If you're a book lover who lives anywhere near the Mason-Dixon Line, you're probably familiar with the Strand. The legendary new-and-used bookstore in Manhattan's East Village is famous for its claim of being home to "18 miles of books." (Full disclosure: A little over a decade ago, I briefly worked as a Strand employee.) I can't remember where I found this photo, but it strikes me as admirable. Instead of simply wilting beneath the power of Amazon, the Strand has apparently decided to strike back by revealing its cheaper-than-Kindle Store prices, of all things. Obviously, this is a bit of a gimmick. And as anyone...

Over at The Digital Reader, Nate Hoffelder posted a great positive-news piece earlier today about a three-story, 41,000-square-foot bookstore that just opened in a Hong Kong shopping mall. As far as I'm concerned, any new brick-and-mortar bookstore that opens for business today is cause for celebration, even if it does happen to be halfway around the world. Regardless of last year's Borders liquidation, however, it looks like there may still be at least some cause for celebration here in the States as well, in the form of Books-A-Million—the Alabama-based company that at one point was intending to take over more than two dozen of the...

“Showrooming.” While I can’t say I’d heard the specific term before, it’s easy to understand what it’s talking about—the practice of using a physical store as a “showroom” where you can examine something and then go buy it online. This is one of the trends many pro-agency pricing comment submitters noted in their comments to the DoJ, though in the DoJ’s response it was largely referred to as “free-riding.” As I mentioned the other day, a lot of people do “showrooming” in bookstores with their Kindles. However, it’s also long been a popular activity on smartphones for general-purpose...

And speaking of Jeff Bezos, TechCrunch has an amusing little anecdote by a woman named Susanna Burke, who happened to be at a hotel where a tech conference was going on. And she tells the story of taking a big hardcover book into the bar where all the tech moguls were hanging out and attracting the attention of Jeff Bezos, who tried to sell her on the Kindle and Amazon without ever coming out and explaining who he was. Not one of the men at that table (Jeff Bezos included) was kind or gentlemanly enough to...

Found this amusing little anecdote over on Not Always Right, the site where people post their stories of hilarious encounters with rude or obnoxious customers, and chuckled for quite a while afterward. It begins innocently enough: (A customer walks into the bookstore and begins looking around.) Me: “Hello! Is there anything I can help you find today?” Customer: “Yes, there is this book that I heard about on the radio that I want to read.  I can’t remember the title, though.” Me: “Alright, do you know...

The popularity of Fifty Shades of Grey continues, and people keep trying to make sense of it. The Bookseller’s blog had a couple of interesting posts lately on the phenomenon. Scott Pack writes of how the book came from right out of nowhere, completely overturning established expectations, and now publishers and bookstores are scrambling to capitalize on the momentum. Expect a bunch of copycat covers to appear over the next few months. Pack believes that this is a great thing, regardless of the quality or lack thereof of Fifty Shades itself, not because it will get people to read...

Remember back in October when DC Comics’s exclusive agreement with Amazon led to Barnes & Noble and Books a Million pulling DC comics and graphic novels from their stores? Apparently the period of exclusivity has expired, as DC has announced its comics will now be available for the Nook Tablet and Nook Color as well. Barnes & Noble is also adding some new features specifically for comic-book reading, the press release notes: With the addition of DC Entertainment content, Barnes & Noble is also introducing Zoom View, an all-new NOOK Comics feature designed for NOOK Tablet...

Nick Bilton has a piece in the New York Times in which he tells of how he wandered into an old bookshop in New York and stared (and smelled) nostalgically at the printed pages all around. As an avowed e-reader now, he nonetheless misses the experience of shopping in bookstores. For those of us who have switched to e-readers , the e-book shopping experience, while immediate and painless, is about as sentimental as a trip to the family doctor. There are no creaking doors, or bells that announce your arrival so someone can smile at you as you walk inside. There...

It came as a surprise a couple of months ago when pre-eminent UK bookstore chain Waterstones announced it would be entering a partnership with Amazon to sell Kindles. Now that the shock has worn off, Publishing Perspectives reports, a number of UK publishers and bookstores are speaking out (mostly anonymously on the publishers’ part, of course) about it. The consensus among publishers tends to be backhanded admiration of how shrewd the deal is for Waterstones, while at the same time recognizing it doesn’t bode well for the rest of the industry. One publisher compares it to “Vichy France,”...

The Bookseller and FutureBook report on a recent meeting of affiliates of the UK’s Booksellers Association at which representatives of three e-book companies—Kobo, Anobii, and Gardners—pitched their respective product frameworks. Unlike the American Booksellers Association (whose own IndieCommerce platform was mentioned in the letter I mentioned last night), the UK’s BA is soliciting multiple non-exclusive schemes for its members, who may choose to offer any or all of them in any combination. Kobo’s affiliate scheme offers booksellers the chance to sell Kobo devices, and receive an affiliate’s cut of any e-books that Kobo owner buys from then on, even...

American Booksellers Association CEO Oren Teicher has posted the text of his letter to the Justice Department commenting on the proposed antitrust settlement with the three Agency Five publishers who agreed to settle. As with the recent Barnes & Noble filing, Teicher concentrates on the harm that such a settlement would allow Amazon to do to its competition—in this case the independent bookstores that make up the ABA. Teicher points out that agency pricing is the only thing that allowed independent bookstores selling e-books through the ABA’s IndieCommerce subsidiary (currently using Google Books’s reseller program, but changing to another...

About a month ago, I covered a blog post by Alan Beatts, proprietor of the Borderlands bookstore in San Francisco, in which he did some back-of-envelope calculations to determine that it could take over a decade for profits to pay down the cost of an Espresso. I just now received an email from Mr. Beatts calling my attention to a new blog post with some updated figures—his prior calculations had been based on out-of-date information. Based on the new figures, Beatts now calculates that, at an average rate of 1 book an hour, the machine would pay itself off...