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.'"
I do know that "irregardless" is used chiefly in nonstandard speech or casual writing and I was using it as such! I happen to like the word irregardless even though it hasn't been blessed by the word gods yet! Language is a living, breathing entity and it is continuously changing!
Definition of a classic: "something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read."
--Professor Winchester (via Mark Twain)
I agree wholeheartedly about the "great" books we read in school. A lot of them were garbage. To take a slightly different angle though, what's really frustrating to me is that they often took garbage from otherwise great authors. I despised The Old Man and the Sea so much that I wouldn't read a Hemmingway novel for years afterwards. I picked up For Whom the Bell Tolls one day and loved it. I have read several of his works since and loved them, too. And I know Romeo and Juliet makes for great movie adaptations but it's one of Shakespeare's weaker plays. It wasn't until we read King Lear in college that I grew an appreciation for his work. I wonder how many other authors I do not like because the school system rammed their crap down my throat.