Yesterday on the bookstore industry newsletter Shelf Awareness, this remarkable proposal was floated. (My personal response is appended further down in this blogpost.)
A Solution for Capital-Starved Independent BookstoresThe following is a proposal made by Jack McKeown, former president and CEO of the Perseus Books Group and former president and publisher of the Adult Trade Group [...]

Malcolm Gladwell had this to say in a recent New Yorker:
1.
At a hearing on Capitol Hill in May, James Moroney, the publisher of the Dallas Morning News, told Congress about negotiations he’d just had with the online retailer Amazon. The idea was to license his newspaper’s content to the Kindle, Amazon’s new electronic reader. “They [...]

From Techcrunch:
Q: Has your opinion of e-readers changed?
A: I’m sure there will always be dedicated devices, and they may have a few advantages in doing just one thing. But I think the general-purpose devices will win the day because I think people just probably aren’t willing to pay for a dedicated device. You notice Amazon [...]

From today’s Publishers Weekly:
Beginning in November, Amazon will begin offering free downloads of Kindle for PC, an e-reading application that will allow consumers to download Kindle edition e-books to any PC running Windows 7, Windows XP or Windows Vista and read them on the PC. While the new application will allow Kindle owners to [...]

Being a reprint of an ABA headline from yesterday. Thanks to Fred Bubbers for the heads up.
The Board of Directors of the American Booksellers Association today sent the following letter to the US Department of Justice requesting that it investigate practices by Amazon.com, Wal-Mart, and Target that it believes constitute illegal predatory pricing that is [...]

Last night on the Indiebookman radio show, Brad mused about my perspective on eBooks. The answer is that I do not believe printed books are endangered, and I assume there will always be new developments in the distribution of information. I don’t regard eBooks as replacements for physical books, in other words: they will simply [...]

I’m working on a new book. Here’s the first chapter!
Vox Pop, Sander, and Me
Chapter One
By Andrew Laties
“Who will screw the chains? How will they screw the chains? When will they screw the chains?”
The entire email response to my book query for Screw The Chains: A Free-Jazz Improvising Radical Children’s Bookseller Gets Chewed Up And [...]

The New York Times features an article about the New York Art Bookfair today, and the display table where I’ve been working at the fair is in the lead photograph!
“World War 3 Illustrated Magazine” is the exemplar of the many books at the fair which are not to be found on the Kindle, [...]

True story: A prominent scholar spends years researching and editing a scholarly gift edition of a Victorian classic. The independent publishing house which over the course of decades has sold hundreds of thousands of this author’s elegant and popular books presents this forthcoming title to Barnes & Noble’s buyers. Barnes & Noble places an order [...]

I don’t know if this takes Tor.com out of the sphere of mainstream publishing, but it seems that this web-based branch of the big SF/F house is going POD with its titles. This kind of makes sense, as the last I heard mother ship Tor is now taking up to three years to release its [...]