Paul Bogaards

Chapter 1: You stumble upon an interesting book at your neighborhood bookstore.

Chapter 2: You go home and order it from Amazon for half as much.

Chapter 9: Your favorite bookstore is bankrupt.

Booksellers call it “showrooming,” and it drives them crazy — and out of business. Barnes & Noble believes that 40 percent of its customers use the store as a place to discover and examine titles, but then buy the books online.

How might “real” bookstores fight back against their Amazonian nemesis?

The National Book Awards ceremony is getting the Oscars treatment, reports the New York Times. In addition to adding a red carpet, hiring a DJ and inviting celebs like, ahem, Molly Ringwald, the awards board appears to be making a push toward higher-profile nominees, noting, as per the report: “Fame or obscurity, small press or large, should have no bearing on your deliberations."

In addition, as per the Times' Leslie Kaufman, the finalists (Junot Díaz, Dave Eggers, Louise Erdrich, Ben Fountain and Kevin Powers) were announced on Morning Joe. —Brian Howard

 

 

A few weeks ago, Paul Bogaards did something few good publicists, let alone the head of public relations at New York’s most patrician publishing house, would suggest their client do. In the early hours of Jan. 24, the 51-year-old executive director of publicity and marketing for Knopf posted “The Hierarchy of Book Publishing,” a top-100 ranking of his colleagues and competitors, on his personal Tumblr. Far from a fawning Forbes-style list, Mr. Bogaards’s blog post was a gallows-humor-inflected schematic of an industry in collapse. Books are so screwed, it suggested, that a

On Wednesday, Oprah Winfrey announced on her TV show that Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road,” published in 2006 by the Knopf Group of Random House Inc., is her second book club pick of the year and just her third overall selection since September 2005 and the controversial “A Million Little Pieces” by James Frey. Oprah’s Book Club was established in September 1996, and since then, her selections have pulled some obscure works onto best-seller lists. However McCarthy’s book is a relatively safe bet for Oprah, already receiving much national acclaim. “The Road” is on the USA Today Bestseller List, a National Book Critic’s

More Blogs