Borders had initially partnered with Amazon to serve as its online retail vendor. A year or so ago, Borders severed that relationship and made plans to start its own e-tailing presence. The beta launch is over and customers can now buy from Borders.com direct.

Shelf Awareness highlighted a New York Times article about Open Book, “the first real estate home for literary arts in the nation.” Open Book is a large facility of 55,000 square feet. It houses three different business/literary facilities:

The Loft Literary Center the largest of the three nonprofit groups that formed Open Book, offers [...]

Nicole and Jim Hayes opened up the Cafe Book store in Antioch, Illinois last month inspired by Nora Roberts’ Three Sisters Trilogy. The bookstore is designed to invoke the feeling of the bookstore in the series. The selection is small but the atmosphere is conducive to lounging.
The Hayes’ have previous small business and [...]

I had lunch with Nicole yesterday and like good bibliophiles, we stopped at Barnes and Noble. Nicole bought a book, Magic Burns by Ilona Andrews and I bought one, Compromised by Kate Noble.
Both our packages were put in clear plastic bags. Is this the future of Barnes and Noble packaging because [...]

There have long been rumors of a sale/merger of Borders and Barnes and Noble. Analysts have commented on more than one occasion that this made sense. I think publishing folks generally dislike this notion across the board. Consolidation doesn’t help sales and it certainly doesn’t help midlist authors.
But according to the [...]

There is a fascinating article available for free on the Wall Street Journal (it was pay yesterday) about changes at Borders’ stores. Borders believes it can sell more books if they are face out on the shelves than spined and therefore is cutting back on stock. It will have fewer books in store, [...]

Publishers Weekly (and every other book rag including mine now) reported that the bookstore sales for October were up again rising 8.0% to $1.10 billion in sales. Not too shabby. This is the fourth month of increased book sales. Great news because surely the October sales can't be attributed to Harry Potter [...]

My eyebrows raised a bit when I read this article on Shelf Awareness this morning. On Tuesdays, Shelf Awareness shared the policy of Rainy Day Book’s, an independent bookstore in Kansas, to refuse to stage signings and readings for authors whose websites and emails have a book purchase link [...]

The New York Times has a really interesting article about German bookselling. In Germany, there are hundreds of small bookstores that populate the business landscape. The reason for the thriving independent bookstore business is because Germany requires all bookstores to sell books at the same price, without discount.
This anti-freemarket idea is netting positive results: [...]

The U.S. Census Bureau statistics are out for August bookstore sales with sales up 9.3% to 2.286 billion. estimates that those sales are still feeling the Potter effects since the “adult hardcover sales were down 21.3 percent for the month, bringing in $93.1 million, but the children’s/YA hardcovers were up 58.6 percent, with sales [...]