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Borders Signs Deal with Wi Fi Advertising Company
Borders has reached an agreement with JiWire, a location-based mobile media company with an advertising platform, to enable companies to run ads across Borders' Wi Fi network. According to JiWire, any time a user connects to Wi Fi in any Border' locations "they will see location-targeted messages and offers from leading national brands." Under terms of the agreement,Borders will receive a piece of the advertising revenue.
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Indies Respond to RH/Wylie Showdown, Chains Stay Mum
The Authors Guild, John Sargent, and a number of independent booksellers, have all expressed their dismay over the Wylie Agency's decision to sell its forthcoming ebooks from Odyssey Editions exclusively through Amazon. But what do the two biggest bricks and mortar retailers think? No comment.
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Borders Enters Online Textbook Market; Completes Paperchase Deal
Borders has teamed with Alibris to sell new and used textbooks online through Borders Textbook Marketplace. The retailer has also completed its deal to sell Paperchase.
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Why? Publishers Answer Booksellers' Questions
Booksellers and publishers may be in the same business, but they don't always understand life on the other side of the fence. Here publishers address frequent bookseller queries about everything from book club paperbacks to a perceived dearth of middle-grade fare and age-appropriateness.
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Event Network Links Gift Shops, Customers
The concept of creating marketing "stories" for gift shops has been successful for Event Network, in San Diego, the company that has managed and supplied books and gift items to more than 60 cultural institutions and attractions in North America since 1998.
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Coalition Challenges New Massachusetts Internet Law
A coalition of organizations, including publishers and booksellers, filed suit on Tuesday to block a Massachusetts law that would ban certain works from the Internet deemed to be "harmful to minors." Signed into law this past April, and in effect as of yesterday, Chapter 74 of the Acts of 2010 makes anyone who operates a Web site or communicates through an electronic listserv criminally liable for nudity or sexually related material, if the material is found to be "harmful to minors."
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Walker to Leave MBA in January
Susan Walker, executive director of the Midwest Booksellers Association for the past 23 years, the longest-serving director of any of the regional bookseller associations, announced in a letter sent to MBA members Sunday that she is resigning her position, as of January 2011. Walker is moving to her native North Carolina by the end of January to care for her elderly parents in the Charlotte area.
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New England Reader Project Due Next Summer
Delphinium/HarperCollins is continuing its ambitious project to do a bookseller/librarian version of State by State: A Panoramic Portrait of America (Ecco), edited by Matt Weiland and Sean Wilsey, itself inspired by the WPA Guides of the 1930s, with a call for submissions for The New England Reader, due out in summer 2011. It will include essays on New York, as well as Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Rhode Island, Connecticut, and Massachusetts.
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Riggio Testifies at Trial
Barnes & Noble chairman Len Riggio took the stand Friday in the lawsuit brought against the retailer by investor Ron Burkle and defended the poison pill adopted by the company aimed at limiting Burkle, or any outside investor's, stake in the company. During his testimony, Riggio said one of his concerns about Burkle was that he would push for a takeover of Borders.
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Summer Lovers
Running an independent bookstore is a difficult business, and those booksellers who rely heavily on tourists to stay profitable face even more challenges, like weather and being a bit out of the typical publishing cycle. Still, there remains a group of store owners who have found a way to make a living selling books in tourist destinations, and the 2010 vacation season appears to be starting off fairly well
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Barnes & Noble Trial Begins
Ron Burkle's lawsuit looking to strike down Barnes & Noble's poison pill provision began in Delaware yesterday with Burkle one of the first witnesses. He testified that the provision made it impossible to talk to other shareholders and reiterated his belief that the measure was aimed at keeping the Riggio family in control of the retailer. The trial is expected to last four days. For more click here.
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Borders Meeting Set to Enhance LeBow's Power
A special shareholders meeting has been called for September 29 that will further cement Bennett LeBow's leadership of Borders. At that meeting, shareholders will be asked to approve a proposal to give LeBow's company, LeBow Gamma Limited, the right to acquire 35.1 million shares of the retailer for $2.25 per share. A second proposal will require LeBow Gamma's approval before any executive officers can be changed.
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New Children's Bookstore in Maine
Michael Curtis, owner of Union River Book and Toy Co. in Ellsworth, Maine, is the latest property owner to turn to bookselling to fill an empty storefront. However, unlike others in real estate, Curtis already had years of experience selling books: his parents owned Sherman’s Books in Bar Harbor, which turns 125 next summer.
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Tin House, Dzanc Books Aim to Help Indies
Tin House and Dzanc Books have launched separate initiatives this summer aimed at giving a little boost to sales at independent booksellers.
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Bookstores Plan Events for 'Mockingbird''s 50th
To Kill a Mockingbird may be on most elementary school students' summer reading lists, but booksellers around the country are hoping to get the classic novel on adults' summer reading radar, too--and Mockingbird's 50th anniversary on July 11 is giving them just the hook they need.
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Barnes & Noble Sees Bright Future
While Barnes & Noble chairman Len Riggio said at last week's investors conference that physical books will constitute the majority of its sales for at least the next five years, the company is investing heavily to make the transition from a bookseller to an electronic and technology retailer.
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David Kipen's Next Chapter: Bookseller
Returning to Los Angeles in April after living in Washington, D.C., for nearly five years where he was the NEA director of literature, David Kipen, former book critic for the San Francisco Chronicle, is planning to open a lending library and used- book store later this month.
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Baker & Taylor Takes Over Shopko's Book Program
Baker & Taylor is taking over the book program for Green Bay-based Shopko Stores. B&T, which already supplies music to Shopko's stores, will now be the retailer's sole supplier of books and will also provide Shopko with both field merchandising and vendor managed inventory services.
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Amazon.com Crashes
Although it isn't clear when it happened, Amazon.com appears to have crashed.
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New Indie Bookselling Model: Publish Own Handselling Favorites
Four years ago this month Susan Novotny, owner of the Book House of Stuyvesant Plaza in Albany, N.Y., looked to print-on-demand to bolster lagging store sales. With Eric Wilska, owner of the Bookloft in Great Barrington, Mass., she opened the Troy Book Makers in Troy, N.Y., in a storefront adjacent to her other bookstore, Market Block Books. Novotny and Wilska not only print books for others on the store's InstaBook machine or via offset, but bring back into print regional titles to sell in their stores--over 300 titles to date.
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