Special Occasions in Winston-Salem, NC, “one of the largest black-owned bookstores between Washington and Atlanta,” will close in late May after 27 years in business. Owners Miriam and Ed McCarter attribute it to “the weak economy and competition from e-books and online booksellers.”
News-Record
The Boulder Book Store will charge fees of between five and ten dollars to attend most of their author events in the future–and will give attendees five dollars off the purchase price of the books featured at those events. marketing and promotions manager Stephanie Schindhelm says, “We want to encourage people to spend their money locally and to help support the author.”
Owner David Bolduc told customers by e-mail, “More and more, we compete with other bookstores vying to host popular authors. Publishers place certain expectations on us when we host events, and so in order to continually attract authors, we must fulfill these expectations. Oftentimes, in return for sending an author to a bookstore, publishers expect us to attract a certain number of people and sell a certain number of books.”
Boulder Daily Camera
Borders is now officially looking into a security breach that it has allegedly known about for some time, according to anonymously-posted employee comments: whether customer personal data was exposed on a website that apparently contained information about its Rewards Plus loyalty program. The website, operated by marketing firm Brierly+Partners (which was hired to design and implement the Rewards program) was removed from public access, but before then employees (or anyone with a BR or BR+ card handy) could conceivably plug in the numbers, run a search, retrieve data and edit it as they saw fit.
Borders spokeswoman Mary Davis confirmed in an email to AnnArbor.com “we take the security of our members’ information very seriously and are currently investigating the situation,” adding that the website had been taken offline and is “no longer accessible externally.”
Newtonville Books outside of Boston has set a firm target of at least 500 dues-paying members before they can renew their lease, which expires next year. The program was announced previously, but the target is new. Owner Jaime Clarke says 266 people have pledged to support the store so far. “We need to know if what we provide is of consequence to the neighborhood,” Clarke said. “There’s no hard feelings if it’s not, but we don’t want to renew the lease for another five or 10 years if we’re just seen as a place to get cheap books.”
Globe