HMV executives are meeting with City analysts today to unveil some new strategies for Waterstone’s to improve business, which HMV hopes will improve the bookstore chain’s net profit margin in the short term to 2-3% and in the medium term to 3-4%. The big changes Waterstone’s has in mind include a new e-book store to launch by May, a repositioning of range, a greater focus on local promotions, increasing non-book sales from 6% to 10% by 2013, and making the most of Borders transfer sales opportunities, as £60m of sales from Borders up for grabs in locations overlapping with Waterstone’s. […]
News
President Obama Catapults Prairie Lights Bookstore into Health Care Spotlight
Iowa City independent bookstore Prairie Lights was vaulted into the national spotlight yesterday after President Barack Obama’s speech about health care singled the bookstore out as an example of a small business that would benefit from tax credits that would help them cover the cost of insurance for their employees. “This is a small business that’s been offering coverage to their full-time employees for the last twenty years,” Obama said about the 32-year-old store. “Last year their premiums went up 35%, which made it a lot harder for them to offer the same coverage. Starting now, small business owners like…the […]
As April 1 Loan Deadline Looms, Borders Looks to Expand Digital Division
With 10 days to go until majority stakeholder Pershing Square Capital Management decides whether Borders should finally make good on the $42.5 million loan that’s already been renegotiated three times before, expect to see a lot more speculation from analysts and journalists about the book retailer’s ability to survive. One analyst, Lou Kasman of Marketing/Management Associates LLC, told AnnArbor.com “I don’t see strong cash flow, so meeting debt is questionable. Whether the lenders will change payment requirements is the question.” Turnaround consultant Jim McTevia is much more blunt: “Borders is a classic example of a company that is struggling for […]
Briefs
Finally, a day this week without headline news… Among other items, the schedule for this year’s PEN World Voices Festival has been announced. Slate has an interesting video on how easy, and inexpensive, it was to schedule a 30-second ad to run on national television via Google’s TV advertising program. The point is that you can reach television-scale audiences for hundreds of dollars and up. (Starbucks ad must be endured first….)Slate Consistent with their previous position, the Authors Guild advised members regarding recent amendment letters from Random House and HarperCollins “appear to be going to virtually all authors who have […]
Posner Admits that His Book Copies Passages
Continuing to own the author retraction beat (thankfully without broad value judgments about the entire industry), the AP reports an admission from Gerald Posner that his fall 2009 book MIAMI BABYLON includes passages that come from Frank Owen’s CLUBLAND. Posner blamed faulty research methodology, and concedes “if you use something from another book, a statement from another book, it needs to be in quotations, or if you take something and put it in your own syntax and grammar, you still need to cite it.” He adds, “without going through every line I can’t be 100 percent sure, but I think […]
Pondering Good Faith In Newspapers
Embarrassing errors in books is red meat to the New York Times in the same way that sloppy articles about book publishing are reliable grist (and often gristle) for Lunch readers. It was the Times that correctly and laudably first exposed author of Last Train from Hiroshima Charles Pellegrino’s errors on February 21 in a prominent page one article that was surely read by far more people than the 7,000 or so who had purchased the book prior to Holt’s announced cessation of publication. Today they circle back to remind readers of the paper’s general contempt for book publishers. You’ve […]