Brian Cassidy

Camera Stores = Bookstores?

This is Jason Burns on the competition the Internet poses to small camera stores:So times have changed. Internet businesses are often the first place to look. [...] This mythical “support and experience” that the mom and pop [...] store provides is just not accurate. [...] It’s time to take a hard look at your approach. If your business exists on the premise of screwing your customer in the name of small town goodness, it’s time to lock your doors [...].Though the differences between camera stores and bookshops are apparent, it's the last sentence that really grabbed me. The appeal to...

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Stimulated Reading

The Written Nerd has been one of my favorite bookseller blogs for some time now. The author, Jessica Stockton Bagnulo, details her experiences working at one of NYC's best independent bookstores (including this jealousy-inducing run-in with Jonathan Lethem), all the while planning to "have a bookstore of my own in Brooklyn." Stockton recently won the $15,000 Power Up! business-plan competition sponsored by the Brooklyn Public Library in order to help bring her bookstore plans closer to fruition. And closer to fruition they are: I opened a small business money market account with the prize money, which will also be the...

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The Library in the New Age

Robert Darnton in the current New York Review of Books on the continuing importance of physical libraries and books:Information has never been stable. That may be a truism, but it bears pondering. It could serve as a corrective to the belief that the speedup in technological change has catapulted us into a new age, in which information has spun completely out of control. I would argue that the new information technology should force us to rethink the notion of information itself. It should not be understood as if it took the form of hard facts or nuggets of reality ready...

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