Chris Webb

Thinking About Borders No-Returns Deal with HarperStudio

It was widely reported this week that Borders has agreed to accept books from HarperStudio as non-returnable.  For those who don’t know, books sold to almost every bookseller can generally be returned to the Publisher for full credit.  In fact, this has been the norm since the 1930s so this arrangement between Borders is unusual [...]

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Buy a Book For Christmas

I only recently discovered the cleverly written publishing blog of the mysterious “Moonrat“, an anonymous editor at an unrevealed publishing house. In a recent post, Moonrat (ok, so I feel silly typing that) discusses what went wrong with the publishing industry in October, 2008 -  lamenting the returns issues we publisher face, and offers a suggestion [...]

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Barack Obama and the Permanence of Paper

Business Week’s David Kiley says “Obama is great for newspapers” and describes his search for a newspaper this morning, only to find there were none available at the many locations he looked. Mr. Kiley wraps his post by asking the question “could it be that with such change afoot amidst a national financial crisis, readership of [...]

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