BilmBlog500

So sneaking out the news on a Sunday night, Borders put out an official press release to say it's not paying publishers for January, and now starting to skip rent payments as well. This follows a press release last week to say that they had a contingency-riddled commitment to new financing. It's going from sad to worse. Borders is so poorly managed right now that it can't even go bankrupt right. As I mentioned on New Year's Eve day, you have to pay your landlord before you pay anyone else, because your landlord is the one person who can change the locks and keep you from accessing your inventory. And if things are so bad you aren't paying your landlord, then you should have just gone into Chapter 11 long before, but as I suggest here that poses ego issues and money issues to some very rich people who've made some bad bets on Borders. Because of those rich person egos, Borders has engaged in a long drawn-out process that has pissed off employees, publish...

Even though Barnes & Noble likes to brag about how wonderfully they're doing, the cost-cutting bug hasn't skipped over. Here Publishers Weekly discusses the impact on small presses of B&N's recent layoff of some four dozen staffers, including several long-time buyers and merchandisers which include the company's director of small press and vendor relationships. Holding to the truism that companies don't like to mayke announcements of bad news, there is no B&N release on the layoffs, their latest is to wax enthusiastic about periodical sales for the Nook. The news from Borders is that publishers are supposed to indicate next week if they will trade their accounts receivable for a promissory note. And there were more layoffs at HQ. They raised some cash by selling their Day by Day calendar kiosk business to Calendar Club. Can't be much, though, because the kiosks are a seasonal business, and the business can't be much more than selling the r...

I'm starting to feel like one of those people who needs to check the obituaries first thing each morning. Susannah York. She played Lara, Superman's Kryptonian mother (Marlon Brandon's wife) in Superman: The Movie, which is one ofd my favorite movies of all time. She was also in Images, which is one of the more interesting efforts by Robert Altman. The prof who taught my intro film survey in college was a big Altman fan, and in this film she played a possibly crazy housewife maybe or maybe not seeing images of men maybe or maybe not threatening her. It's a weird movie, hard to follow. Blessed with stunning musical score by John Williams and beautiful photography by Vilmos Zsigmond. And then a few days before that, Peter Yates. When I finally caught up with Bullitt, with its famous San Francisco chase scene, a few years ago, I wasn't impressed. I thought the movie was on the long and slow side and a little implausible. There's that chase scene, but there...

I found my way to an Atlantic blog post by Peter Osnos, the person who founded Public Affairs Books, which is now part of Perseus, with his take on why Borders has declined so. It overlaps with but is somewhat different from my own . You can read his here . According to Jim Milliot in this week's Publishers Weekly, Borders accounted for 8.5% of dollars spent on books in the third quarter, which was just under half the dollar share for B&N, and still for most people their third largest account. So you can understand the dilemma, that everyone wants Borders to keep going but at the same time it's hard to know what the good path forward is. A quick update on the JABberwocky e-book efforts. We love Amazon more and more with each passing day because they made it so easy for us to go up with titles for Kindle. We will soon be up at Kobo, waiting to get a countersigned contract back. They were very nice, because we were actually able to negotiate a couple of points in the c...

I'm just not a Coen Brothers fan. Haven't been a big Coen Brothers fan for some 25 years now, their first overrated movie was their very first Blood Simple, which I saw and didn't think was all that great at the old State Theatre in Ann Arbor during my college days. For trivia buffs, the State is just a few doors down from the original Borders location, and they still show movies in the two theatres that were twinned out of the old balcony, the street level is retail. Now, True Grit is better than a lot of other movies, let's be sure to say that. Not without its virtues. But like even the best Coen Brothers movies, I just don't think it's as good as everyone's running around saying it is. Most of you probably know what it's about, but since I can summarize it quickly enough... 14-year old hires a US Marshall to find the man who shot down her father, and she accompanies him on the journey. So one of the virtues in chief here is that of Hailee Stei...

Here's a blog post on Edward Champion's blog that was re-tweeted by Tobias Buckell last night, regarding event cancellations at Borders. This isn't exactly news, who's going to rush to send 200 copies to a bookstore for an event when the bookstore has already announced you won't be paid. Here's a link to a NY Times Media Decoder blog post with a few small items, that Borders suggested publishers obtain joint legal counsel to represent in discussions over their bills, and that some publishers weren't thrilled with the turnaround plan being discussed at this week's meetings. Again, not entirely news. I want to remember the Borders that was. It was 1981 or 1982 that I first stepped into the original and then only Borders on State Street in Ann Arbor. My memory says it had to have been '81, but the first book I purchased at Borders was The Exiles Trilogy by Ben Bova which did not come out until '82, maybe we went there in '81 but I didn...

According to this article on publishersweekly.com there is a bank willing to refinance Borders debt but with several strings attached, and one of those strings is for publishers to accept a note or bond for their delayed payments. The only problem with this is, it may not be legal or kosher for the publishers to agree to this outside of having a court force it upon them, because it's then selling books to Borders on terms way different than the established discount schedule and terms of sale. Quoting from a B&N statement on the subject: "We think the playing field should be even. We expect publishers to offer same terms to all other booksellers, including Barnes & Noble and independent booksellers. We fully expect publisher’s will require Borders to pay their bills on the same basis upon which all other booksellers pay theirs. Any changes in publishers terms should be made available to all." And who can blame them. I'd sue, if I were some other bookstor...