Over the past decade, Barnes & Noble has suffered some pretty considerable losses. There have been 150 store closures, diminishing sales, and a one billion dollar loss on their Nook e-reader. Perhaps the most obvious reason for B&N’s crisis stems from the growing popularity of Amazon where readers can order books online cheaply with little to no struggle. It’s for this reason that Barnes & Noble’s new CEO, James Daunt, is rethinking the way that his bookstores operate. Daunt’s background lies in indie-publishing, and, as the founder of Daunt Books, he has always focused on providing customers with an earnest …
Imagine a scene: the sun sets upon a little Amish community out in Lancaster, PA as a young man named Abram steers his horse and buggy back from the fields after a hard day’s work. His neighbor, Mary, sits next to him as she twirls the ribbons of her bonnet between her fingers. Suddenly, the front wheel of the buggy hits a rock on the path, and Mary is tossed over into Abram’s strong arms. She stares up into his deep blue eyes before recoiling from his grasp. He ducks his face beneath the bill of his cap in order …
The longlist for the 2019 Booker prize was recently announced with literary heavyweights like Margaret Atwood, Salman Rushdie, and Chigozie Obioma appearing on the list. The pool of well-accomplished authors didn’t come as a shock to anyone, but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t a few noticeable surprises on the list. One of the most striking inclusions was Lucy Ellmann’s 1,020 page novel Ducks, Newburyport which is composed of only eight sentences. image via goodreads Following in the footsteps of modernist writers like James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, Ellman expands upon the boundaries of what a novel can be in …
Pittsburgh’s Book’Em was created in 2000 when its founder, Etta Cetera, decided to do something about the nearly non-existent educational opportunities that U.S. prisons afford their inmates. Under-stocked libraries and convoluted book request systems make it difficult for prisoners who are trying to self-educate. Cetera started Book’Em to increase prisoners’ access to books, and after years of overwhelming community support, Book’Em has served approximately 33,000 prisoners throughout the state of Pennsylvania. image via Book’em Whether prisoners read in order to improve their understanding of the world or simply just to pass time, books have always held a special …
It’s never too late to start writing. Sure, there always seems to be a lot of pressure on younger authors to go out into the world and make a name for themselves, but Sarah Yerkes is living proof that there is no rush. She started writing when she was in her nineties, and now at the age of 101 she has just published her first book of poems through Passager Books titled Praise for Days of Blue and Flame. Image via passager books The collection reads like a message to future generations who will have to deal with both …
