In my recent counter-tirade against the emotional outbursts that booksellers are frequently guilty of when they should be discussing retail strategies, I mentioned that the last time I contacted a local bookstore to offer feedback on what I want as a customer, I was ignored. I thought it might be nice to publish that email [...]
booksellers
The biggest threat to local bookstores? Crazy booksellers and their fanboys
Last week, Amazon tried to train consumers to openly treat local retail stores as showrooms for Amazon merchandise. It was a ballsy but ethically shaky move; I believe customers who participated helped Amazon steal resources and sales from competitors for very little compensation. It was, at the very least, retail dirty pool. But then—even though [...]
Unbridled has 25 books for 25 cents each. The catch? It’s through Google Ebooks.
There’s a great sale going on right now from Unbridled Books. Unfortunately you’ll have to go through Google, a company that hasn’t worked out the kinks when it comes to ebook purchases. (Update: the sale has ended, but the user experience is still relevant, especially if you plan on buying Google Ebooks in the future.)
We’re doing just fine, says Kobo to its Borders customers
If you own a Kobo, don’t worry about what’s going to happen to your ebooks, Kobo announced yesterday in a blog post. Kobo handles all ebook sales for Borders, not the other way around, so no matter what happens to Borders in the U.S. there will still be a Kobo for the foreseeable future. Borders [...]
Writers, readers, publishers, and the desire to know everything at once
I like infoporn. I love to pore over traffic charts for websites, or look at survey numbers from opinion polls, or sit back and marvel at a really good graph, which is infoporn’s centerfold. One area where the data-crunching promise of personal computing has delivered is in capturing, assembling, and displaying this kind of labor-intensive [...]
Can you use Twitter to sell books?
Everyone who writes or publishes wants to know how to use Twitter as a promotional tool to drive sales, and to that end the British book reading website Lovereading–sort of the ugly UK cousin to Goodreads, only with a smaller membership and more directly tied to big publishing houses–just completed a survey of members to [...]