Subtlety is out. Bloomberg Businessweek’s January 25th cover shows a book engulfed in flames. The book’s title? “Amazon Wants to Burn the Book Business.” A towering pile of books dominates the front page of Sunday’s NYT Business Section. The pile starts well below the fold (print edition), breaks through the section header at the top [...]
Hampton, VA – One of the nation’s leading publishers is taking the helm of the National Center for the Prevention of Community Violence (NCPCV), based in Hampton, and San Jose, CA. The National Center for the Prevention of Community Violence is the nonprofit organization founded by national gang consultant Bobby Kipper in 2010 to advance [...]
The Pew Internet and American Life Project today released a ”mini-report” on the adoption of tablets and e-readers that found the number of Americans owning tablets and e-readers nearly doubled over the holidays. The bottom line numbers represent phenomenal growth in consumer device adoption: from mid-December 2011 to early January 2012, the number of Americans owning a tablet computer rose to 19% from [...]
Powell’s Books, one of the country’s largest and most successful bookstores, will launch its Espresso Book Machine in March at its City of Books flagship store location in Portland, Ore. “We are excited to offer this service to our customers, expanding our vast inventory at the City of Books location from one million volumes [...]
Kobo Posts Record Holiday Season. Kobo has released its sales numbers for the holiday season, posting record highs. There was ten-fold increase in new customers from the company’s pre-holiday period, and the total number of registered users nearly doubled from six weeks prior. There was a 500% increase in e-gifting from November to December, and [...]
Barnes & Noble May Spin Off Nook Business. Barnes & Noble could be a very different company one year from now. Following a report in Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal that B&N is looking to sell Sterling Publishing (a process that a source told PW “is moving along”), the company disclosed Thursday morning that it is considering spinning off its [...]
Apple Hits 1 Billion Apps a Week, Starts 2012 With Focus on eBooks. As Apple celebrates its part of 1.2 billion app downloads last week, those centuries-past, paper-based tomes are the focus of the company’s first big news in 2012. While we’re sure it is hard at work on a budget iPad and a new [...]
Steve Jobs Biography and Other Hot Titles Bookstore Lures – NYTimes.com. Facing economic gloom and competition from cheap e-readers, brick-and-mortar booksellers entered this holiday season with the humblest of expectations. But the initial weeks of Christmas shopping, a boom time for the book business, have yielded surprisingly strong sales for many bookstores, which report [...]
Saturday Is ‘Take Your Child to a Bookstore’ Day. In November 2010, suspense writer and mother Jenny Milchman wrote a blog post about what how if she ever got famous she would like to start a bookstore day for kids. “We need to show our children the pleasure, not just of a story, or even [...]
Nook Tablet Reviewed: Like the Kindle Fire, But…. The Kindle Fire and the Barnes & Noble Nook Tablet are the two big players in a new category of device that has emerged in the wake of the iPad: the handheld multimedia viewer. Unlike the iPad, these devices really don’t mimic and transform the functions [...]
Amazon Announces New Kindle Format 8 for Graphics Rich eBooks | ITProPortal.com. Online retail giant Amazon has introduced a new web based format for eBooks on its Kindle e-reader device, which brings enhanced resolution for comics and children books on the device. With the new Kindle Fire tablet device, Amazon is rolling out the Kindle [...]
Lombardi Resigns as Barnes & Noble CFO. Joe Lombardi has resigned as chief financial officer of Barnes & Noble after nine years. He will remain with B&N as a “non-officer employee” until mid-2012 to assist in the transition to a new CFO. Until a permanent replacement is found Allen Lindstrom, v-p, corporate controller, will serve [...]
Books-A-Million plans to open stores at former Borders Books | PennLive.com. Books-A-Million, which sells books, toys, games, electronic accessories and DVDs, will open a store next month in the former Borders at Paxton Towne Center in Lower Paxton Township. The nation’s third-largest book retailer plans to open 40 stores, mostly in former Borders, including nine in Pennsylvania. [...]
Kobo Unveils Kobo Vox, $200 Color Tablet e-Reader. Responding quickly to Amazon’s Kindle Fire e-reading tablet, e-book retailer Kobo is releasing Kobo Vox, a seven inch, full-color, multimedia digital reading device for $200. Reminiscent of both the Kindle Fire and B&N’s NookColor, the new device runs the Android 2.3 OS and offers access to 15,000 [...]
B&N Expands Online Marketplace. Barnes & Noble is expanding its non-book offerings. The company, which already sells a variety of forms of media and entertainment, ranging from games to toys to crafts, is adding over one million new products to its online marketplace. The growth is coming [...]