Category Archives: Uncategorized

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Selling Used Childrens’ Books Is Not a Crime!

Many of us in the US book selling community have been concerned about recent legislation that was intended to offer new safety standards for children’s products. The Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act (CPSIA) was created to address concerns about harmful substances, such as lead, found

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Blogging from beyond the grave

The Orwell Prize has taken blogging to a new place and time. The British prize annual British prize for excellence in political writing takes its name from writer George Orwell.  Beginning in August of 2008, the Orwell Prize has taken an innovative approach to presenting

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Have you ever been ‘sheeped’?

OK–advance discalimer–this is not a post about fraternity hazing. I read Haruki Murakami’s A Wild Sheep Chase a few months ago and the striking images and unsettling moods evoked by this novel have continued coming to mind ever since. Like one of the characters from

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Open Source Textbooks: Menace AND Blessing?

I came across an interesting intersection of the worlds of Book and Geek yesterday. Previous rants in this space have discussed in detail the cost of textbooks, and how that impacts the poor and worthy demographic of students. On the other end of the spectrum,

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Laying siege to your local library

Make no mistake, in the world of books, there is no idyllic indian summer. No lazy dog days’ afternoons. No sweet corn harvest. No last minute dash to the coast. For this is the beginning of the Library Sale Wars. This is the time that

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Seven words you can’t upload

Many of us older than compact discs (they turned 26 yesterday, hooray) remember George Carlin’s classic comedy routine, Seven Words You Can Never Say on TV. The routine was controversial, memorable, and (at least to me) quite hilarious. Carlin’s routine has recently come to mind

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When you spend a lot of time looking at books like commodities, as I do in our business, sometimes you sort of forget that the books have things in them. Things like information, sometimes true and sometimes false, heartrending, well-told stories and trite, really badly

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Digital Generation Gap for books?

I’ve collected books my entire life.  I treasured my Hardy Boys collection above all things (yes, more than the dog), back when I was four feet tall (my treasured books today are considerably older, better written, and more significant, but I digress).  And I’m also

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Textbooks, or, the Battle of Students vs Publishers – Part II

Apologies in advance for belaboring the point in regards to my previous post on the broken textbook industry, but another interesting article on custom textbook publishing appeared this morning in the Wall Street Journal. The article is mostly self-explanatory, so I won’t go into a