Simon and Schuster has been on the loose lately.In January they partner with Gather.com and Borders for a nationwide literary contest that reeked of American Idol. They framed it this way "Publisher Leverages Power of Social Media to Find America's Next Great Writer"Then they go ahead and Long Tail their standard author contract so that technically a book never goes out-of-print.and now they've launched the ambitious BookVideos.tv. A "social media video site...where you can engage with the literary community on a whole new level."All the books on the BookVideos.tv website are available for sale directly from S&S. They provide you...
Research Reveals AbeBooks Driving Booksellers Crazy
Maybe that should have been the title of their latest press release.While most of the bookselling trade is going nuts over AbeBooks' new 'bookseller rating' system, which is running in beta version right now, they release this news flash:Research Reveals Baby Boomers Drive Online Used Bookselling in USBefore I get to that here is a bit about the current skirmish between the booksellers in the ABAA and AbeBooks.AbeBooks is working on a rating system for booksellers based on the star rating systems that appear at other online marketplaces. Unfortunately, this bookseller rating system has nothing to do with bookselling and...
Auction Wrap: The Sale of Annette Campbell White’s Library
Nigel Burkwood over at Bookride has the wrap up of the auction of the library Annette Campbell White held at Sotheby's in London.The Recap:The sale grossed about £1.3 million. About half a million less than the top estimates.25% of the lots did not sell.Many of the dealers present were the same one who had sold Ms Campbell the books in the first place.The London trade gossip was "that the stuff had all been bought too recently and was in less than fab condition."The attendees were mostly male though Jeannette Winterson was spotted in crowd and active.Many lots went to an...
Readings For Money and Books For Free
You get a sneaking suspicion reading Ceclia McGee's piece in the New York Times "A Way to Give Authors a Lucrative Second Platform" that the model for author readings has changed drastically and that the free in-store author reading is endangered.Many of the major publishing houses have set up in-house speakers bureaus which now hire out their authors to various groups and businesses for a fee which includes travel expenses.Why are they doing this? The publishers say "they are responding to common industry trends: fleeting tastes in mass-market books, shrinking shelf lives in bookstores, disappearing book review sections, and the...
Thoughts on the Book Pyro
Talk about an independent bookstore going up in flames. Tom Wayne just had his 15 minutes of Warholian fame. How long he will live in infamy is another story.You see Tom Wayne has decided to burn all the books he couldn't sell and hide his actions under the umbrella of protest.He was protesting "what he sees as society’s diminishing support for the printed word." He called it an "act of art."The burning of books no matter what the motivation can never be a positive. It is ultimately, a selfish act of destruction and to claim that nobody wanted them as...