The Format Wars have begun! To arms! To arms! Choose your weapon, grab your hardcovers for close-in combat, your paperbacks for ranged attacks. Get your kindle and hope that the screen doesn’t shatter on the first impact! A month or so ago I read the headline “Barnes & Noble Pulls Watchmen, Sandman And 100 DC Graphic Novels From Their Shelves” and my first thought was “Censorship!” Then I read the whole headline “Barnes & Noble Pulls Watchmen, Sandman And 100 DC Graphic Novels From Their Shelves Over Amazon Kindle Fire Deal” and I realized I should be less impatient and read entire sentences before jumping to conclusions. The story behind the complete headline is that following a deal between DC Comics and Amazon such that certain DC graphic novels will
DC Comics Archive
It’s not all doom and gloom for bookstores despite the news I woke up to Friday morning. I was awoken by CBC’s morning radio show host interviewing one of the co-owners of Flying Dragon Bookstore, an award-winning bookstore in Toronto, Canada. Saturday May 14, 2011 the Canadian Booksellers Association had named them Specialty Bookseller of the Year. Thursday May 19, 2011 they announced they would be closing. I was struck by fear and doubts about my future plans. If even a well-run, community-beloved bookstore such as Flying Dragon can close, what hope is there for my as-yet-unrealized bookstore? Couple this with the announcement today that Amazon has sold 105 eBooks for every 100 print books sold since April 1 of this year, and it seems
I went to the New York Comic Convention this past weekend. In between wandering the show floor, meeting authors, artists, and book store owners who had booths there I decided to take in a couple of panels on the state of the comic industry. While the comic industry is slightly different from the book industry, there were still a few things discussed that I feel have merit for bookstore owners to think about. This is in part due to the fact that bookstores and comic book stores do cater to somewhat similar clientele, but when a bookstore gets especially specialized (I’m thinking of stores like Bakka-Phoenix, a Toronto-based science-fiction bookstore, or the Sleuth of Baker Street, a mystery-genre specific store) it can start to run
There has been a dramatic shift in the publishing industry in the past couple of months. This is one that might not be seen as important by many of the readers of this blog, but it is going to have a huge impact on at least one sub-set of the bookstore industry. I’m talking about the fact that DC Comics and Marvel Comics are now both releasing their books in digital formats on the iPad on the same day as the physical editions come out. I’m not sure how many of you view the comics industry, and whether you see comic stores as part of the bookstore family, but I feel that this is something that will have an impact on everyone. It will change,