The Bookseller recently published what appears to be a very interesting article about a sort of bookseller's university that Waterstones—the UK-based bookstore chain—plans to open at some point in the near-to-distant future. And I use the term "appears," by the way, because the article in question in available only to subscribers of the website's premium content, of which I am not one. Bummer. The article's abstract, at any rate, claims that Waterstones Academy, as the school will be known, will be an "industry first" in the UK. Students of the nine month-long program, which will be operated in partnership with the...

That's the title of an article in the Canadian Quill & Quire: The online retailer currently ships orders from a few large warehouses located in low-cost states. Now that Amazon will be charging sales tax, it can legally set up smaller distribution centres closer to more populous urban areas in states such as New Jersey, Texas, and Virginia. Two new distribution centres planned for California will service the Los Angeles and San Francisco areas, dramatically cutting down delivery times. In an article for Slate, Farhad Manjoo writes about why this should be a concern for bricks-and-mortar retailers: Amazon’s new goal is to get stuff to...

How dumb is this!  When your market is diminishing, and your revenues are diminishing, just go ahead and refuse opportunities to make money.  The booksellers won't hurt Amazon, they will only hurt themselves.  From Publishers Weekly: Earlier this year when Houghton Mifflin Harcourt announced a licensing agreement with Amazon to publish and distribute all adult titles from Amazon Publishing’s New York office under the newly created New Harvest imprint, independent bricks-and-mortar booksellers as well as the nation’s two largest chains, Barnes & Noble and Books-A-Million, said that they would not carry them in their stores. Among other reasons for the ban, they...

They’re nowhere near as big as Tor, but the Bookseller reports that Duncan Baird Publishers, a UK publisher of illustrated mind, body, and spirit and cookery books, has announced it will be removing restrictive digital rights management (DRM) from 150 of its current and 80 future e-book titles in order to provide a better experience for readers. It is not clear from the Bookseller piece what percentage of Duncan Baird’s overall catalog this represents. Duncan Baird is writing to authors to tell them of its decision, which has met with mixed response. “There are some authors...

The Bookseller reports that, after a closed beta that lasted a lot longer than originally promised, the Pottermore website based around the Harry Potter books has finally fully opened to the public. The site began taking on new users very early Saturday morning, intentionally opening at a time of low demand, but even as the day went on, Pottermore CEO Charlie Redmayne said that traffic rates were not “anywhere near a level that we are concerned about.” The reason for the extended closed beta was to get the site ready to handle the expected high traffic, and Redmayne...

From the press release: Berlin, 13 February 2012, www.corporate.txtr.com – Foyles, Britain’s world renowned bookseller, launches a brand new eBook service together with eReading apps on Android and iOS, under the name‘Foyles powered by txtr’. txtr is a leading eReading solutions provider on numerous branded smartphones, tablets and PCs. Through its partnership with Foyles, txtr adds more focus on the UK eBook market in 2012. The eBook shop is operated jointly by the marketing and merchandising teams of txtr and Foyles. Sam Husain, Foyles’ Chief Executive, comments: “At Foyles we are very excited by the developments in reading and bookselling afforded by...

Here's a part of an excellent, and long, article in American Bookselling Association's Bookselleing this Week.: The best approach to promoting e-books is multiple approaches — feature them in general and targeted electronic and print newsletters, advertise online and in-store, train staff, and “just be relentless”— is the collective opinion of booksellers who recently talked to Bookselling This Week about e-book marketing — Paul Hanson of Village Books, Christie Olson Day at Gallery Bookshop & Bookwinkle’s Children’s Books, and Pete Mulvihill of Green Apple Books. One of the key elements of a multifaceted approach according to Paul Hanson, the community outreach director at Village...

Alison Baverstock, author of The Naked Author, a guide to self-publishing, has written a lengthy feature on The Bookseller looking at the self-publishing field. In the introduction, she writes: At a time when traditional book sales are falling and bookshops are closing, self-publishing offers a valuable opportunity to promote wider engagement with reading and writing. Writers who have experimented are developing skills and competencies that will make them both more demanding of future investors and better equipped to manage alone. This genie will not go back in the bottle. To begin with basics,...

From Bookselling this Week.  Here's a snippet: Matt Norcross, the co-owner of Petoskey, Michigan’s McLean & Eakin Booksellers, recently talked to Bookselling This Week about his store’s strategies for e-book and online sales promotions — some successful, and others that needed a little tweaking. The overall result of McLean & Eakin’s promotional efforts has been solid online sales, Norcross said. “But there hasn’t been a single, real game-changer. It’s a lot of little things that have had an effect.” To promote e-book sales, McLean & Eakin advertises their availability online and in-store. Two efforts in particular have caught ...

The Bookseller Group has joined with other publishing organizations in the UK to formally request that the nation's Competition Commission investigate Amazon's proposed purchase of The Book Depository. The Bookseller's managing director explained that his company feels it will give Amazon too much control over the marketplace: Nigel Roby, m.d of The Bookseller Group, said: "It is not that TBD's acquisition creates a sudden, new, anti-competitive position; it is rather that it is the straw that broke the camel's back. If Amazon is in a stronger position to demand better terms from publishers, this could also have a knock-on effect for...

The Bookseller has some interesting coverage of the London Book Fair, but I don’t have time right now to go over all of it. I’ll focus on the one bit that just leaped out at me. A number of execs—David Shelley of Little, Brown, Richard Mollet of the Publishers Association, and Stephen Page from Faber—explained that fighting online piracy is costing publishers a bundle, and is one of the reasons publishers cannot afford to raise e-book royalty rates as some publishers have been requesting. In the FutureBook blog, Philip Jones notes that there was some skepticism from the audience, and also...

Here's the shortlist: Best use of social media Waterstone's on Twitter, Waterstone's New Voices, Midas PR for Harlequin Mills and Boon Penguin Facebook & Twitter campaigns, Penguin Books Vintage Podcasts, Vintage Publishing   Best app/enhanced eBook/interactive book 1,000 Ultimate Experiences, Lonely Planet Malorie Blackman's My CriBaby, Random House Children's Books The Three Little Pigs app, Nosy Crow Echo Bazaar, Failbetter Games Chris Ryan Extreme, Hodder & Stoughton The Good Pub Guide, Random House Solar System for iPad, Faber and Faber Ltd / Touch Press LLP The Heart and the Bottle App for iPad, HarperCollins Children’s Books Guinness World Records - at your fingertips, Guinness World Records Dinosaurs Alive! Carlton Publishing Group   Best digital marketing campaign...