The toilet paper analogy: how can local book stores compete?
Independent bookstores: get beyond emotional, altruistic reasons if you want your customers to continue to support and grow your local business.
All posts by brendan
Scholarship for 2009 Antiquarian Book Seminar available!
Biblio.com is offering a full-ride scholarship to one Lucky Bibliophile to the 2009 Colorado Antiquarian Book Seminar ($1195) and free listing fees for one year and a donation of $500 to the winner’s literacy charity of choice. As mentioned in a previous post, now is
Amazon sued over Kindle
The Discovery Channel is suing Amazon over the Kindle for patent infringement, claiming they invented the concept of encrypting a book to be sold digitally over the internet. If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you know I’m usually the dorky uncle wearing the
Used Books Recession Proof?
Chris Volk at Bookfever has put together an interesting, short survey of booksellers and how the recession is affecting them. To summarize: booksellers are reporting average sales 10.6% lower than the prior year. On Biblio, we’re definitely seeing used book sales weaker than we anticipated
Kindle is Heir-Apparent to Betamax
They really just don’t get it. In a move to prevent the possibility that someone could use the Kindle to buy e-books from (gasp!) a retailer other than Amazon, the same had its attorneys contact MobileRead and demand that they remove some user posted scripts
The Scanning Age; or, a primer on the Corporate State
A recent article in the New York Times talks about Google’s so-called “pursuit” of copyholders on the books they are digitizing. This is part of the settlement announce last October that effectively legalizes Google’s blatant trademark infringement. As part of the settlement, Google is given
Eaten any good books lately?
Bern Marcowitz (co-author of Care and Feeding of Books) is fond of pointing out that the Torah & Bible both talk about eating books no less than five times. This got me thinking about the recent books I’ve read – how would they taste?
Brief notes from the San Francisco book fair
This past weekend, Stephen and I had the good fortune to attend the ABAA international book fair in San Francisco. Although a dreary weekend in the bay area (fortunately there was an REI store across from the convention center where I could procure a new
Book Zeitgeist
Its always fun to speculate on how an alien culture would interpret our society, with our McDonald’s arches and reality TV shows. So our search engine isn’t quite alien technology, but we thought we’d ask it what it thinks of society in 2009, by looking
Biblio.com gets a new skin for a new year
For those who haven’t noticed yet, we’ve quietly rolled out a little 2009 polish on Biblio.com. That image on the side, by the way, is taken from a very cool WPA library poster. The main changes, of course, are cosmetic, but we’ve also made the