Bookstores

As part of the build-up to the success Small Business Saturday program (on November 30) Simon & Schuster has created a Shop Local video featuring many of the publisher’s authors “praising the role of independent booksellers as community centers,” also including shots of many well-known indie stores. This page showcases the video along with downloadable promotional banners stores can use.

American Booksellers Association ceo Oren Teicher released a statement regarding the Amazon Source initiative. He is, as you might expect, opposed to the program, though the rationale is not entirely clear. Perhaps primarily, he just doesn’t like the company: “Given Amazon’s aggressive corporate tactics and their long-standing strategy to avoid the collection of sales tax, we don’t see this new program as being at all credible.” In one part of the statement, Teicher actually laments that the new Amazon program is only available to some of the organization’s members: “Based on available information, independent bookstores in more than half the […]

After France’s second-largest book chain Chapitre announced their intention to sell all of their stores — or close any that remain unsold by next summer — the country’s publishers have been reluctant to supply it with stock, which only diminishes the value of those stores and accelerates the sale process for parent company Actissia (owned by Najafi Companies). The Bookseller picks up on an AFP report (in French) that says Hachette Livre, France’s largest publisher, is among those not shipping to the account. The company says in a statement, “The Virgin experience [Virgin Megastores in France went bankrupt earlier this […]

Among the interesting stories in Brad Stone’s just-published THE EVERYTHING STORE: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon is the chronicle of the creation of Kindle. Initiated in 2004, by the end of that year the engineers at Amazon’s Lab126 (1 = A; 26 = Z) dubbed the project Fiona. It was named after a character in Neal Stephenson’s novel THE DIAMOND AGE. It wasn’t until 2007 that Michael Cronan (who also named TiVo) came up with Kindle, “But by then [Steve Kessel’s] team was devoted to the name Fiona and the group tried, unsuccessfully, to convince Bezos to keep […]