePrint Books Bounce Back
Physical books are not only surviving, they are thriving. New data suggest that 2015 saw an uptick in the number of print books sold.
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The Rumpus Interview with Marian Thurm
Prolific author Marian Thurm talks about her new collection of stories, Today is Not Your Day, being a true New Yorker, and the importance of sympathetic characters.
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The Rumpus Interview with Elisabeth Egan
Elisabeth Egan discusses her debut novel, A Window Opens, life as a book lover, workplace jargon, and the question we should ask ourselves in place of can we “have it all”.
...moreDigital World, Digital Library
Why do we need physical libraries in the age of Wikipedia? What does a library look like in the digital age? The New York Review of Books explains how librarians are embracing technology.
...moreUnlocking the eBook
Craig Mod writes for Aeon on ebooks’ technological stagnation: …it was a stark reminder that pliancy of media invites experimentation. When media is too locked down, too rigid, when it’s too much like a room with most of the air sucked out of it, stale and exhausting, the exploration stops. And for the intersection of […]
...moreWhy Choose?
The birth of the ebook has been a source of fear among literary consumers for years now, but it seem, based on current sales trends, print is making a comeback. Flavorwire puts up an argument for both, asking authors and publishers what medium they prefer, and where they think the future of books is headed. […]
...morePrint Soldiers On as Digital Sales Slump
Ebook sales have fallen 10 percent in the first five months of 2015. The surge of electronic books between 2008 and 2010 coupled with the stress of economic depression on independent bookstores seemed a portent of an all-digital future, but print books remain and many digital consumers are returning to physical books. The New York […]
...moreA Look Back at Amazon’s Twenty Years
Publisher’s Weekly has a retrospective on Amazon.com’s 20 years of selling books, DVDs, electronics, and everything else. The article cites the introduction of the Kindle and the Kindle e-bookstore as Amazon’s most important innovation, but is quick to cite the company’s other advances—as well as the many controversies sparked by said advances. For example, before it […]
...moreCollege Bookstores and Digital Textbooks
Student textbooks are a big moneymaker for college bookstores. But as textbooks go digital, college bookstores are under threat as publishers gain more power over the means of distribution of the textbooks. Forbes takes a look at the changes in the textbook market and how college bookstores need to adapt to keep up.
...moreEbooks Are Changing How Writers Write
The rise in popularity of e-books are changing how readers consume books. Readers now have short attention spans, and that is leading to writers adopting new styles. The Guardian takes a look at the impact of the rise of e-books on new works.
...morePublishers Earn More than Authors on E-Book Sales
Authors are earning less on e-books than on physical ones, and the villain isn’t necessarily Amazon. According to the Author’s Guild, a professional organization for writers, publishers are now taking closer to 75% of an e-book’s profit, up from only 50% of traditionally published books. While Amazon’s downward pricing pressure has squeezed profit from everyone […]
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The Rumpus Interview with Joshua Cohen
Novelist Joshua Cohen gives an interview, digital, about his new novel, paper, but also digital, about the Internet, digital, subsuming the novel, even his novel, best on paper, Book of Numbers.
...moreWord of the Day: Nesh
(n.); soft, delicate, tender; from the Old English hnesce (“soft in texture”) or Gothic hnasqus (“tender; soft”) “Over the years, I’ve gone back and forth over the merits of print versus digital books so many times, it’s as if I were in an abusive relationship with myself. But my mother’s passing and the sentimental value […]
...moreReviewing the Absurd
Wired is launching a book review section—of absurd self-published titles. Jason Kehe will in fact be judging books by their cover, selecting the books he reviews for the regular column by browsing the blog Kindle Cover Disasters. The first title in the series is Moira, The Zorzen War, The Divided Worlds Book 3: If you’re […]
...moreBuying Online Is Like Shoplifting
British novelist David Nicholls believes that book buyers who browse their local shops and then buy books online are basically shoplifters, he tells the Guardian. The author of Us and other novels, Nicholls is a former bookseller himself. He delivered the keynote speech at the London Book Fair’s Digital Minds conference where he lamented that, […]
...moreWeekly Geekery
Is this where digital media is headed? When your body is tracked. Gender, power, privilege, and technology. What did you talk about on social media in 2014? Publish or perish: Amazon edition.
...moreRussian Novels for Rushing Muscovites
In addition to boasting one of the most beautiful subway systems in the world, Moscow commuters now stand to become the best-read. Per the Guardian, over 100 titles from authors including Pushkin, Chekhov, and Tolstoy are now available for download, simply by scanning a QR code in the station. The city has already implemented a […]
...moreWeekly Geekery
The final frontier of stories. What the government did with content will shock and delight you. The science of your confident stupidity. Twitfic is just getting started. Slate hosted a talk about Amazon, books, literature and the future. Here is the recap.
...moreCrowdsourcing Publishing
As if upending the publishing industry with its ongoing battle with Hachette wasn’t enough, now Amazon wants to cut out publishers entirely. Amazon is launching a new program called Kindle Scout, a system where customers will read excerpts and vote on which books will move forward with publication. Voting for a winner gets users a free […]
...moreChoosing Sides
Andrew Wylie, arguably the most powerful literary agent in the world, has chosen sides in the Amazon-Hachette battle for global domination, and he’s allied with Authors United. Wylie represents a slew of high-profile writers like Philip Roth, Salman Rushdie, and V.S. Naipul—writers he has enlisted to join the 1,000-plus strong group fighting against Amazon. Alex […]
...moreWin Or Lose, Amazon War Means Change
No matter how the dispute between publisher Hachette and online mage-retailer Amazon resolves itself, the one thing that can be assured is that the publishing industry is changing. Amazon might hope to accelerate and seize control of the changes through pricing, but the book industry was changing even before Amazon started picking fights, warns The […]
...moreBookless Libraries
Florida Polytechnic University has just opened, in a building designed by Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava, a completely bookless library. Available to all the students is a catalog of 135,000 e-books that can be consulted in an impressive, completely empty room equipped with internet connections and librarians to help the students.
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