Bitchin' Blog Posts
: Booksellers
February 24, 2011 | Thursday | 43 Comments
One of the sessions I attended at Tools of Change was from BeneTech, which works to make books accessible to those with significant physical obstacles to reading, such as visual impairment or learning disability. Listening to that presentation, I tweeted some of it and heard back from a reader named Sassy Outwater, who agreed with some of the points and offered to school me on what blind readers need and have to facilitate their own reading enjoyment. I know absolutely squatnada about blind readers. And so I asked a bunch of really ignorant and obvious questions, and Sassy was kind…
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February 18, 2011 | Friday | 30 Comments
The highlights of the first day of ToC included Margaret Atwood, Indie booksellers speaking confidently and knowledgeably about building community, and two days of hot lunch. I love hot lunches like you have no idea. The opening keynotes of ToC were rather awesome, mostly. First was Theodore Gray, who discussed the creation of his periodic table table, and the book and then the iPad app that were inspired by his strange collection. The ipad app is jaw dropping - then comes the Outer Space one, and I about leapt off my chair to go home and get my iPad so…
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February 16, 2011 | Wednesday | 225 Comments
With the news that Borders filed for bankruptcy, I started thinking about the Borders that I went to when I was younger, back when a giant huge bookstore was a luxury I’d never experienced. There were fireplaces! And big huge chairs! And more books than I’d ever seen in my life, and the employees were friendly as opposed to condescending like the people in the local bookstore near my house who never had any good chapter books for kids. Colleen Lindsay was saying that if the local Borders near her brother’s home closes, there won’t be a bookstore for 35…
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May 17, 2010 | Monday | 128 Comments
Let’s be somewhat rude and talk about people who aren’t here, by which I mean, people who aren’t on the internet. I know, can you imagine? There are people who aren’t online. I can’t fathom not having the internet. I find it peculiar and disorienting when I am not connected to faraway friends and people who like to talk about romances and cooking with white beans and removing whatever bug is eating my peppers and whatever immediate concerns I’m harboring. But there are people who are not on the internet, romance readers, specifically. Romance, if you recall from the oft-quoted…
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November 09, 2009 | Monday | 36 Comments
In this month’s Romance Writer’s Report, there’s an article about decoding what it means to be a “bestseller.” In a curious convergence of topics, I was recently interviewed by an undergrad journalism student looking for information on how books are marketed with the arrival and market power of digital books. Seeing this article made me ponder how books are labeled and sold, both online and off, and I had to ask myself: have I ever bought a book from an author I haven’t heard of just because the cover said, ‘New York Times Bestseller?’ Nope, I haven’t. I remember being…
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