BilmBlog500

I just updated a blog post about bookstores that are set to close, and as promised I wanted to talk a little more about the Westwood Borders. This was one of the very first Borders to open in Southern California, store #56, and one of the very first Borders I'd ever visited on the West Coast. That would have been in 1996 when I went out for the WorldCon in Anaheim, and made the rounds of what was then a relatively small selection of stores in the earlier days of the book superstore era. If memory serves, Borders in Westwood, West Hollywood, South Bay/Torrance and Brea would have been on the list. It wasn't a great store for sf/fantasy, but it was a major location. I mean, you didn't have a lot of superstores then, they were big news, and this one was huge. Lots of room for books, for music, for videos, for everything. A United Artists movie theatre triplex was on the next block. Godawful underground parking garage, personified why I've enjoyed LA more now that I...

News is trickling out here and there of bookstores that are set to close after the holidays or even before. Here in New York, there's a big flagship Barnes & Noble by Lincoln Center that will be closing after a 15-year run with the expiration of its lease. A fashion discounter called Century 21 quickly leased the entire space. Joseph Beth booksellers has filed Chapter 11 , and will be closing half its stores. They owe millions of dollars to Ingram, hundreds of thousands of dollars to Random House, and more. This is a real shame. I went to Pittsburgh a few years ago when Brandon Sanderson did a signing at their store in Pittsburgh that will be closing. It was a great store with great staff. Joseph Beth shares some lineage with Borders. In the dawn of time at Borders in the 1980s, Borders licensed its inventory system and may have even done warehouse fulfillment for some independent bookstores in the midwest, and if memory serves Davis-Kiss was among the chains they were d...

So a few things to comment upon from Thursday's Wall St. Journal. I'm not going to provide links since so much of their content is behind a pay wall that I may not be able to access the articles, who knows about you. First, Walter Mossberg reviews another entrant in the e-book reader wars, the Irex. He wasn't thrilled with it. I wouldn't be since it doesn't have a note-taking feature. The one aspect of it which really intrigued me was that it's tied in with Newspaper Direct , which offers facsimile editions of tons of newspapers from all over. Talk about love! That's the kind of site where I wonder if I had an iPad to access a facsimile subscription to the Washington Post just how close to heaven that might be. Second, there's a little article about an arrangement in Norway to arrange electronic copying of all of the books in the national library. All of the publishers are signed on, all of the author's groups, if you're a Norwegian author...