Bookstore Weddings – are there a lot of these? It seems like there should be, but I worked in a large independent bookstore for years and don’t recall ever hearing of one. Either way, these two win awards for great hair, and great taste in a wedding venue. According to the Facebook post, these two met in a library, so a bookstore wedding was a natural fit.
And a quick Google Search for bookstore weddings offers up a delightful way to spend your lunch break.
This is our planet.
This is Our Planet from Tomislav Safundžić on Vimeo.
The Best Google Features You’re Probably Not Using
http://dm2studios.posterous.com/the-best-google-features-youre-probably-not-u
Lego Garden in Australia
Fast Food Workers tell you the worst things to order.
“When I worked at McDonald’s, I accidentally left a whole bag of about 100 chicken nuggets out on a counter for way too long. They melted. Into a pool of liquid. I never understood why. But they were completely indiscernible as being the nuggets i once knew.”
Amazing History of Rock and Roll in 100 Riffs (via @weegee)
I live in the Brewmuda Triangle.
When I moved to Fort Collins in 2007, I knew it was the best beer town in the U.S. This post does a great job of summing up one of the many aspects I love about it here.
Image and Blog Post from Chris Around the World
RIP Andy Griffith
Malls still suffer from Borders Closing
A year after Borders Group collapsed, a survey by Colliers International shows that one-third of 205 bookstores shut down by the company are still vacant, according to the Wall Street Journal. http://web.hbr.org/email/archive/dailystat.php?date=070312
10 Best Vacation Cities for Beer Lovers
I’ve been to seven of these cities (and am fortunate to live in one). See the list.
On July 4, 1776, George Washington Bought a Broom
On July 4th, 1776, representatives from what were then British colonies met in Philadelphia to sign the Declaration of Independence. Also that day, George Washington bought a broom.
When Washington became Commander-in-Chief of the Continental Army in 1775, he said he wouldn’t accept a salary for the position. But he did say he would accept reimbursement for his expenses.
So he documented everything, from payments to spies to his daily meals. (Apparently, he was a big fan of mutton.) And he was extremely meticulous. See his report.
The Only Advanced Country with No Vacation Policy: The U.S.
Vacation is important. It really is. And we all wish we could take more of it. But I don’t think it’s the government’s job to regulate it. Still – this article in The Atlantic presents a stark contrast.
I recently finished a book that I read almost entirely on my iPhone (A Dance with Dragons, Book 5 in the Game of Thrones Series). And I loved the experience. Big, fat, hairy deal, right? Here’s the thing – I feel guilty about it and I’m trying to figure out why. I know this isn’t uncharted territory and that people have been reading on their iPhones for years. I just never thought it would happen to me – the same way that I never thought I’d live in a subdivision or buy frozen waffles or own a big white mini-van (at least we named her Moby Dick).
As someone who’s been working in the book industry my entire career, with a librarian mother and a father who was a high school principal, books have been a part of my everyday life for as long as I can remember. I think my guilt stems from wanting to be ‘old school’ and to remain a living, breathing, loyal, print-book-buying human as a tribute to my roots and the importance that print books have played in my life and over the course of history. When given the choice between Kindle or iPad or physical book – I almost always choose physical. But I think my iPhone experience might have changed all that. I may start *gulp* buying eBooks over print books just so they’re available on my phone…
The basic reason is this: I can sneak-read ANYWHERE. I read this book in line at the grocery store, waiting in parking lots, stopped for trains, while I was grilling on the deck, and of course in bed, on planes – in short, everywhere. It made me realize that maybe I’m not as much a book-nerd as a reading-nerd. And I think I’m okay with that.
Note: On vacation a couple of weeks ago, I saw a lanky kid walking down the beach carrying a big fat hardcover in front of him, reading as he walked. If he’d been reading on his iPhone, however, I’d have had no idea he was reading a book (although I think it was 50 Shades of Grey). I may have though he was checking email or playing Angry Birds or streaming Miley Cyrus videos on YouTube. SO maybe being an ambassador for reading means that physical books (or obvious eReaders) are better? Sigh.
Bach like you’ve never seen it before.
Bach like you
Rumor We Hope Isn’t True: Amazon Retail Stores are Coming spotted by @dnussbaum
“Just heard an interesting piece of gossip from a very credible source: Amazon is going to open retail stores and will start making its own branded merchandise.
That would seem absolutely insane if we hadn’t witnessed Bezos doing the following insane — and wildly successful — things:” More…
Arizona wants $53 Million in Taxes from Amazon via @publisherswkly
“Amazon reported good and bad news in its battle against collecting state online sales tax in its just filed 10-K report. In what appears good news for the e-tailer, Amazon said that the Securities & Exchange Commission began looking into Texas’ decision to assess Amazon $269 million for uncollected sales tax in March and notified the company in November that it had concluded its inquiry. No mention was made of any SEC decision.” More…
47 Essential Social Media Tools for Content Marketers spotted by @copyblogger
“It’s hard to believe the sheer number of social media tools we use everyday to help grow the Content Marketing Institute and SocialTract, as well as my own personal brand. Since there are so many, I decided to update this post from almost three years ago. It’s amazing the number of social media and content marketing tools that I continue to use, as well as the many that died over the years from lack of use.” More…
Anything Boys Can do, Girls Can Do Better. Even Drinking Beer via Coloradoan
“A new ladies-only beer club called the Beer Bettys is ensuring that the women of Fort Collins are just as knowledgeable as men when it comes to beer. Bar manager for The Mayor of Old Town Michelle Peth teaches the class that covers everything from how to drink beer to how to make it.
The beer club, free and open to the public, started around two months ago and meets every Tuesday night at The Mayor of Old Town, 632 S. Mason St. Each class, composed of around 20 women, offers a flight of beers at a reduced price that relates to topic such as the history of stouts.
Peth stresses that the class is not about drinking beer so much as it is educating women about beer, or as she calls it “nerd out.”
“I’m teaching understanding and respect of beer,” she said. “It has built our community up with all of our breweries, so it really does deserve that.”
Historically, Peth said women are more hesitant to try craft beers as they prefer to drink wine.” More…
Local Deli Zingerman’s Uses Facebook, Bacon to Win Over Faraway Foodies via@clickz
“Providing a useful link to an online visitor is a lot like carrying a customer’s bag of groceries to her car. A Facebook promotion is like serving a party of 50 at your restaurant. That’s the thinking of Ari Weinzweig, co-founder of Zingerman’s, a local deli that’s grown into a $40 million empire of food companies, restaurants, food tours and even business books and consulting – all in Ann Arbor, MI.” More…
Super Giant Crustacean Found in Deepest Ocean spotted by @MargaretAtwood
“A huge crustacean has been found lurking 7km down in the waters off the coast of New Zealand. The creature – called a supergiant – is a type of amphipod, which are normally around 2-3cm long. But these beasts, discovered in the Kermadec Trench, were more than 10 times bigger: the largest found measured in at 34cm.” More…
Colorado River from Source to Sea via @HuffingtonPost
“After 110 days of paddling and hiking, two recent Colorado College graduates have completed a “source to sea” journey of the entire Colorado River. The expedition by Will Stauffer-Norris and Zak Podmore was conducted as part of Colorado College’s State of the Rockies Project.
Beginning in Wyoming’s Wind River range at the source of the Green River, the duo ended at the Sea of Cortez in Mexico approximately four months later.” More…
Photos courtesy of Colorado College State of the Rockies Project:
The Perks of Being an English Major via @FLoaBComic
The Perks of Being an English Major by Jacob Andrews
10 Best Soul Train Line Dances
RIP Don: 10 Best Soul Train Line Dances via Idolator
“Our hearts are heavy today following the news that Soul Train creator and host Brother Don Cornelius has died at the age of 75. To honor Don’s legacy and the lasting impact he made on music and pop culture (and to cheer ourselves up), we’re taking a look back at our favorite Soul Train line dances. So strap on your highest platform shoes, tease out that ‘fro (with Afro-Sheen, of course) and boogie down along with us.” See the dances…
Jonathan Franzen Is Wrong: Ebooks Are Good for Everyone via @BoSacks
By Lance Ulanoff
I love books, especially old ones. Recently I learned a simple dinner table trick from a 110-year-old magic book. It involves picking up a napkin with both hands and, without releasing either corner, tying the napkin into a knot. Good fun and likely unavailable anywhere but in this very old tome. That fact, though, does not make me love ebooks any less or think that they somehow are a better long-term solution for the reading public. Celebrated author Jonathan Franzen thinks otherwise. More…
Let the Panic Begin: Peyton Manning Still Not 100% via @slate
Peyton Manning isn’t throwing at full strength. This is a perfectly valid piece of news on its own, and it was relayed as such by Peter King on Sunday. But because it’s newsless Super Bowl week, and the event is in Indianapolis, and the insatiable NFL monster has to be fed, we’re bombarded with questionable sources reaching questionable conclusions till an informative little rehab update has turned into OMG Peyton Manning to retire! More…
Alan Lomax’s Archive to Stream For Free via @Weegee
Alan Lomax’s extensive archive of field recordings is being digitized for an online collection that will begin streaming by the end of February. Some 17,000 of Lomax’s recordings will be available for free, including early recordings of folk and blues legends such as Woody Guthrie, Leadbelly and Muddy Waters. More…
Steve Jobs Listened to Vinyl, was Suprised at MP3’s Success via @thetecheye
While Apple’s Steve Jobs claimed that he listened to music on his iPod and Apple boom box, he really had a low tech approach to music.
His chum and popular beat combo artist Neil Young is currently campaigning to get a return to the days when the sound quality of a record was a hell of a lot better than it is now. Young is fed up with the standard of compressed music and wants to get the world back into hi-fi again.
According to AP, taking his campaign for higher-fidelity digital sound to the stage of a technology conference, Young invoked the ghost of Steve Jobs to back him up.
Young said the Apple co-founder was such a fan of music that he didn’t use his iPod and its digitally compressed files at home. More…
Teenagers Send Lego Man Into Space
Step 1. Lock up a Bicycle Step 2: Take a picture of it every day for a year.via @adventurevida
Marilyn Monroe at Home, 1953 via@TheRetronaut
Images by Alfred Eisenstaedt via LIFE archive
Pfizer Profits Halved As Lipitor Comes Off Patent via @forbes
Pfizer booked a sharp decline in fourth-quarter profit Tuesday, and more importantly cut its 2012 outlook as it projects its first year of results after patent expiration on cholesterol drug Lipitor.
Profits dropped by half to $1.5 billion, or 50 cents per share in Q4 as its star drug came off patent during Nov. 30. Revenue for its primary care medicines, which includes Lipitor, decreased by 8% to $5.4 billion. More…
Teens Ditch Facebook for Twitter via @theweek
More and more young people are tweeting, especially as their parents ease into Mark Zuckerberg’s social network. More...
Pinterest Driving More traffic than Google+, nearly on par with Twitter via @socialmedia411
Pinterest, the website which lets people collect and share photos online with a “virtual pinboard,” has steadily amassed a very dedicated following of users that spreads far beyond the app-obsessed early adopter crowd. On Tuesday, a new study out of content sharing company Shareaholic showed just how powerful the Palo Alto, California-based startup has become. More…
Study: As E-Readers Increase, So Does Resistance via @paidContent
E-reader usage is growing beyond a group of early adopters, but new stats suggest that consumers are also increasingly resistant to buying an e-reader.
A study presented by book marketing firm Verso Advertising at Digital Book World last week finds that 15.8 percent of book buyers already own an e-reader—that figure has doubled since 2010. But 51.8 percent of book buyers say they are “not at all likely” to purchase one in the next 12 months. More…
The 20 Most Beautiful Bookstores in the World (flavorwire)
With Amazon slowly taking over the publishing world and bookstores closing left and right, things can sometimes seem a little grim for the brick and mortar booksellers of the world. After all, why would anyone leave the comfort of their couch to buy a book when with just a click of a button, they could have it delivered to their door? Well, here’s why: bookstores so beautiful they’re worth getting out of the house (or the country) to visit whether you need a new hardcover or not. More…
The Worst Book Ever is Moon People via @PublishersWkly
“What I’m going to do before telling you about the epic stinker Moon Peopleby Dale M. Courtney is issue a blanket sic statement for the duration of this article. I think that’s important to say before we move forward. Anyway, this is how chapter one of Moon People by Dale M. Courtney opens (source):
This story begins on a Beautiful sunny day in Daytona Beach Florida With a man by the name of David Braymer. A 45-year-old Single man that works at the local High school as a science teacher and astrology in the 12-grade level. Now he’s been here about 5 years and has become kind of partial to a young lady by the name of Cheral Baskel a local restaurant owner in Daytona Beach. At the moment Cheral’s preparing her restaurant for another Shuttle launch at the cape and everyone always gathers at her place because you can see the launch real good at her place. It’s also on the water and its real close to the cape and she really decks the place out.” More…
Barnes and Noble Will not Stock Amazon Published Books via @galleycat
Barnes & Noble has decided not to stock books published by Amazon in their physical stores, keeping the new publisher out of the country’s largest network of brick and mortar bookstores.
Bloomberg Businessweek senior reporter Brad Stone called it “a declaration of war,” More...
Blake Griffin gives facial to Kendrick Perkins
McDonald’s Names the 35 Best High School Basketball Players of All Time. via @ESPNHS
On Tuesday, in celebration of the 35th anniversary of the premier high school all-star hoops event, the McDonald’s All-American Games unveiled its list of the 35 greatest McDonald’s All-Americans. More…
Zooey Deschanel sings “Yesterday Once More” by The Carpenters via @zooeydeschanel
Violin player handles cell phone situation brilliantly.
Leisure Suit Larry Never Goes out of Style @jsmcdougall
See the collection on Cafe Press
Octopus Diver T-Shirt – everybody needs one.
Octopus Diver Shirt by KoenigCo
As publishers we struggle with keeping up with device innovation and the proprietary formats that accompany them. We spend a tremendous amount of time and money massaging our content into the formats necessary to get our books onto these devices and then we hand over the commerce relationship to the device manufacturers themselves. I think it’s nuts.
Here’s what I’d like to know…what if web browsers were as competent at delivering as great a reading experience as the native reading software in Kindle, iPad, Nook or the rest? Scribd and Zinio and others have tried to make this work, but it doesn’t. What if you could open safari on your Ipad, click on a books tab and have access to your library? What if you could pull an html-based book feed into Flipboard? I’ve bought eBooks through Zinio, Nook, Amazon, iBookstore, and as PDF downloads and I have to remember where each one is. As a reader, I’m being forced to choose not only where I buy my books, but where I want to store my digital library – and I don’t like it.
If we could store our eBooks in the cloud and also have a great reading experience in-browser (regardless of tablet brand), it could change the book publishing landscape forever. Put eBook library management tools into the browser and let me buy the eBook from the vendor that’s going to give me the best commerce experience – whether it’s a big guy like Amazon or my neighbor down the street.
Borders is on the verge of bankruptcy and Barnes and Noble continues to rapidly reallocate valuable shelf space to non-book product while foot traffic in book superstores plummets. Who do they blame these days? eBooks, of course! And Amazon. And they have a point.
Yes, the superstores are suffering and so is the generation of bookstore lovers (different from book lovers, but that’s another post) who have grown up with a selection of more than 200,000 books on every corner.
But who is caught in the cross fire? Cue the violins – I contend that it’s illustrated book publishing. Yes, the kind of publishing that benefits from all that foot traffic heading into brick and mortar retailers to buy their fiction, self-help and business books and happen to pick up a gardening, nature, photography, craft or home improvement book while they are there. In my line of work (illustrated DIY art and craft publishing), we’ve yet to see to shrinking demand for our books, but the distribution channels are contracting because the foot traffic is drying up.
So what’s a publisher to do? Every time I read about the rapidly growing market share that eBooks capture across primarily the text-only publishing landscape, it makes me wonder how long it will take illustrated nonfiction publishers to realize that eBooks just may not be the answer for us. Sure, if people want our books on their Kindles and Nooks and Kobo’s, we should make them available. But is that really the format that best suits our content? Is that want the content wants to be?
Let’s say that I publish a book on encaustic painting in mixed media (yes – one of those is coming next spring and it’s going to be fantastic) and I put a DVD in the back that shows, step-by-step, many of the techniques outlined in the book. Is an eBook really the best format for communicating this rich, multi-media content? I don’t think so – it should be an app. 3 dimensional, easy to navigate and entertaining. The problem? The economics don’t work, yet. Here’s why:
Take the economics of an eBook. Same editing costs as a print book. Same design costs. Same marketing costs. Same legal, overhead, and staffing costs. The list goes on. But publishers save big on distribution and printing, right? Not if they have to turn the content into an app, they don’t. Apps can cost tens of thousands of dollars to produce and add months of development time. Tools like Adobe Publishing Suite will make all this easier eventually, but even Adobe doesn’t know how their software works at this point.
So we may not have to spend money on printing, but I spend just as much, or more, on app development and then…there’s nowhere to distribute the thing. We can sell it on our website (and we do – check out our latest eMag for example – EntreKnits.) – and while these are nicely profitable, the sales figures don’t yet come close to a successful print book or magazine.
Browsing apps is not typically a fruitful experience – and even searching for them can be frustrating. Until distribution channels for this type of content are able to find the right consumers, content companies are going to have to continue to develop them on our own – knowing that eBooks and the Internet will be the downfall of the book superstore, and likely the savior of those publishers that survive the bookstore demise.
letters from slumberboard 