Libraries’ main brand.
These are pairs of groups of books wrapped and meant to be checked out and unwrapped at home. With RFID they can be checked out while still wrapped, and without the patron knowing what they are (unless they look at the checkout screen or slip). – Todd Mecklem.
“An average Borders superstore stocked around 140,000 titles at immense cost, but if a customer craves selection, no store can compete with the long tail of the Internet. Maybe more crucially for Borders, the assortment of titles that provided the key to its identity didn’t give it a competitive edge over Barnes & Noble. Mark Evans, a director of merchandising strategy and analytics at Borders until 2009, says that the company surveyed customers to understand why Barnes & Noble, with its slimmer selection, continued to clobber them in terms of year-over-year growth, average sales per store, and even the number of books sold at each location. ‘Customers didn’t notice our larger assortment of books,’ Evans laments. ‘They didn’t care.’” – From The End of Borders and the Future of Books.
The article offers an interesting analysis of why Borders failed even though some of its stores were profitable and other booksellers remain so.
“Little Printer lives in your front room and scours the Web on your behalf, assembling the content you care about into designed deliveries a couple of times a day.”
Coppola went to the San Francisco library, checked out books on the Mafia, and found a deeper theme for the material.
From The Godfather Wars, an article about the making of the film.
The director researching at the library struck me as neat and from another era.
The Independent Printing Resource Center in Portland is hosting a 24 hour reading of Moby Dick starting at 17:00 on 11 Feb 2011. I like the explanation of why they’re doing it:
When first published, Moby Dick was a near flop. It remains a totem to the importance of small, independent publishing for keeping alive great works ahead of their time.
It starts at Powell’s and moves to a mystery location from there.
For another Starck project, in Dallas, Mr. Wine used black paper to wrap the 2,000 vintage books he picked for their “distressed edges,” so they could be displayed backward.
Read more about “book solutions” at Selling a Book by Its Cover.
I don’t have a strong desire to read this book but I might anyways just because it is an amazing artifact. Insert obvious ebook joke here.
Trees of Code by Jonathan Safran Foer was written by removing words from his favorite book, The Street of Crocodiles by Bruno Schulz.
More photos at Visual Editions
