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...

In the “it doesn’t only happen on Wall Street” department, the Wall Street Journal is reporting that the bankrupt Borders bookstore chain expects to hand out $8.3 million in executive bonuses in 2011 as part of its bankruptcy proposal. 70% of the recipients of a $7.1 million bonus package that makes up the bulk of the award have been with the company for less than 18 months, and many joined less than a year ago. Saddled with leases on big stores, Borders has said it will try to get out of bankruptcy by August or September....

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...

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...