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Borders Expands Games and Toys
In an interview with PW earlier this fall, Borders CEO Mike Edwards said that as more books are sold in digital formats, retailers need to redeploy the space they have used to sell trade titles. At Borders that has meant adding more educational toys and games and branded books.
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NECBA's Holiday Top 10+
'Tis the season for top 10 lists. But this fall the New England Children's Booksellers Advisory Council just couldn't cut off its biannual selection of the season's best. So it is featuring 11 middle-grade and young-adult fiction titles culled from galleys and ARCs by booksellers throughout the region.
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Indigo Sales Rise Despite Weak Book Results
Indigo Books & Music's strategy of relying less on printed books was evident in the second quarter as Canada's largest bookstore chain reported that it had strong gains in its digital, gift, and toy businesses, while its core book business "experienced a challenging quarter against a very strong line up of titles in the same period last year." Overall, Indigo revenue rose 3.8%, to C$214.8 million, and the company had a net loss of C$1.8 million compared to earnings of C$2.2 million in last year's second quarter.
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Borders Signs with Chegg, Expands Children's Offerings
Borders continues to expand its offerings through strategic partnerships both in-store and online. Today it announced a partnership with Chegg.com, which will serve as the sole provider of textbook rentals through Borders.com. The arrangement, part of the new Borders Textbook Marketplace, complements the company's current offering of 1.4 million new and used textbooks.
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Regional Trade Shows Live for Another Day
Despite the nine regional bookseller organizations continually revamping their fall trade shows/conferences to meet their members' changing needs, bookseller attendance declined at many of this year's shows, or didn't make up for drops in 2009.
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NE Mobile Book Fair For Sale
In the past two years, two of the Boston area's iconic bookstores have changed hands, Harvard Book Store in Cambridge in fall 2008 and Wellesley Booksmith just two months ago. Yesterday, New England Mobile Book Fair in Newton Highlands became the third to go on the shopping block.
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Rainy Day Books Celebrates 35 Years
With Rainy Day Books celebrating its 35th anniversary today, bookseller Geoffrey Jennings, son of store founder and current owner, Vivien Jennings, insisted that the secret to store's longevity is simply that they are doing what they've always done since his mother opened a 450-square-foot used paperback bookstore in Fairway, Kans. in 1975: sell books.
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New Children's Bookstores to Open in Mass., Wash.
At both ends of the country, two new children's bookstores are about to open their doors. Nancy Oliver is just one month away from opening Wit and Whimsy, a children's bookstore in Marblehead, Mass. And The Bookworm Burrow will open in Bellingham, Wash., on November 16, focusing on picture books, both new and used.
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Borders Outsourcing Call Center, Keeping DC
Contrary to some media reports yesterday, Borders said it is not closing its distribution center in Tennessee. A spokesperson said the retailer is in the process of outsourcing its customer call center, located on the same "campus" as the distribution center, a process that should be completed by December 23. The distribution center will remain open.
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Six U.K. Publishers Sign with Trafalgar Square
Trafalgar Square Publishing in Chicago, the distribution arm of IPG that represents U.K. and Australian presses, has signed six houses from the other side of the pond and will start distributing their titles January 1. Among them is the 10-year-old British subsidiary of Grove/Atlantic, Atlantic Books UK.
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Obituary: John Olsson, Founder of Olsson's Books & Records
Olsson's Books & Records founder John Olsson died last Thursday. A Washington native and graduate of Catholic University, Olsson began working in retail for Discount Records in Washington in 1958 and stayed until 1972 when he opened his own record store. He eventually added books to the mix. At its height, Olsson's had nine book and music stores in the Washington, D.C., metro area with sales over $16 million and 200 employees. Thirty-six years after the independent chain opened, it went into bankruptcy in fall 2008 and closed all of its locations.
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Unchained Tour Barnstorms For Georgia's Indies
George Dawes Green—poet, novelist, and son of Georgia's St. Simon's Island—believes that "everyone's had enough of the Internet." As proof, he can point to the success of the Moth, the storytelling series he founded in New York in 1997, which has spawned franchises in a handful of cities across the country (L.A., Detroit, Chicago, Atlanta) and, just this year, in Berlin, Germany.
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Obry Named MBA Director
Carrie Obry, an acquisitions editor at Llewellyn Worldwide in suburban St. Paul, Minn., has been named the new executive director of the Midwest Booksellers Association. Obry will replace Susan Walker, and will assume her new responsibilities on Dec. 27.
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Print Books Still BMOC
E-books and e-readers may be making headlines off campus, but a new study by OnCampus Research, a division of the National Association of College Stores, reaffirmed last fall's OnCampus Student Watch study that 74% of college students prefer print. According to the study taken by 627 college students earlier this month, only 13% purchased an e-book within the past three months. And just over half, or 56%, did so because it was required for class.
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Judge Halts Massachusetts "Harmful to Minors" Law
A federal judge yesterday halted the implementation of a Massachusetts law that would ban certain works from the Internet and punish distributors of works deemed to be "harmful to minors" deeming it overly broad and in violation of the First Amendment. Signed into law this past April, the statute made anyone who operates a Web site or communicates through an electronic listserv criminally liable for nudity or sexually related material deemed harmful to minors, and subjected violators to a $10,000 and to up to five years in prison. The decision comes after a group of booksellers, advocates and trade associations sued the state in July.
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PGW Adds 5 Clients; Hal Leonard Goes With Login Canada
Publishers Group West is adding five new distribution clients this fall and winter, including one next week, the U.K.-based startup Visual Editions, which it will represent in both the U.S. and Canada. Visual Editions's first list includes a new novel by Jonathan Safran Foer, Tree of Codes.
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Fire Petal Books Closes Its Doors
Three-month-old Fire Petal Books in Centerville, Utah, a suburb of Salt Lake City, became the latest children's bookstore casualty this year. This spring former Gibbs Smith associate editor Michelle Witte used social media to raise funds to open the bookstore. But when her fundraising efforts fell short of her $40,000 goal, she scaled back her events plans and went ahead with opening the store.
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College Bookstores Head Back to Class
With Barnes & Noble College Booksellers, Follett Higher Education Group, and Nebraska Book Company all pushing textbook rental, not to mention online players like Chegg.com and BookRenter.com, 2010 is shaping up to be the year of the rented textbook.
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Texas Says Amazon Owes $269 Million in Taxes
Amazon has fought long and hard to avoid collecting sales tax in states where it believes it does not have nexus, and for the most part has been successful. But in its quarterly filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission Friday morning, the online retailer reported that in September Texas issued an assessment saying that Amazon owed the state $269 million for uncollected sales tax for the December 2005 to December 2009 period. In the filing, it wasn’t clear why Texas determined that Amazon should have collected sales tax, and Amazon stated that, "we believe that the State of Texas did not provide a sufficient basis for its assessment and that the assessment is without merit. We intend to vigorously defend ourselves in this matter."
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ABFFE Earns Injunction in Alaska
Booksellers, librarians and others won an injunction on Thursday in Federal District Court in Alaska to Senate Bill 222, which made anyone who operates a Web site that features content deemed "harmful to minors" criminally liable.
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