Traditional Sales
December 28, 2015 at 12:08 pm
When it comes to the business of books – a staple of under-the-tree gifting – there are actually two Christmas stories. The first – for physical books – ramps up throughout December and ends by Dec. 25. In Canada, a typical week sees about 700,000 books sold. But, in the weeks before Christmas, that number…
December 22, 2015 at 11:22 am
Apologies to any middle children reading this. Honestly, I think you’ll be just fine. Well, sort of. But woe to the business that finds itself sandwiched in the middle! It doesn’t matter what you make or what you sell, middle market players are always in a truly bad position. I think this is even truer…
December 17, 2015 at 10:56 am
You could say I have a sentimental attachment to the chain bookstore. Growing up in an intellectually impoverished American suburb, I spent much of my free time in now-defunct locations of Borders and Barnes & Noble. I read garbage, mostly: popular history magazines, Star Trek novelizations, art tomes whose pages I scoured only for frank…
December 10, 2015 at 2:26 pm
With Islamic State militants taking greater control of strategic towns in Syria and Iraq, the publishing heartland of the Middle East is being thrown into disarray. These traditionally more literature-oriented countries have long suffered from a lack of coherent cross-border book distribution but that problem is now compounded by Isis disrupting the major arteries. But…
December 8, 2015 at 2:50 pm
On a recent Sunday afternoon, the journalist and editor Aaron Hicklin was standing among some still-empty shelves in his newly completed bookstore, One Grand, in a former mercantile building in the town of Narrowsburg, New York. In less than one week, he would open the doors to the shop, but at the moment he was…
December 7, 2015 at 11:47 am
The American city that spends the most money on books, magazines, and newspapers—Washington, D.C.—will soon be left without any chain bookstores. Despite the recent revival of the brick-and-mortar bookshop (in London, and Seattle, and even The People’s Republic of China, not to mention Washington itself), The Washington Post reports that Barnes & Noble is slated…
December 1, 2015 at 2:48 pm
Your average trade publisher is a laundry list of bad business characteristics: Consumer customers (the worst/least predictable kind of customer). Entertainment good (the worst/least predictable kind of product). A market that’s shifting increasingly to the blockbuster model (the worst/least predictable kind of market). Dominated by vendor duopolies (Amazon and B&N in the states, Amazon and…
November 10, 2015 at 2:44 pm
According to the Association of American Publishers (AAP), July was a strong month for trade publishers. In its Monthly StatShot report, the AAP reported that sales grew .3% in the trade market from January to July 2015 -- the first increase in trade sales this year. Driving that growth were double-digit increases in adult, children/YA,…
November 6, 2015
Softening sales for digital books have impacted the bottom lines at HarperCollins and Simon & Schuster, according to both companies' recent earnings reports.
November 3, 2015 at 1:13 pm
The opening of Amazon.com's first brick-and-mortar store on Tuesday proves that software is not really "eating the world," as venture capitalist Marc Andreessen put it in 2011. In his widely noted Wall Street Journal column about predatory software, Andreessen wrote: Today, the world's largest bookseller, Amazon, is a software company -- its core capability is its amazing software…
