If Borders couldn’t make it, can any bookstore survive? To bookstore owners and patrons watching Borders go down the drain, this has to be a fairly pressing worry. To try to quell the panic, the American Booksellers Association has issued a statement calling the closure “an unfortunate right-sizing of a bookstore landscape that has suffered from overexpansion in certain markets” and insisting that the future for other bricks-and-mortar booksellers is still bright. In that light, Jason Boog at Galleycat has collected a list of suggestions for independent bookstores on how try to stay relevant to consumers in an e-book...

Jason Boog of GalleyCat has taken a look at an essay by agent Andrew Wylie coming out in the new issue of WSJ Magazine. Wylie, Boog reports, is concerned about the quality issue in publishing, noting that even with all the self-publishing options available, editors and other quality controllers are an essential part of the process. Here’s an excerpt: “The devaluation of quality editing and writing is sad and it’s inevitable. Each house has a large number of titles to publish, and with a difficult economy, fewer people to handle the publications. But publishers need to...

Although this doesn’t have anything directly to do with e-books, it points out a way that authors can use digital media to help raise money for worthy causes. Yesterday, tornadoes ripped through Joplin, Missouri, a city about 90 miles west of my home in Springfield, killing at least 89 people and leaving many more homeless. Galleycat reports that to help raise money for a relief effort through Shelterbox, authors Maureen Johnson and Robin Wasserman are auctioning full book critiques on Twitter. Johnson led a similar fundraiser for earthquake victims in New Zealand...

When we talk about DRM restricting fair use, we are usually referring to the inability to copy and read the e-book on the platform of our choice. But there are other forms of fair use that are just as restricted. On GalleyCat the other day, editor Jason Boog reported hitting a publisher-imposed “clipping limit” when he had highlighted 25 passages in a Kindle book. This limit meant that he couldn’t share and view all his marked passages online. This kind of limit is troubling, especially for students who use highlighting as part of their study process—if they...

Although Barnes had a good last quarter—7% increase in total sales, 64% increase in sales at Barnes&Noble.com—the bankruptcy of Borders is inclining its board to be cautious. The company’s sales report contained a note stating that it has decided to suspend its quarterly stockholder dividend payment in order to have more cash on hand so it can meet whatever market challenges and opportunities caused by this sudden new development. Not too surprising. It’s not beyond the realm of possibility that B&N might expand into an abandoned Borders storefront or two, and having more cash on hand could help them...

The Wall Street Journal reports that Ron Burkle has lost his bid to seat himself and his chosen nominees on Barnes & Noble’s board of directors. Barnes & Noble shareholders elected founder Len Riggio and his nominees for the other two available seats to the Board of Directors. Barnes & Noble is proceeding to auction itself off, and has said that Burkle’s Yucaipa Companies is welcome to submit its own bid to be considered alongside all the others. It is unclear what the results of the auction will bode for Barnes & Noble’s Nook (and, for...

Mediabistro’s GalleyCat has a post about ABBYY FineReader Express, an OCR program that can even use cell phone cameras (though for best results, a 5 megapixel version is recommended, which would seem to limit it to the iPhone 4’s camera). The post mentions it in the context of scanning “orphan works” such as the “hundreds of pages from 1930s novels, periodicals, and self-published materials that couldn't leave the New York Public Library” that GalleyCat editor Jason Boog read through during a project. As a demonstration, it includes a photograph of a page from such a work, a screenshot...

Mediabistro’s Galleycat makes note of a two-page letter sent by the Authors Guild to its members in reference to letters that Random House and HarperCollins have sent its authors. It seems that those two publishers are trying to get their writers to lock into 25% royalty rates on e-books. While this might look better than the 15% going rate on hardcovers, the Authors Guild warns that the terms may not be entirely desirable: Authors and publishers have traditionally split the proceeds from book sales. Most sublicenses, for example, provide for a 50/50 split of...

Ooooh, dissed! Galleycat posts a photo of a full-page New York Times ad for a book, which features the bolded line at the bottom, “Available at booksellers everywhere except Amazon.” I’m sure that’s got to sting. As the first commenter on Galleycat notes, it actually is available at Amazon, albeit via third-party vendors....

How might Google battle Amazon’s Kindle side? And just how might Apple strive to displace the Amazon Kindle for the title of “iPod of e-books”? Your thoughts? To help you out, here are two starting links and related ones: Google’s strategy to take out the Kindle, from iReaderreview.com. By year’s end, will Google “be selling nearly every book in the Kindle Store and also giving away a ton of books”? And could there be more extensive give-aways in 2010? Maybe. As I noted today, Amazon apparently will be inserting ads in...

The title says it all. Here's an excerpt. Any publishers here? If so, go over and read the whole thing. Let's face it, all the major publishers are pretty much sending their galleys out to the same reviewers year after year. That's why, if the reviewers' offices are anything like mine, they have a good stack of 100-150 books coming in every week (no exaggeration) from every major, mini-major and independent publisher. This is where the "saving the $1.5 million a year" comes in to play. If all the publishers are sending their galleys to the same 1000 reviewers,...