relics

From: fuckyeahcraft

"Then a Barnes & Noble 'superstore' came to town. It anchored a mini-mall with a large parking lot. The bookseller already had a cloudy reputation; I knew that its steep discounts on best-sellers were putting pressure on smaller bookstores near its locations. The retailer was then making its big expansion push. Soon after the opening, I drove over to check it out. Look, Starbucks coffee! A magazine rack filled with alien titles such as Zyzzyva, Utne Reader, and Foreign Affairs. A 'Cultural Studies' section. An entire shelf full of Faulkner. Going to Barnes & Noble became a Saturday afternoon. It was as if a small liberal-arts college had been plunked down into a farm field."
— Michael Agger, The New Yorker
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"Publishers, fearful that selling to libraries will hurt sales to the general public, have thrown up roadblocks. Some major publishers jack up the price libraries pay for e-books compared to what they charge the public. Others make only a small number of titles available, delay their availability until weeks after the general release, or require libraries to buy another copy after lending it 26 times. Such policies actually mark an improvement over the recent past. Until earlier this year, some major publishers refused to sell to libraries at all.
     Public awareness that libraries lend e-books will play a key role in whether Amazon's digital book business erodes, Barclays said. As it is, relatively few people know about borrowing digital books, although their numbers are growing. A survey last year by the Pew Internet & American Life Project found that 31% of the public was aware that libraries lend e-books, up from 24% in 2011. Only 5% of people actually had checked out a digital book compared with 3% in the prior year, Pew found. 'E-books are becoming more important, and we do expect them to grow going forward,' said Christopher Platt, director of the joint technology team for the New York and Brooklyn public libraries. 'Digital is not a boutique service. It's part of the future of the library.'"
— Verne Kopytoff, CNN Money
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Amazon (rainforest)

Brazilian rainforest (from: The Guardian)

"According to survey research by the Codex Group, roughly 60 percent of book sales — print and digital — now occur online. But buyers first discover their books online only about 17 percent of the time. Internet booksellers specifically, including Amazon, account for just 6 percent of discoveries. Where do readers learn about the titles they end up adding to the cart on Amazon? In many cases, at bookstores.
     The brick and mortar outlets that Amazon is imperiling play a huge role in driving book sales and fostering literary culture. Although beaten by the Internet in unit sales, physical stores outpace virtual ones by 3-to-1 in introducing books to buyers. Bookshelves sell books. In a trend that is driving the owner of your neighborhood independent to drink, customers are engaging in 'showrooming,' browsing in shops and then buying from Amazon to get a discount. This phenomenon is gradually suffocating stores to death. If you like having a bookseller nearby, think carefully before doing this. Never mind the ethics of showrooming — it’s self-defeating. You’re killing off a local business you like. (If you prefer e-reading, many independent stores have agreements with Kobo and Zola Books that give them a cut of e-book sales.)…
     By defeating its competitors, Amazon is choking off some of its own air supply. Barnes & Noble and independents are in one sense competitors for Amazon, but in another sense they are functioning as unwilling showrooms and sales agents for the online giant. As David Carr has suggested, Amazon should want them to survive, if only out of self-interest."
— Evan Hughes, Salon
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Hardbound; Hard-Pressed

"The Mann Press for Rotary Offset" (from: Retro Graphic Design)

"There’s been a great deal of conjecture lately about the future of the bookstore: What will happen to the B&N [Barnes & Noble] stores (especially if they do plan to reduce the number of stores)? What about independent bookstores? Will Amazon crush bricks-and-mortar stores out of existence? Oh, lordy, will there even be such a thing as a bookstore!?!?

     …Is there, in fact, a place for bookstores in our future?
     What does the business model for that bookstore look like?
     On the first question, I think the answer is yes. Here’s my bias — I LOVE bookstores. In my youth, I would bring my lunch and spend the day in multi-level used bookstores on Fourth Avenue in Manhattan (which was also the home of hot metal typesetters, printers and book binders, by the way). I prefer independent and used stores to B&N, but these days you take what you can get.
     Part of me wants to suggest that we take the emotional hot button of the 'nobility' of the bookstore (particularly the local independent variety) out of the discussion and just talk cold/hard facts. But I don’t think we can."
— Michael Weinstein, Book Business
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Write-By-Numbers

From: Above & Beyond

"In the past, publishers and authors had no way of knowing what happens when a reader sits down with a book. Does the reader quit after three pages, or finish it in a single sitting? Do most readers skip over the introduction, or read it closely, underlining passages and scrawling notes in the margins? Now, e-books are providing a glimpse into the story behind the sales figures, revealing not only how many people buy particular books, but how intensely they read them. For centuries, reading has largely been a solitary and private act, an intimate exchange between the reader and the words on the page. But the rise of digital books has prompted a profound shift in the way we read, transforming the activity into something measurable and quasi-public.
     The major new players in e-book publishing—Amazon, Apple and Google—can easily track how far readers are getting in books, how long they spend reading them and which search terms they use to find books. Book apps for tablets like the iPad, Kindle Fire and Nook record how many times readers open the app and how much time they spend reading. [...]
     Pinpointing the moment when readers get bored could also help publishers create splashier digital editions by adding a video, a Web link or other multimedia features [Jim Hilt, Barnes & Noble's vice president of e-books] says. Publishers might be able to determine when interest in a fiction series is flagging if readers who bought and finished the first two books quickly suddenly slow down or quit reading later books in the series. [...]
     Others worry that a data-driven approach could hinder the kinds of creative risks that produce great literature. 'The thing about a book is that it can be eccentric, it can be the length it needs to be, and that is something the reader shouldn't have anything to do with,' says Jonathan Galassi, president and publisher of Farrar, Straus & Giroux. 'We're not going to shorten 'War and Peace' because someone didn't finish it.'"
—Alexandra Alter, The Wall Street Journal
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paper/back/lash

"Amazon.com removed more than 4,000 e-books from its site this week after it tried and failed to get them more cheaply, a muscle-flexing move that is likely to have significant repercussions for the digital book market.
     Amazon is under pressure from Wall Street to improve its anemic margins. At the same time, it is committed to selling e-books as cheaply as possible as a way to preserve the dominance of its Kindle devices.
When the Kindle contract for one of the country’s largest book distributors, the Independent Publishers Group, came up for renewal, Amazon saw a chance to gain some ground at I.P.G.’s expense.
     'They decided they wanted me to change my terms,' said Mark Suchomel, president of the Chicago-based I.P.G. 'It wasn’t reasonable. There’s only so far we can go.' [...]
     I.P.G. told its publishers to immediately begin stressing that their books were available in other electronic formats, including from the Amazon rivals Barnes & Noble and Apple. It also told them to contact their local independent bookstores and point out that they could now sell something that Amazon would not."
— David Streitfeld, The New York Times/Bits
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Buy all the books Amazon doesn't have here...

Paper Backlash

From Samuel Johnson's  A Dictionary of the English
Language (1755) Internet Archive

"Canada’s Indigo Books and Music has joined forces with U.S. bookstore chain Barnes & Noble in refusing to stock or sell any books published by online rival Amazon.com – including upcoming titles by James Franco, Deepak Chopra and Ian McEwan – with both chains now accusing the online giant of using predatory tactics that weaken an already struggling book industry. [...]
     The three-chain defensive front is the first setback Amazon has experienced since it began its aggressive and highly publicized move into the business of producing as well as selling books last year. Among the other authors whose upcoming work will become inaccessible to the majority of North American book buyers as a result of the ban are actor/director Penny Marshall, self-help writer Timothy Ferris and politician Ron Paul."
— John Barber, The Globe and Mail
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"Kindle is an ingeniously sly name, because it’s designed to connote a variety of 'warm' feelings, including 'kin' (for cozy associations; Kindle’s one of the family—that cyborg cousin from your father’s side); 'kindred' (think of Anne Shirley and Diana Barry, kindred spirits!); 'kindling' (ahh—a natural reference: kindling wood to start a fire, and wood also makes paper); and 'kindle' itself (to illuminate [knowledge?]; to light)."
— Miss Cavendish
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