The Bookseller has a brief report on a London roundtable in which some publishers and booksellers sounded a warning about library e-book lending. Waterstones m.d. James Daunt said that library e-lending could be disruptive to bricks-and-mortar booksellers. “If you can download a book for free and read it, why would you want to own it?” Daunt further noted that booksellers have had things “extremely easy” for a long time, and have lost focus on “the basic discipline of retailing.” He suggested that there is an opportunity for booksellers to learn to improve their financial focus and learn to run...

Publishing consultant Mike Shatzkin’s latest column is a look at the motives behind Amazon’s competitive behavior, and how it might end legacy publishing. Perhaps the most interesting thing here is that Shatzkin spends the first half of the post giving the devil his due, explaining why Amazon has been looking so good to so many people with manuscripts they want to get out there. If you’ve got the manuscript in hand and you have a choice between [spending months to go from manuscript to published book and earning lower royalties] and having books to show your...

What will the publishing industry look like if all physical bookstores go the way of Borders? Publishing-industry observer Mike Shatzkin doesn’t know, but he thinks publishers shouldn’t want to find out for as long as possible. Some publishers report that the growth rate of e-book sales seems to be tapering off, However, other publishers report that their own e-book growth rate continues. And as more e-books sell, physical book sales go by the wayside—and with them go the bookstores that are selling them. UK analysts, as reported in the Guardian, predict a 40% decline in all “high street” brick-and-mortar...

PaidContent reports that the US’s second-largest bookstore chain, Books a Million, is following in the footsteps of Barnes & Noble and proclaiming it will not stock Amazon-published titles in its brick-and-mortar stores. It’s not clear whether, like Barnes & Noble, they will sell the titles online. Books a Million sells a version of the Nook as its own e-reader. There’s a Books a Million store in Joplin, Missouri, and I stopped by it a few months ago. I wasn’t particularly impressed. Unlike Barnes & Noble, the store does not offer free wifi for its customers—you have to pay for...

The Authors Guild blog has an interesting piece looking at Amazon’s growth in light of a decline in antitrust enforcement. For background, it brings up the Bloomberg Businessweek story I covered the other day, it moves on to excerpt a piece in Harpers by Barry Lynn that compares Amazon to the current state of other monopolized markets, such as the chicken-raising industry: Mr. Lynn makes the case that Amazon’s dominance isn’t just a story of an industry disrupted by online commerce and digital upheaval, it’s about the abandoning of New Deal era protections of retailers in...

Barnes & Noble has announced it will not be carrying Amazon-published titles in its stores. B&N chief merchandising officer Jaime Carey issued a statement saying that the company was taking a stand against “Amazon’s continued push for exclusivity”, and that B&N didn’t get many requests for Amazon titles anyway. So, Carey said, if B&N customers want Amazon titles, they’ll just have to order them online at bn.com. Um, what? Look, guys, if you’re going to take a principled stand, go all the way. Decline to carry the titles on your web store too. I’m sure there are plenty...

A couple of more people have weighed in on the controversy over Amazon’s price-check app that I mentioned a couple of days ago. Slate’s Farhad Manjoo has been ruffling some feathers with a column in which he first berated Amazon for its callousness in stealing business from brick-and-mortar competitors—then took Russo to task for focusing on the harm to bookstores rather than brick-and-mortar retail in general. Rather than focus on the ways that Amazon’s promotion would harm businesses whose demise might actually be a cause for alarm (like a big-box electronics store that hires...

Whether it will ever be great again or not, Barnes & Noble seems to be trying to survive by imitating Amazon. An article on Time explains that B&N is adding more shopping categories to its bn.com website, including Home and Gift, Consumer Electronics, Arts and Crafts, Toys and Games, and Baby. The items in these new categories will mostly be provided by third-party vendors, with B&N taking a sales commission on each item it sells. This seems to be an example of playing to one’s strengths—thanks to Nook e-book sales, the bn.com website seems to be one of...

On the Bookseller blog, UK bookstore owner Tim O’Kelly looks at the impending rise of e-books and fall of bookstores, the purchase of The Book Depository by Amazon and the general upheaval in the publishing industry and calls for action to strengthen publishing and slow down bookstores’ demise. What action does he call for? Bundling the e-book with sales of the print book. A concern might be that if the e-book was part of a package and not paid for, sales would be lost. However it's clear that the reverse would be true. Very few people...

The Boston Herald looks at the decision bookstores have to make over whether to carry printed books from the new publishing imprint Amazon has launched. Dana Brigham, co-owner of Brookline Booksmith, an independent bookseller in Brookline, has doubts about carrying books bound by Amazon at her Coolidge Corner shop. “They are a huge competitor, and they don’t collect sales tax, giving them an unfair advantage,” she said. “We’ll have to think about it.” These concerns aren’t new, of course. In July, I covered one bookstore owner’s firm commitment not to...

Brooklyn based Melville House Publishing has launched a new program, HybridBooks, that lets a customer scan a QR code printed on the back of a book to access supplemental material in digital format. Here's a sample of the related content, which it calls "illuminations," for the novella "THE DUEL by Giacomo Casanova." The New York Observer has more details: "For example, The Illumination for the HybridBook version of Anton Chekhov's The Duel contains an essay on dueling by Thomas Paine, poems by Lord Byron, philosophy by Nietzsche, an anti-dueling church sermon, an argument in favor of dueling by a U.S. Senator, and...

When Borders announced liquidation last week, there was a brief glimmer of hope that thirty of the stores might still be saved under a deal with Books-A-Million. That hope is now gone, with BAM's CEO telling newspapers that his company couldn't reach a satisfactory deal with Borders in time (some of the stores had already started going-out-of-business sales). However, BAM may independently lease some of the store locations Borders leaves behind, like the former Borders store at Huntington Mall in Barboursville, West Virginia. Via Shelf Awareness (Photo: markhillary) ...