Sadly, another one bites the dust 

Rocky Mountain Low: Colorado Springs Indie to Close by Edward Nawotka

McKinzey-White Booksellers, the 19-year-old Colorado Springs bookstore, will close at the end of June. Twenty employees--six full timers, 14 part-timers--will be laid off.

Owner Karen Bauder blamed burgeoning competition from the chains and other retailers for the store's demise. She told PW Daily, "It was a downward cycle that began four years ago when B&N and Borders moved in and opened within three blocks of us. Then a Media Play opened across the street. Plus, a Wal-Mart behind us also sold books and Sam's Club opened down the street." She said that within a year of the chains opening, McKinzey-White lost 50% of its business and was never able to recover. "It sort of stunned me. I just couldn't win, there's just no way," she said. [read more]

Do yourself and your community a favor -- search out and support a local independent bookstore.

Are books too expensive? 

Who's Responsible For High Book Prices? by Dennis Loy Johnson

Why are book prices so high? Not just new hardcovers, which are mostly hovering -- for another five minutes or so -- just below $30. But have you noticed that even paperbacks, the thing that revolutionized the book business once-upon-a-time by virtue of being affordable, are now just as over-priced as everything else?

And prices climb so steadily you can see it happening from season to season. You don't have to read trade reports to know that there's a wide-spread belief in the book industry that "consumers" don't see much difference between, say, a $25.95 book and a $26.95 book, or even a $27.95 book of that matter. As if they didn't have us over a barrel. As if there was something we could do about it. (And as if there were any logic at all to a system that believes a dollar or two means nothing, but the difference between $26.95 and $27 will send people running out the door screaming.)

Then there are those ludicrous advances making the news more and more regularly -- just this past week, "Cold Mountain" author Charles Frazier got $8 million out of Random House for a one-page description of an idea he's got for a second novel. An 'idea.'

Is it any wonder books are so expensive? And is there any question whose fault it is? [read more]

What's it worth? 

Placing value on Information by Audrey Fenner

Society regards information as a commodity and the possession of it as an asset. Economists would like to account for information in the same way as physical assets, but no discipline has given us an accepted model for such treatment. Disciplines regard information differently, and it is more difficult to develop systems to measure information than physical commodities. The price system has been used to assign value to information, but does it provide the best means? Can librarians plan for the future, justifying increasing expenditures to their funding agencies, in the absence of a meaningful information measurement scheme? [read more]

Tough act to follow 

After Oprah by Laura Miller

Since Oprah Winfrey announced two weeks ago that she's ending her television book club, some new players have stepped up to the plate hoping to beat her record in swatting authors onto the bestseller lists. USA Today has announced the launch of a book discussion that will take place both in its Life section and on its Web site, and in June the "Today" show will begin a club in which popular authors will invite viewers to read the works of "undiscovered" writers.

Both media outlets have sizable audiences, but it's hard to imagine either one matching Winfrey's influence on book buyers. Her power to bump up a book's sales figures by as much as a million copies (at the peak of her club's popularity) tended to confuse observers about the nature of the club itself. Despite its use of the broadcast medium, the Oprah Book Club worked according to an old-fashioned principle. Publishing savants have long known that word of mouth is the most effective way to sell lots of books, especially when those books are novels. The people who spend their money on fiction are mostly women, and most of them tend to try out new books and authors on the recommendations of trusted friends or booksellers.

Winfrey's book club represented a kind of supercharged word of mouth: In her case, the mouth reached 7 million ears daily. ... [read more]

Business and the web 

Business pros flock to Weblogs by Martin Wolk

Omar Javaid describes himself as a "pretty prolific" Internet reader who used to fire off hundreds of e-mails each week with news tidbits that might interest staff and customers of his consulting firm. Then about six months ago he began a sort of online diary known as a Weblog and began posting his thoughts and findings there instead.

The experiment has been so successful that Javaid says he plans to expand it until virtually everyone at his 60-person company, Mobilocity, has a Weblog. Javaid's brief experience has convinced him that far from an exercise in self-indulgence, Weblogs actually can be used to increase worker efficiency.

Javaid is hardly alone. Increasingly professionals in many fields are adopting a technology that until recently was considered to be largely the province of insomniac teen diarists and technology geeks.

Journalists use weblogs to build and maintain an audience. Lawyers use them to discuss cases in the news. Educators use them to encourage class participation and offer resources to students. [read more]

Web is the future for business

Business use of the web is about to get serious.

The next two years will see businesses start to remake the software they use to run their organisations as they start to put the net at the heart of everything they do, says a report by consultancy PricewaterhouseCoopers.

It predicts that the move to more web-centric ways of working will be aided by industry groups and software companies defining and standardising how programs should swap information via the net.

But it also warns that a lot needs to be done to make web-centred software secure and reliable before businesses start to use it in everything they do. [read more]

This is a joke, right? 

Browsers: Can They Be Stopped?

The Australian Publishers Association and the Australian Booksellers Association have joined forcesÝ in an attempt to prevent Browsing, the customer practice which is believed to cost the industry millions of dollars a year.

"It's time we finally tackled this problem head on", said new APA President Greg Browne. "For too long customers have wandered about our shops, looking at our stock, leafing through our books, and not buying stuff. It must be stopped".

The Associations are working on a white paper on the issue, tentatively entitled Browsers: Can They Be Stopped?, which canvasses a number of possible solutions to the problem.

"The difficulty is making sure that customers feel compelled to buy lots of books, without providing disincentives for them entering the shop", said Browne. ... [read more]

Happy anniversary! RLG DigiNews is five years old 

RLG DigiNews: Taking Stock at Five Years

Five years ago, RLG published the first issue of RLG DigiNews. A lot has changed since then--and a good bit has remained the same. We're using this anniversary issue as a case study to reflect on those changes. This feature article discusses key turning points for RLG DigiNews from the access and preservation perspectives. Our FAQ asks "where are they now" as it follows up on two projects that were announced in the first issue. In the June 2002 issue, we'll report on several more. The fate of these projects, like the other changes that the editorial staff of RLG DigiNews has witnessed, are revealing of both the opportunities and the obstacles that line the shores of a swiftly moving technological sea.

RLG DigiNews had its roots in an RLG electronic group-based document, "Diginotes," compiled by members of PRESERV as a way to keep pace with the rapidly developing field of digitization. In the two "issues" distributed via email to a special RLG discussion list, "Diginotes" contained announcements on, and citations to, "library imaging technology and applications." Though "Diginotes" ceased after two compilations, the need for timely information on the topic of digitization did not. [read more]

Photocopiers and buggy whips 

Digital Copiers and Scribal Musings by Fred Stielow

A funny thing happened while shopping for photocopiers for the Walter P. Reuther Library of Wayne State University. They are apparently becoming obsoleteãgoing the way of the phonograph record, punch card, and fountain pen. The industry is quietly converging on digital scanning and the microchip. This new technology goes beyond a simple replacement. It has significant implications for the future of libraries and archives along with interesting echoes from their past. [read more]

Online Symposium 

From The Book & The Computer -- Book Culture at the Crossroads, Muro Kenji, Editor in Chief

A Watershed Moment
Today, we are poised at a watershed moment for all of book culture. There has been nothing like this in over 500 years. Some have compared the advent of digital publishing technology to the Gutenberg revolution. Jason Epstein and Roger Chartier, both of whom we have interviewed for our online journal, have argued that electronic technology will have an even greater impact on the book than Gutenberg's printing press. At the same time, the phenomenon of globalization -- also made possible by digital technology -- has emerged as a threat to the richness and diversity of book culture. Even the future form of the book is in doubt. [read more]

Write on 

Omniglot: a guide to writing systems, is an amazing effort and website by Simon Ager

What is writing?

There are a number of different ways to describe writing and writing systems.

In the world's writing systems, Peter T. Daniels defines writing as:

a system of more or less permanent marks used to represent an utterance in such a way that it can be recovered more or less exactly without the intervention of the utterer.

In The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Writings Systems, Florian Coulmas defines a writing system as:

a set of visible or tactile signs used to represent units of language in a systematic way, with the purpose of recording messages which can be retrieved by everyone who knows the language in question and the rules by virtue of which its units are encoded in the writing system.

All writing systems use visible signs with one exception: Braille, the system of raised dots used by blind and visually impaired people. Hence the need to include tactile signs in the above definition.

In A History of Writing, Steven Roger Fischer argues that no one definition of writing can cover all the writing systems that exist and have ever existed. Instead he states that a 'complete writing' system should fullfill all the following criteria:

• Complete writing must have as its purpose communication;
• Complete writing must consist of artificial graphic marks on a durable or electronic surface;
• Complete writing must use marks that relate conventionally to articulate speech (the systematic arrangement of significant vocal sounds) or electronic programing in such a way that communication is achieved.

Book Clubs 

Bibliofuture: Librarian's Book Club

Selections for May - June 2001:

• The Myth of the Paperless Office by Abigail Sellen
• Scrolling Forward : Making Sense of Documents in the Digital Age by David Levy

Previous selections

Of course you already heard this -- Oprah closes the book on clubs by Carrie Kirby

To the disappointment of the book industry, authors and readers, Oprah Winfrey said yesterday that she is ending her influential book club as a regular feature.

"It has become harder and harder to find books on a monthly basis that I feel absolutely compelled to share," Winfrey said in a brief release yesterday.

"I will continue featuring books on the 'Oprah Winfrey Show' when I feel they merit my heartfelt recommendation."

It is not clear how often Winfrey will introduce books on her show. Her spokeswoman would only say, "It's ending on a monthly basis."

Publishers are mourning the loss of a cash cow. [read more]

Where do you get your news? 

From the "Car Talk" guys -- Who Reads What and Why

1. The Wall Street Journal is read by the people who run the country.
2. The New York Times is read by people who think they run the country.
3. The Washington Post is read by people who think they should run the country.
4. USA Today is read by people who think they ought to run the country but don't really understand the Washington Post. They do, however, like their smog statistics shown in pie charts.
5. The Los Angeles Times is read by people who wouldn't mind running the country, if they could spare the time, and if they didn't have to leave L.A. to do it.
6. The Boston Globe is read by people whose parents used to run the country and they did a far superior job of it, thank you very much.
7. The New York Daily News is read by people who aren't too sure who's running the country, and don't really care as long as they can get a seat on the train.
8. The New York Post is read by people who don't care who's running the country either, as long as they do something really scandalous, preferably while intoxicated.
9. The San Francisco Chronicle is read by people who aren't sure there is a country, or that anyone is running it; but whoever it is, they oppose all that they stand for. There are occasional exceptions if the leaders are handicapped minority feministic atheist dwarfs, who also happen to be illegal aliens from ANY country or galaxy as long as they are democrats.
10. The Miami Herald is read by people who are running another country, but need the baseball scores.
11. The National Enquirer is read by people trapped in line at the grocery store.