After lengthy financial struggles that were often referred to but rarely made plain, the Tattered Cover Book Store’s corporate owner filed a voluntary petition for reorganization under Chapter 11’s streamlined Subchapter V in the US Bankruptcy Court for the District of Colorado. If approved by the court, the bookstore will be able to access up to $1 million in debtor-in-possession financing, “provided by a newly created entity” formed by current investors and board members Leslie Rainbolt and Margie Gart. Immediate restructuring plans include closing three of their seven stores — recently-opened locations in Denver’s McGregor Square, Westminster and Colorado Springs […]
Bookselling: Two BN Openings
The chain will open two new replacement stores in California on October 18 — one in Marina Del Rey (in a former Amazon Books space) and one in Tustin.
Texas Court Sets November 8 Hearing
The US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit in Texas has agreed to expedite oral arguments in the appeal of the preliminary injunction blocking the state of Texas’s cumbersome “READER” book banning law. (The injunction was stayed pending appeal, meaning the law is in force until further action from the appeals court.) A full schedule has the case due to be fully briefed by November 3.
Third Quarter Deals Ebb Overall, Gain At the Highest Level
Consumer book sales have continued to fall versus last year and the big pandemic highs, but are still running at their third-best level in years. (Circana Bookscan has YTD units at 527 million, down about 4 percent from 549 million units a year ago.) Meanwhile, investment by publishers in future product both aligns with and diverges from the consumer sales trend. As a reminder, Q1 deals were weak — due in large part to the strike at Harper Collins and continued conservatism at Penguin Random House — and then rebounded in Q2, helped by later dates for the book fairs, […]
Yes, AI Was Trained on Your Book
Having already assured readers that a significant body of copyrighted books were used without permission to train large language models as part of the corpus researchers call Books3, the Atlantic is now ready to collect your rage clicks with a searchable database of those titles. “Since my article appeared, I’ve heard from several authors wanting to know if their work is in Books3. In almost all cases, the answer has been yes.” They tabulated 206 works by Nora Roberts; 133 from Danielle Steel; and only 121 by James Patterson. Amusingly, the publication also wants us to know that a long […]
Stay
The US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit in Texas formally issued a temporary administrative stay of Judge Alan D. Albright’s clear and unambiguous preliminary injunction blocking implementation of Texas’s cumbersome “READER” book banning law. The court is expected to decide further on whether or not to stay the original order pending the full appeal after the issue is fully briefed in early October.