I saw Notting Hill a few years ago. I’m sure at this point everyone knows that Hugh Grant’s character is the owner of a travel bookstore. A store that sells only travel books. When I first saw Notting Hill I thought it was a hilarious idea. How could that possibly survive these days? I can see how it may have been a viable business at one point, since the staff would know all of their product really well. These days, it would be nice to have staff that would be that knowledgeable, but only selling product in that narrow a focus sadly seems to be just asking to go out of business. Then I found out that Toronto has a store dedicated only to Cookbooks.
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How do you accept payments? In Toronto there are a multitude of booksellers of different types and sizes: some are huge multi-story stores with thousands of books, DVDs, and music; others are small storefronts whose square footage can be measured in tens of feet. Then there are the individuals who set up on a street corner and sell books out of a cart or off of a blanket. All accept various means of payment. The individual sellers only accept cash as payment. After all, for a credit card machine you need a phone line, somewhere to plug in the terminal, all that stuff. Or at least, you used to. Not any more thanks to the ubiquity of smart phones and the emergence of small credit
Spacing published an article the other day about a new way for users to interact with subway advertising devised by a few students at the Miami Ad School. The idea they propose is called the Underground Library and the gist of it is that ads would be placed in the trains of the New York subway system which would have a Near Field Communication (NFC) chip embedded in them which would allow people with NFC enabled smartphones (not iPhones…sorry) to touch their phone to the active portion of the poster and download a ten page sample of the book that is designated on the poster. Theoretically a single poster could even offer multiple books. You can read the sample and it will let you know of nearby
Finally a eReader User I finally bought an eBook reader. I know that I’ve been writing about eBooks for a few years now, but only just this past week did I finally decide to get a dedicated eBook reader, rather than running an app on my iPad or an eBook reader program on my computer. My initial assessment, which I’ll explain more in a bit, is overwhelmingly positive. I decided that it was finally time to get one because a few months ago a friend recommended Old Man’s War by John Scalzi. I was about to buy a copy when I remembered that it was among the 8 books included with the Humble eBook Bundle, a pay-what-you-want collection of DRM free eBooks I had bought a few
One of the things I remember from my time in school learning to be a librarian was something the professor in the Reference Services class I took during my first semester said: never apologize for what you read. This is just one of those quotes that is so simple and yet so true. Why should you apologize for what you read? Reading is done for you and no one else. Reading a book lets you learn something you didn’t know, it entertains you, and it provides an escape valve. It is also very hard to put into practice. Or it was, at least. People judge people. They judge them based on what they wear, how they talk, what they say, what they do, and what they read. I commute to