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Cool Reads

Do you have favorite articles to recommend? Email me the links or post them in a comment here. This page is becoming increasingly popular, so these articles are getting some traction.

My son sent me this link from the Atlantic, an article by Natalie Wexler about American children's reading abilities and what can be done about them. My reason for posting this here is that, as my son says, just have a LOT of books in the around them and your children will turn into great readers (a lot of e-readers won't do the job):
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/why-american-students-haven-t-gotten-better-at-reading-in-20-years?utm_source=pocket-newtab

About how reading comprehension is better with paper than with digital media, and, despite so many studies showing this, college textbooks are going more and more digital. Big money prefers us to be as dumb as possible, why not use digital media to dumb us down even further? Did I just say that?
https://www.jamesgmartin.center/2018/11/the-trouble-with-ebooks-and-digital-reading/

More on why print matters from Patricia A. Alexander and Lauren M. Singer Trakhman at the University of Maryland:
https://theconversation.com/amp/the-enduring-power-of-print-for-learning-in-a-digital-world-84352

From Sonia Livingstone at LSE about how we need to be careful in our reading strategies, screens versus books, especially in regards to our children. I don't agree with everything she says, but it's well reasoned:
https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/parenting4digitalfuture/2019/06/26/debate-on-reading-print-versus-digital-books/

From Kensington Row Bookshop, a list of books about bookstores:
https://bookshop.org/lists/novels-and-other-books-about-bookstores?fbclid=IwAR3tsSKEhb43byyUqW9Z0OTlCXcGJfTMAQMReSg5n8Kv64z3XlM139iARM4

You simply cannot have too many real books:
https://bigthink.com/personal-growth/do-i-own-too-many-books?rebelltitem=1#rebelltitem1

From Jim Milliot at Publishers Weekly, more about how bookstores are doing great:
http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/bookselling/article/68920-october-bookstore-sales-rose-6-9.html?utm_source=Publishers+Weekly&utm_campaign=2d16a1a035-UA-15906914-1&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_0bb2959cbb-2d16a1a035-304562593


The Plot Twist: E-Book Sales Slip, and Print Is Far From Dead
By ALEXANDRA ALTER, The New York Times,  SEPT. 22, 2015

Five years ago, the book world was seized by collective panic over the uncertain future of print.

As readers migrated to new digital devices, e-book sales soared, up 1,260 percent between 2008 and 2010, alarming booksellers that watched consumers use their stores to find titles they would later buy online. Print sales dwindled, bookstores struggled to stay open, and publishers and authors feared that cheaper e-books would cannibalize their business.

Then in 2011, the industry’s fears were realized when Borders declared bankruptcy.

“E-books were this rocket ship going straight up,” said Len Vlahos, a former executive director of the Book Industry Study Group, a nonprofit research group that tracks the publishing industry. “Just about everybody you talked to thought we were going the way of digital music.”

But the digital apocalypse never arrived, or at least not on schedule. While analysts once predicted that e-books would overtake print by 2015, digital sales have instead slowed sharply.

Steve Bercu, co-owner of a bookstore in Austin, Tex., where 2015 sales are up 11 percent, and profits are the highest ever.
Now, there are signs that some e-book adopters are returning to print, or becoming hybrid readers, who juggle devices and paper. E-book sales fell by 10 percent in the first five months of this year, according to the Association of American Publishers, which collects data from nearly 1,200 publishers. Digital books accounted last year for around 20 percent of the market, roughly the same as they did a few years ago.

E-books’ declining popularity may signal that publishing, while not immune to technological upheaval, will weather the tidal wave of digital technology better than other forms of media, like music and television.

E-book subscription services, modeled on companies like Netflix and Pandora, have struggled to convert book lovers into digital binge readers, and some have shut down. Sales of dedicated e-reading devices have plunged as consumers migrated to tablets and smartphones. And according to some surveys, young readers who are digital natives still prefer reading on paper.

The surprising resilience of print has provided a lift to many booksellers. Independent bookstores, which were battered by the recession and competition from Amazon, are showing strong signs of resurgence. The American Booksellers Association counted 1,712 member stores in 2,227 locations in 2015, up from 1,410 in 1,660 locations five years ago.

“The fact that the digital side of the business has leveled off has worked to our advantage,” said Oren Teicher, chief executive of the American Booksellers Association. “It’s resulted in a far healthier independent bookstore market today than we have had in a long time.”

Publishers, seeking to capitalize on the shift, are pouring money into their print infrastructures and distribution. Hachette added 218,000 square feet to its Indiana warehouse late last year, and Simon & Schuster is expanding its New Jersey distribution facility by 200,000 square feet.

Penguin Random House has invested nearly $100 million in expanding and updating its warehouses and speeding up distribution of its books. It added 365,000 square feet last year to its warehouse in Crawfordsville, Ind., more than doubling the size of the warehouse.

“People talked about the demise of physical books as if it was only a matter of time, but even 50 to 100 years from now, print will be a big chunk of our business,” said Markus Dohle, the chief executive of Penguin Random House, which has nearly 250 imprints globally. Print books account for more than 70 percent of the company’s sales in the United States.

The company began offering independent booksellers in 2011 two-day guaranteed delivery from November to January, the peak book buying months.

Other big publishers, including HarperCollins, have followed suit. The faster deliveries have allowed bookstores to place smaller initial orders and restock as needed, which has reduced returns of unsold books by about 10 percent.

Penguin Random House has also developed a data-driven approach to managing print inventory for some of its largest customers, a strategy modeled on the way manufacturers like Procter & Gamble automatically restock soap and other household goods. The company now tracks more than 10 million sales records a day, and sifts through them in order to make recommendations for how many copies of a given title a vendor should order based on previous sales.

“It’s a very simple thing; only books that are on the shelves can be sold,” Mr. Dohle said.

At BookPeople, a bookstore founded in 1970 in Austin, Tex., sales are up nearly 11 percent this year over last, making 2015 the store’s most profitable year ever, said Steve Bercu, the co-owner. He credits the growth of his business, in part, to the stabilization of print and new practices in the publishing industry, such as Penguin Random House’s so-called rapid replenishment program to restock books quickly.

“The e-book terror has kind of subsided,” he said.

Other independent booksellers agree that they are witnessing a reverse migration to print.

“We’ve seen people coming back,” said Arsen Kashkashian, a book buyer at Boulder Book Store in Boulder, Colo. “They were reading more on their Kindle and now they’re not, or they’re reading both ways.”


Alex D. September 23, 2015
I'd like to join my voice to the chorus of print book lovers here.No one other than Eric Schmidt , CEO of Google, has said: 'I still think ...
Eileen September 23, 2015
Being able to set my own text size is much easier on my eyes and less weight is easier on my wrists. I imagine this will only become true as...
Michael J Edwards September 23, 2015
If you read this article carefully, you will see that their reporting on sales of ebooks includes ONLY ebooks being sold by the traditional...
SEE ALL COMMENTS
Digital books have been around for decades, ever since publishers began experimenting with CD-ROMs, but they did not catch on with consumers until 2008, shortly after Amazon released the Kindle.

The Kindle, which was joined by other devices like Kobo’s e-reader, the Nook from Barnes & Noble and the iPad, drew millions of book buyers to e-readers, which offered seamless, instant purchases. Publishers saw huge spikes in digital sales during and after the holidays, after people received e-readers as gifts.

But those double- and triple-digit growth rates plummeted as e-reading devices fell out of fashion with consumers, replaced by smartphones and tablets. Some 12 million e-readers were sold last year, a steep drop from the nearly 20 million sold in 2011, according to Forrester Research. The portion of people who read books primarily on e-readers fell to 32 percent in the first quarter of 2015, from 50 percent in 2012, a Nielsen survey showed.

Higher e-book prices may also be driving readers back to paper.

As publishers renegotiated new terms with Amazon in the past year and demanded the ability to set their own e-book prices, many have started charging more. With little difference in price between a $13 e-book and a paperback, some consumers may be opting for the print version.

On Amazon, the paperback editions of some popular titles, like “The Goldfinch” by Donna Tartt, are several dollars cheaper than their digital counterparts. Paperback sales rose by 8.4 percent in the first five months of this year, the Association of American Publishers reported.

The tug of war between pixels and print almost certainly isn’t over. Industry analysts and publishing executives say it is too soon to declare the death of the digital publishing revolution. An appealing new device might come along. Already, a growing number of people are reading e-books on their cellphones. Amazon recently unveiled a new tablet for $50, which could draw a new wave of customers to e-books (the first-generation Kindle cost $400).

It is also possible that a growing number of people are still buying and reading e-books, just not from traditional publishers. The declining e-book sales reported by publishers do not account for the millions of readers who have migrated to cheap and plentiful self-published e-books, which often cost less than a dollar.

At Amazon, digital book sales have maintained their upward trajectory, according to Russell Grandinetti, senior vice president of Kindle. Last year, Amazon, which controls some 65 percent of the e-book market, introduced an e-book subscription service that allows readers to pay a flat monthly fee of $10 for unlimited digital reading. It offers more than a million titles, many of them from self-published authors.

Some publishing executives say the world is changing too quickly to declare that the digital tide is waning.

“Maybe it’s just a pause here,” said Carolyn Reidy, the president and chief executive of Simon & Schuster. “Will the next generation want to read books on their smartphones, and will we see another burst come?”


From Kelly Jensen at Book Riot, why "free" ebooks from publishers to poor children don't help anybody:
http://bookriot.com/2015/05/04/free-digital-ebooks-dont-help-poor-kids/

From Dennis Johnson, publisher at Melville House, by way of David Enyeart, about how indies are great for authors and best ways for authors to work with indies. This is targeted more at authors than at booksellers, but a bunch of my readers are authors, so I like this for you, and it does get into the relationship between authors and indies, which is so important to booksellers. (It also has quotes from a few buds.):
http://www.mhpbooks.com/ask-a-bookseller-how-can-authors-partner-with-indie-bookstores/

From Ann Patchett, writing in the Washington Post, about what it means to her to be a bookseller:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/theres-a-book-i-want-you-to-read/2015/04/21/d0e5fd7a-e839-11e4-aae1-d642717d8afa_story.html

From Jon Acuff about how bookstores are so great and why he loves them so much:
http://acuff.me/2015/04/why-i-fell-back-in-love-with-bookstores/

From Brian C. Rittmeyer, writing for Trib Total Media, an article about a bookseller, the daughter of a bookseller, opening a bookstore in Pennsylvania, with comments from Oren Teicher about good prospects for the future of independent bookstores:
http://triblive.com/neighborhoods/yourallekiskivalley/yourallekiskivalleymore/5995092-74/books-watkins-bookstore#axzz3XTG4TRqA

I usually don't do photos, but this is too great:
http://www.slate.com/blogs/behold/2015/03/12/lawrence_schwarzwald_a_new_york_photographer_captures_candid_images_of_people.html

From Christopher Bonanos at Slate, about my alma mater, the Strand, and how the monolithic independent bookstore survives and thrives in the age of E:
http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2014/11/28/the_strand_the_business_model_that_s_kept_the_nyc_bookstore_up_and_running.html

From The Denver Post about the sale of Tattered Cover, one of the biggest and best independent bookstores ever, by Joyce Meskis, one the best booksellers ever, to Len Vlahos, one of the biggest names in the book industry, all of which I think speaks volumes about the good health and future prospects of independent bookselling: 
http://www.denverpost.com/business/ci_27792334/joyce-meskis-selling-tattered-cover

From Vox about how taking notes with pen or pencil on paper commits them to memory better than entering them in your computer (it's that paper-mind connection I am so fond of):
http://www.vox.com/2014/6/4/5776804/note-taking-by-hand-versus-laptop

From Michigan Radio about how independent booksellers are resurgent: 
http://michiganradio.org/post/independent-bookstores-are-rise-despite-digital-competition

From Book Machine, more about the resurgence of real books and bookstores:
http://bookmachine.org/2015/01/13/end-book-nowhere-near-new-year-sees-increase-sales/

From the American Booksellers Association about how bookstores had a great 2014 and are projected to have an even better 2015:
http://www.bookweb.org/node/30583

From The Guardian, more about how reading real books is better for you than reading from e-books, this one saying that plot recall is better, among other things. 
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/aug/19/readers-absorb-less-kindles-paper-study-plot-ereader-digitisation

From ScienceNordic, about how reading from paper is better than reading from screens: 
http://sciencenordic.com/paper-beats-computer-screens

From teenreads.com, an interview with Annie Philbrick, owner of Bank Square Books, about what it takes to buy and run an independent bookstore, and what a great experience it is: 
http://www.teenreads.com/features/real-talk-publishing-the-people-behind-the-books/annie-philbrick-bookstore-owner-part-1

From Forbes Magazine, of all places, about why libraries are still viable and important. One interesting stat in this piece is that, while 28% of Americans will read an e-book this year, 69% will read a physical book:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/northwesternmutual/2014/06/19/the-end-of-the-story-why-libraries-still-matter

From Stephen Marche, writing in Esquire, more about how great bookstores are and why we should buy our books from them:
http://www.esquire.com/blogs/culture/how-to-shop-in-a-bookstore?%3Fsrc=rss

From Mary Mackey, an interview with Amy Thomas, independent bookstore owner, on what indies are, why they're so great, and what they need:
http://marymackey.com/helping-independent-bookstores-survive-thrive/

From Jason Diamond about how indie bookstores are models for small businesses:
http://flavorwire.com/451705/5-reasons-why-indie-bookstores-are-perfect-models-for-american-small-businesses

Just the greatest blog:
http://bookshopblog.com

From New York Magazine, about 6 NYC indies thriving in a difficult market (left out Strand, which seems odd):
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2014/04/6-nyc-independent-bookstores-that-are-thriving.html

From Salon.com about how the shop local movement has boosted sales at independent bookstores:
http://www.salon.com/2014/04/04/the_independent_bookstore_lives_why_amazons_conquest_will_never_be_complete/

From Voice of America about how independent bookstores are thriving, contrary to public perception:
http://www.voanews.com/content/despite-increased-competition-independent-bookstores-thrive-in-us/1853907.html

From The Boston Globe about the new rise of the new independent bookstores:
http://www.bostonglobe.com/arts/2013/10/13/indie-bookstores-hang-owning-one-becomes-new-fantasy-career/mECgvUmqINWv19srlKJhZL/story.html

From Poets & Writers, about a wonderful new bookstore in Ann Arbor, Michigan:
http://www.pw.org/content/how_to_make_a_life_maybe_even_a_living

From The Atlantic, how reading fiction changes the brain:
http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/01/study-reading-a-novel-changes-your-brain/282952/?utm_content=buffer4ff2c&utm

From NPR, how things are improving for independent booksellers:
http://www.npr.org/2013/11/27/247468341/independent-book-stores-enjoy-a-bit-of-a-renaissance

From the Christian Science Monitor, more about how bookstores are back:
http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Society/2013/0317/The-novel-resurgence-of-independent-bookstores

From the LA Times, more about how young people prefer real books over e-books:
http://www.latimes.com/books/jacketcopy/la-et-jc-young-people-prefer-printed-books-survey-20131126,0,7125735.story?track=rss&utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter&dlvrit=717819#axzz2lmKsHnWE

From NBC News, yet again even more about young folk doing the right thing:

http://www.nbcnews.com/technology/majority-young-folks-still-go-paper-books-study-2D11664973

From The Book House in St. Louis, a good bit about the value of books, booksellers & bookstores. Even if you don't contribute, read it (and contribute if you can):
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1338431583/help-build-the-book-house/posts/664893?ref=email …

From Stanford University regarding the physical and beneficial stuff going on inside your brain when you're reading:
http://news.stanford.edu/news/2012/september/austen-reading-fmri-090712.html

From Shelf Awareness about Amazon's publishing program scaling back because, in part, of a lack of sales to brick & mortar independents. Yes, it seems to demonstrate that tone deafness we've come to know and love, but what I find most interesting is the broader context, that they had so much confidence in real books after all:

http://www.shelf-awareness.com/issue.html?issue=2114#m21978

From No Tech Magazine, more about why our brains love reading words on paper, not on screens:

http://www.notechmagazine.com/2013/10/why-the-brain-prefers-to-read-on-paper.html

From Jonica at Village Books in Bellingam, Washington, about how books have helped pull her through hard times:

http://villagebooksblogs.typepad.com/village_books_blog/2014/04/sharing-stories.html

From The Huffington Post about why if you don't read real books to your children they will suffer terribly. Ok, I exagerate, but I made you look:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/cate-pane/why-i-dont-read-digital-books-to-my-kids_b_4179144.html


From Scientific American, more about the whole brain-paper thing (yes, I have a fixation... but it's important, so deal with it):

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=reading-paper-screens

About book collecting, from A Novel Idea Bookstore in Lincoln, Nebraska:

http://anovelideabookstore.com/basic-info.htm



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