bookstores Archive
Shelf Aware Machines
When I was a kid, I loved the Barnes & Noble in Seattle’s University Village. It was one of Barnes & Noble’s flagship stores, at that time the largest bookstore I’d ever seen: forty-six thousand square feet over two floors. I spent hours in its expansive science fiction and
Round-Down: the Cost of Higher Minimum Wage for Bookstores
A recent article in the San Francisco Gate announced the imminent closing of yet another bookstore–Borderlands Books, which exclusively sells, according to its website, science fiction, fantasy, mystery, and horror titles. It’s sad news, no doubt, but it’s also—pun unintended but liked—downright scary news. On its current home page,
The Ploughshares Round-Down: The Ebook is Dead. Long Live the Ebook.
One of the best parts of being a book editor is that it gives you a magic power. You take a Microsoft Word file, wave your hand over it and say, “Now it’s a book.” And it’s a book. Up until that moment, it’s just words and ideas, and
The Ploughshares Round-down: The Problem with Literary Doomsday Laments
We who love literature face an urgent crisis: a gruesome epidemic of articles worrying over the demise of literature, reading, English Departments, and apparently (along with them) culture, art, morality, humanity, and ALL KNOWLEDGE AND CIVILIZATION. We’re in dire need of an antidote for this doom–prophesying fever, these impassioned warnings about “philistinism.” (A word that, btw, needs