March 25th, 2012
Destroying paperbacks instead of recirculating them is a curious and wasteful vestige of the days when most pocket books were sold on newsstands alongside magazines. Magazines are topical – they have little resale value. Books do. But freight and logistics costs mean that pulping paperbacks is not necessarily as wasteful as it first appears.
March 25th, 2012
I assume that on October 2, 2005 Anthony Federico really did die “peacefully at home” of a heart attack before the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) could lay charges against him. He was only 46 years old.
January 4th, 2012
How I wish that were a compliment. It likely would have been in 2004 when Best Buy was named “Company of the Year” by Forbes. Today it’s an insult. Or a threat. Or a doom-filled prediction.
October 4th, 2011
Thinking of the Amazon.com Kindle Fire as an iPad killer doesn’t illuminate the issue of how tablets and e-readers are impacting the future of publishing. Fire is aimed first at Barnes & Noble and its Nooks, and to a much lesser extent, at every other hardware company that thinks it might succeed in the tablet space….
July 20th, 2011
Borders is dead. The post-mortems abound. Some blame management. Some blame fate. Most just muse. The first Borders store was launched forty years ago by brothers Tom and Louis Borders while studying at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. In 2009 Borders had sales of $2.8 billion from over 500 stores and nearly 20,000 staff. I’d call…