District of Columbia

With the number of indie bookstores in the US growing every year, no one can argue that they are on the rise. B&N may be closing stores left, right, and center, but indies are doing great. That is why I found myself deeply confused when  I read this bit on The Bookseller yesterday:

Standing in this beautiful new Foyles store to launch ALLi's Authors For Bookstores campaign, for a moment we can fool ourselves that reports of the decline of bricks-and-mortar bookshops are greatly exaggerated.

The three major publishing houses charged with e-book price-fixing have reached a settlement collectively worth $69 million with nearly all state attorneys general, the District of Columbia, and some American territories. Under the agreement, which was announced late Wednesday and still must be approved by the court, the Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins, and Simon & Schuster will award consumers monetary compensation if they purchased e-books from those publishing companies between April 1, 2010 and May 21, 2012.

Amazon has created an interactive map that classifies each US state as "red" or "blue" based on the number of Republican or Democratic books that were purchased there.

If the map is any indication of how the elections will go, the Republicans are in for a sweeping victory, as the only "blue" states based on book purchases are New York, Vermont, Massachusetts and Rhode Island. The District of Columbia has also fallen under the "blue" category.

U.S. libraries are struggling to get up to speed with the new way of reading books -- in digital format on e-readers, librarians and others say.

The Washington Post
reported Saturday that in Maryland, for example, the state's libraries doubled their total of copyright e-books available to fewer than 10,000 titles in the past two years, while the number of e-book checkouts statewide nearly quadrupled to 266,000. The District of Columbia library system witnessed the number of people using their Kindles, Nooks and iPads to download books grow 116 percent from 2010 to 2011, the newspaper said

Books-A-Million Inc. is ready to snap up some former employees of bankrupt rival Borders.

Birmingham-based Books-A-Million issued a press release Tuesday encouraging all former Borders employees to apply for positions. Borders stores closed in July.

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