THE LATE AGE OF PRINT

Beyond the Book

Browsing Posts tagged Barnes & Noble

IMPORTANT UPDATE: On Tuesday, April 16, 2013, I received an email from Laurel Cornell, President of the Indiana University Friends of Art, stating that the IU Friends of Art Bookshop ”must close because its existence violates the contract which Indiana University has with Barnes & Noble for the sale of books.”  Cornell indicated that Friends of Art [...]

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I just wrapped up an interview about Late Age, where my interlocutor asked me about my scholarly relationship to e-books.  It was such an intriguing question, because it forced me to admit to, and to begin working through, a contradiction with which I’ve wrestled privately for quite some time now: the amount I write about [...]

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Last week, in a post entitled “The Book Industry’s Moneyball,” I blogged about the origins of my interest in algorithmic culture — the use of computational processes to sort, classify, and hierarchize people, places, objects, and ideas.  There I discussed a study published in 1932, the so-called “Cheney Report,” which imagined a highly networked book [...]

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Some folks have asked me how I came to the idea of algorithmic culture, the subject of my next book as well as many of my blog posts of late.  I usually respond by pointing them in the direction of chapter three of The Late Age of Print, which focuses on Amazon.com, product coding, and [...]

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OR, HOW TO SAVE INDEPENDENT BOOKSTORES ONE E-BOOK AT A TIME Several weeks ago I mentioned the “Cultures of Books and Reading” class I’m teaching this semester at Indiana University.  It’s been a blast so far.  My students have had so many provocative things to say about the present and future of book culture.  More [...]

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I’ve been struck this start of the school year by the proliferation of textbook rental outfits here in Bloomington, Indiana and elsewhere.  Locally there’s TXTBookRental Bloomington, which brokers exclusively in rented course texts, as well as TIS and the IU Bookstore (operated by Barnes & Noble), both of whom sell books in addition to offering [...]

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What a difference a few years can make.  I’m talking about the proliferation of e-reading devices among my Indiana University undergraduates — devices that were virtually non-existent in their lives not so very long ago.  Let me explain. In 2006, I piloted a course based loosely on The Late Age of Print called “The Cultures [...]

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It’s been awfully quiet around here for the past six weeks or so.  I’ve had a busy summer filled with travel, academic writing projects, and quality time with my young son.  Blogging, regretfully, ended up falling by the wayside. I’m pleased to announce that The Late Age of Print is back after what amounted to [...]

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“Well folks, it’s official: literature is dead,” announces Geekologie, in a post commenting on this photo, snapped at a Barnes & Noble bookstore: Evidently this is a real placard meant to direct shoppers to a new section of the store.  It’s capitalizing on the extraordinary success of Stephanie Meyers’ Twilight series and all of those [...]

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After more than a decade of dominance fueled by aggressive expansion, the leading big-box bookstore chains in the United States are hurting. Borders is barely hanging on by a financial thread, with an almost $38 million loss near the end of 2009 sending the company into a tailspin. 2010 began with a round of layoffs, [...]

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