Slashdot Mirror
Barnes and Noble Bookstore Chain Put In Play
suraj.sun sends in word that the country's largest bookstore chain, Barnes and Noble, will put itself up for sale. "The news surprised analysts and alarmed publishers, who have watched as the book business has increasingly shifted to online retailers and e-book sales, leaving both chains and independent sellers struggling. ... For years, Barnes & Noble has been battered by large shifts in the publishing industry and the retail environment. Book sales have moved toward big-box stores like Costco, Wal-Mart and Target, and away from mall-based stores like B. Dalton, which Barnes & Noble acquired in the late 1980s. 'There's been a long series of pressures,' said David Schick, managing director at Stifel Nicolaus in Baltimore. 'The market has not been kind to bookstores, and it's for new reasons like competition with Apple and Amazon, and it's for old reasons, like what we believe has been a decline in reading for the last 20 years. Americans have devoted less of what we call media time to books.'"
It is extremely hard for our kids to even have an opportunity to learn to love books! They are exposed to so many competing media at such an early age that books get relegated to schools as something they use. I teach and every year it gets harder and harder to get kids to read the simplest of texts. It is very sad as books offer a very personal relationship and intimate relationship with characters that no other medium can provide.
Here's the link on how to crack the DRM on the ePubs that Barnes and Nobel delivers their eBooks in, if you buy one.
http://i-u2665-cabbages.blogspot.com/2009/12/circumventing-barnes-noble-drm-for-epub.html
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
I'm in the same boat as you, but I bought the nook with no intention of ever buying ebooks from B&N so I'm not really too upset about it. There are many places to get ebooks. Also, if you haven't tried Calibre to manage your library, you owe it to yourself to try it out.
In Soviet Russia jokes are formulaic and decidedly non-humorous.
It's very possible that old LIFE book came from a mom-n-pop store that also sells online. I know a woman who has a small bookstore in upstate New York and she keeps the actual storefront open to give her a place to go (she's pushing 80), as a place for book readings, but also as warehouse; she sells most of her stuff via Amazon, with apparently one or two really rare things going on ebay.
If anything, it was a brilliant move on Amazon's part to adopt this model; now lots of mom-n-pops can stay open and be more of a social place (if only for the cats) and still have give people the opportunity to browse.