The French state has launched its latest battle against change and reality with an attack on Amazon, with Aurélie Filippetti, the Minister for Culture and Communication in the embattled government of President Francois Hollande, castigating the U.S. giant for “dumping” in France. And tellingly, she had to use the Anglicism for the practice, despite endless initiatives from her own department and elsewhere to stamp out Franglais in France. Labeling Amazon the “destroyer” of bookshops, Filippetti claimed that the company abuses its position to artificially lower book prices to create a situation of quasi-monopoly, only to raise them again once competition is extinguished. The positive...

By Michael Weinstein There’s been a great deal of conjecture lately about the future of the bookstore: What will happen to the B&N stores (especially if they do plan to reduce the number of stores)? What about independent bookstores? Will Amazon crush bricks-and-mortar stores out of existence? Oh, lordy, will there even be such a thing as a bookstore!?!? Not surprisingly, this all made me think of a song. Under time pressure to have a song for the first Earth Day concert in 1970, the great Tom Paxton created the gold standard for songs about ecology when he wrote “Whose Garden Was...

An image has been making the rounds on Reddit of this clever bookshop sign, spotted on the door of The Albion Beatnik in Oxford. Reaction seems to be mixed; some people see such gimmicks as incredibly pretentious. Others are more sanguine and feel, as I do, that it's meant to be a little tongue in cheek, and that if it works, more power to them. Buried amongst the comments are some other gems, including this bookmark giveaway that another reader reported spotting: "Please use this free bookmark wisely. Do not leave it in the rain, nor throw it at your enemy. Eschew...

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...

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...