It is arguably the biggest sin of the deeply flawed world of publishing. Year in and year out students are charged exorbitant prices for the textbooks that they have to have. With the average shelf life of a textbook being 2 years the publishers have a built in dependency that borders on criminal. The schools and universities are not, like the students, innocent victims. They are complicit in this madness.If the open access movement or the digitization crowd ever needed something to rally around the textbook trade would be the place to start.The advent of buying used books online has...
An Issue Point With The Harry Potter Book: Some Copies Missing Pages
At least 200 people across the country who bought "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows" over the weekend received copies that "have printing errors that include missing pages." 30pp. to be exact in one copy.The Seattle PI reports at least three of the QFC supermarkets in the Puget Soundreported trouble with Harry. "Printing and distributing 12 million copies of a book is a Herculean task, and it is not surprising at all that some would have printing errors," Scholastic said in a statement Monday morning.If you have one of these copies do not return it or exchange it just buy...
Eco-Libris: A Green Light in a Dark Sky
An estimated 20 million trees are cut down every year to provide books to the U.S. marketplace. Luckily, 65 percent of the 16,700 tons of paper used in the mammoth first U.S. printing of the Harry Potter finale was printed on recycled paper containing at least 30 percent post-consumer waste fiber. If it wasn't I suspect the amount of trees lost this year would be much higher.As the world continues to tilt green these numbers will no longer be acceptable. In an effort to raise awareness and replace the fallen trees Eco-Libris is asking readers to "plant a tree for...
The Interior Designer and the Bookseller
There was a short post yesterday in the Good Questions section of the Apartment Therapy New York website titled How To Start a Book Collection?The post was from an interior designer whose client has a new apartment with a lot of bookshelves and no books. There were already over 100 comments to the article when I came upon it and most were less than the kind.Their goal: A book collection that is "based on his taste, but also be a great collection of classics and aesthetically as pleasing as the work that's gone into the rest of the apartment."A fair...
Another Amazon Outgrowth: The Penny Pinchers
It is no secret that Amazon and has single-handedly corrupted the entire bookselling industry.We have lost 50% of our open bookshops since the birth of online booksellingand it almost impossible for the 50% who are left to be price competitive.Interestingly enough, while the number of open bookshops have been cut in half the amount of people calling themselves booksellers has skyrocketed.Within this tornado little cottage industries have popped up trying to capitalize on the Amazon effect.There is the whole Scoutpal culture where a PDA device and the Amazon database combine to remove much of human element from handling and pricing...