{"id":2930,"date":"2011-05-20T09:33:44","date_gmt":"2011-05-20T09:33:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/2011\/05\/book_news\/"},"modified":"2011-05-20T09:33:44","modified_gmt":"2011-05-20T09:33:44","slug":"book_news","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/2011\/05\/book_news\/","title":{"rendered":"Book News"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/adambowie\/225455644\/\" title=\"Waterstones by adambowie, on Flickr\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/farm1.static.flickr.com\/60\/225455644_8c1e6fb5db.jpg\" width=\"500\" height=\"334\" alt=\"Waterstones\"><\/a><br \/>\nTwo interesting developments in the book world in the last 24 hours:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Waterstones has been <a href=\"http:\/\/www.thebookseller.com\/news\/waterstones-sold-alexander-mamut-%C2%A353m.html\">sold<\/a> by HMV; and<\/li>\n<li>Amazon says it&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/phx.corporate-ir.net\/phoenix.zhtml?c=176060&#038;p=irol-newsArticle&#038;ID=1565581&#038;highlight=\">selling<\/a> more Kindle books that Hardback and Paperback titles<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Waterstones has been sold by the slightly ailing HMV group for \u00a353m to Alexander Mamut&#8217;s A&#038;NN Group, and James Daunt (he of Daunt Books fame, the renound tote-bag selling bookshop) will run it. That suggests that it&#8217;s going to concentrate on its core offering &#8211; a good range of books.<br \/>\nIn the meantime, Amazon.com has announced that in the US, the company is selling 105 Kindle books for every 100 paperback and hardback books it&#8217;s selling. And importantly it has stripped out free books. That&#8217;s important because when I glance at readers&#8217; Kindles on the tube, I&#8217;ve noticed a significant upsurge of interest in classics based largely on the fact that they&#8217;re free and everyone likes free.<br \/>\nIn the UK, Amazon.co.uk says that it&#8217;s selling Kindles to hardbacks on a ratio of greater than 2 to 1. Of course, many Kindle books are priced very cheaply &#8211; at below paperback prices. So while I wouldn&#8217;t belittle that number, I&#8217;d put it in context. On my decidedly middle-class railway line, I see an awful lot of commuters reading Kindles (far more than using iPads for example).<br \/>\nWe&#8217;re at something of a fork in the road. Our libraries are being whittled away, and this is a last chance for a major high-street book chain to survive and even prosper. If bookshops do disappear, they&#8217;re unlikely to reappear. While your supermarket sells a selection of top 20 titles (I bet they&#8217;re stocking that Maddie book), that&#8217;s not enough. Russian oligarchs are all well and, um, good, but even they probably demand an eventual return on investment.<br \/>\nThere&#8217;ll be pockets of bookshops that will always exist. The aforementioned Daunt Books will be fine. But its main branch is located on Marylbone High Street (with other branches in those not-quite-destitute parts of London &#8211; Chelsea, Holland Park, Belsize Park and Cheapside), while other independents will get by. But without a Waterstones &#8211; or even a WH Smiths &#8211; many towns and cities will have nothing of note.<br \/>\nI&#8217;ve seen the future, and I&#8217;m not altogether sure I like it.<br \/>\n[Addendum] I see that in the US, John Malone&#8217;s Liberty group has made <a href=\"http:\/\/www.tvweek.com\/blogs\/tvbizwire\/2011\/05\/what-does-john-malone-know-tha.php\">an offer<\/a> to buy the troubled US book retailer Barnes &#038; Noble. Is there life left in bricks and mortar stores?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Two interesting developments in the book world in the last 24 hours: Waterstones has been sold by HMV; and Amazon says it&#8217;s selling more Kindle books that Hardback and Paperback titles Waterstones has been sold by the slightly ailing HMV group for \u00a353m to Alexander Mamut&#8217;s A&#038;NN Group, and James Daunt (he of Daunt Books [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"cybocfi_hide_featured_image":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2930","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-literature"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2930","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2930"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2930\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2930"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2930"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2930"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}