Remember that Amazon retail store rumor from a few days ago? Well, Good E-Reader has heard more from anonymous “Amazon sources close to the situation.” According to their sources, Amazon is going to roll out a retail store in Seattle within the next few months to test the waters and see if a chain of such stores could be profitable. “They intend on going with the small boutique route with the main emphasis on books from their growing line of Amazon Exclusives and selling their e-readers and tablets,” Good E-Reader’s Michael Kozlowski writes. As a small boutique,...

Don’t tell my Nook, my achey breaky Nook… Billy Ray Cyrus, singer of a particularly overplayed country song and father of Miley “Hannah Montana” Cyrus, has landed a book deal with Amazon’s publishing arm for his memoirs, GalleyCat reports. Publication date is expected to be spring 2013 in both hardcover and e-book editions. The deal was brokered by Trident Media CEO Dan Strone, who also arranged the $800,000 deal for Penny Marshall’s memoirs. As that anonymous publishing insider lamented a few weeks ago, Amazon is lining up some pretty big names for its publishing arm. What with...

As readers of my columns know, Amazon is not my favorite bookseller. It is not because Amazon doesn’t offer value or quality service; it is because I fear Amazon’s attempts to monopolize the book marketplace vertically, that is, everything from acquiring and publishing to selling exclusively. Right now consumers, especially ebookers, are happy with everything Amazon because the prices are lower, the selection is existentially broader, and the customer service is great (especially as Amazon is more interested in market share than profit from the book division). But will all that change should Barnes & Noble follow Borders into the...

On Open Salon, blogger jlsalthre posts a wry list of 25 things she learned from opening a bookstore. While most of them are observations about what kinds of people buy what kinds of print books, there are a few that show a rather pointed awareness of the electronic medium and the effects it is having: 1.  People are getting rid of bookshelves.  Treat the money you budgeted for shelving as found money.  Go to garage sales and cruise the curbs. 2.  While you're drafting that business plan, cut your projected profits in half. ...

Here's the beginning of a thoughtful article by Tim Carmody in Wired's Epicenter.  The rest of it is well worth reading: Here are two surprising holiday shopping season success stories. They’re even more surprising because they seem to directly contradict each other. First, Amazon, which has historically kept its sales figures for Kindle e-readers tightly under wraps, announced that it’s sold more than a million Kindle devices each week for the past three weeks. Priced between $79 for the new entry-level Kindle and $199 for the Kindle Fire tablet, that’s hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue every week for the Kindle division,...

From The New York Times: Facing economic gloom and competition from cheap e-readers, brick-and-mortar booksellers entered this holiday season with the humblest of expectations. But the initial weeks of Christmas shopping, a boom time for the book business, have yielded surprisingly strong sales for many bookstores, which report that they have been lifted by an unusually vibrant selection; customers who seem undeterred by pricier titles; and new business from people who used to shop at Borders, the chain that went out of business this year. Barnes & Noble, the nation’s largest bookstore chain, said that comparable store sales this Thanksgiving weekend increased 10.9...

Good article today in Melville House's Moby LIves blog.  Here's part of it: The other half of my contention is that one reason it’s gotten this way is that reporting on the industry has tended to follow trends at the cost of reporting reality. Thus, as I pointed out in a MobyLives post a few months ago, the demise of Borders was treated as a trend story, the trend being that ebooks are cooler than print books and people were thus losing interest in print books, instead of a business story, whereby Borders had simply been badly managed and all signs were...

On Publishing Perspectives, Rachel Aydt has an interesting story about a bookseller who has decided to try to make use of the Internet in an unusual way to sell more books. Roxanne Coady, owner of R. J. Julia Booksellers in Madison, Connecticut, has a personalized reading recommendation and subscription service called Just The Right Book.com. The service works by having prospective readers take a survey to find out their tastes in reading, and then the bookstore staff selecting a personalized recommendation. Survey takers can then subscribe to a tiered subscription system, with prices ranging from $85 per year for...

Got the following email from Thad McIlroy of The Future of Publishing: I thought you might get a kick out of this: http://thefutureofpublishing.com/2011/11/music-business-teach-the-book-business/ I took a Salon.com article on the death of record stores and substituted "bookstores" throughout: It's scary that it reads so convincingly. Best regards, Thad Here's the beginning: As book sales plummet and famed shops close, brave entrepreneurs are trying to reinvent the model. Is it too late? On Wednesday night, hundreds of people passed through the doors of Other Books, one of New York City’s last bookstores. Yes, there was free booze. But the young, plugged-in crowd came to celebrate, not necessarily...

The Bookseller has a feature interview with James Daunt, the new managing director of UK bookstore Waterstone’s. Daunt talks about his impressions of the future of the book and e-book, and why publishers are still important in the modern publishing landscape. Daunt thinks that we will continue to read books in multiple ways, on a number of different platforms including paper. Paper will not disappear, but we will read a lot more digitally than we have been. And with so many other distractions available on tablet devices at the swipe of a finger, books will face a challenge competing...

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...

It is becoming increasingly clear that bookshops, both chains and independents, are the first segment of the trade book publishing industry to face wrenching decisions that amount to bets on survival in this digital transition. Publishers, agents, authors, wholesalers and many others all need to respond and some have already made significant efforts to do so, but it is clear that bookshops are the facing the full thrust of this change right now. The way I see it bookshops have three choices: 1) Bet On Digital Betting on digital means much less emphasis on real bricks and mortar locations. In order to win in this space...