Booksellers Blog

I haven’t yet gotten a copy of Ted Striphas‘ new book, THE LATE AGE OF PRINT (978-0-231-14814-6, Columbia University Press), though I would very much like to read it.  Striphas argues that printed material (books, magazines) are both at once dying and thriving. Scott Esposito at the always-excellent blog The Quarterly Conversation has an intriguing [...]

I read a post this morning that floored me.  It was written by someone who is not in the book world, and only a small portion is about books. But it crystallizes one of the biggest problems facing independent bookstores right now. Sally McKenzie, a retail and e-commerce consultant, was browsing for books at Powell’s [...]

How much success is a result of being somewhere first? I’ve been thinking about this quite a bit in relation to bookselling.. Why did Amazon.com succeed? If you were watching in the early days (I was), you will remember that it was the first site where you could find book reviews from “real” people. There [...]