There was the St. Louis Post Dispatch, “Turmoil over the book price war took a new turn today when the Justice Department was asked to investigate what a booksellers group called ‘illegal predatory pricing’.”
The New York Times, “(Reuters) The American Booksellers Association has asked the U.S. Department of Justice to investigate a recent price war on books sold online between such retail giants as Wal-Mart Stores Inc, Amazon.Com Inc and Target Corp ahead of the holidays.”
The Washington Post noted, “The plot really began to thicken Monday when Target got into the game. It also began selling eight of the books offered by Wal-Mart for $8.99. Not to be outdone by its chief competitor, Wal-Mart on Tuesday beat Target’s price—by a penny.”
And the Wall Street Journal said, “Wal-Mart triggered the online skirmish Thursday when it began selling the 10 most anticipated hardcovers for $10 apiece…
I was recently asked to contribute to the Powells Books website as a guest blogger for the week of Monday, Oct. 19 through Friday the 23rd. Powell’s has kindly given me permission to repost my entries here.
The gnashing of teeth and beating of breasts will not occur until later, when it is discovered that Uncle Octavo has squandered his fortune in recent years
The theme of the Hound is the death of the book. It seemed an obvious concept to me at the beginning: to use the lives of individuals faced with this cataclysm as a means of revealing its true magnitude.
I made several false starts before realizing a problem. The simpler the theme, the more difficult the story.
And certainly, writing a book to present such a theme is inherently ironic. But then irony is a part of the human comedy–as it is in the catching of whales, Ahab might have said at the last. More to the point, the game is afoot. The murder is happening now.
I have already mentioned here, in ‘The Hound and its consequences,’ why I chose the mystery genre. However, there is one thing I did not say before on that subject, because I thought it was too provocative to put forward…
The Christian Science Monitor asked me to write a short piece on bookselling back in 2002. The context at the time was the continuing struggle of our small business to survive the tides and vicissitudes of our age. There were and are hundreds of articles easily findable on the internet about the difficulties of bookselling–even a few I have caused to be written–but at that time I had been working on a poem about the ‘Perfect Bookshop’ and though a poem was not what the newspaper wanted, I decided to rework the effort into a prose statement on the subject. The result can be found here: www.csmonitor.com/2002/1108/p11s01-coop.html (The perfect bookshop weathers the storm).
I have put aside my hopes of re-establishing a bricks and mortar bookshop for the present. Not from a lack of interest or desire. More from the chastening of financial realities and the physical…
I met a man the other day. Not a great man perhaps, but at least a very good one, I can tell you.
On January 12, 2009, the Wikipedia website presented a front page with an 
account of King Arthur. Having a life-long interest in the subject–one of my several unfinished novels is based on the legends—I read it with some interest. The article was noteworthy, but mostly for what it lacked.
Following the article was an extensive field of footnotes and links. This was impressive in size, but not in content. Most of the links were to sources which were in fact drawn from other linked sources. In other words, if I wrote an article based on the sources cited, I too could become a source. This ingrown toenail of research is equivalent to using the same word to define itself.
And though I am not a scholar, only an interested party, I immediately noticed the absence of citations for original scholarly works which might contradict the thrust of…
Twelve reasons for the death of small and independent book stores:
Ever thankful to those who made the effort before us, with heartfelt apologies to those who are still in the fight and the few who support them–offered upon the closing of Avenue Victor Hugo Bookshop in Boston.
1. Corporate law (and the politicians, lawyers, businessmen and accountants who created it for their own benefit)–a legal fiction with more rights than the individual citizen, which allows the likes of Barnes & Noble and Walmart to write off the losses of a store in Massachusetts against the profit of another in California, while paying taxes in Delaware–for making ‘competition’ a joke and turning the free market down the dark road toward state capitalism.
2. Publishers–marketing their product like so much soap or breakfast cereal, aiming at demographics instead of people, looking for the biggest immediate return instead of considering the future…
As a boy I was fascinated with the Norman Rockwell painting of a family tree, depicting the generations from pirate of the Spanish Main to pirate of Wall Street.
A regular newspaper reader of average interest and intelligence could tell Pinch, the old gray lady’s current keeper, more about how to save his rag than a hundred self-important editorial minions.
