What was once part of a wave that some predicted would wash away old-fashioned competition has itself been done in by technology and trends not imaginable when it began.

In January, Musicland Group will close its 61 Media Play stores. The company plans to continue operating MediaPlay.com.

Founded in 1992, Media Play was an all-media store, selling music, books, games, videos and other products. Books and magazines constituted 10%-15% of sales at the average Media Play. At Media Play's height, about four years ago, there were nearly 80 stores.

Musicland also created some 200 On Cue stores, smaller versions of Media Play for rural markets. Two years ago most On Cues were closed or converted into Sam Goody stores.

Media Play has been "unprofitable for a number of years," Musicland spokesperson Laurie Bauer told the AP. "We have not been able to find a niche in the marketplace. Music, movies, video games, and books all have a lot of competition, and the chain has been struggling for a number of years."

Musicland continues to operate more than 800 Suncoast Motion Picture Company and Sam Goody stores, the latter of which it's redesigning. Musicland has also started a new retailing line called Graze, a store-within-the-store at its Mall of America Goody store, where customers can buy a cell phone or burn a CD.

Once an independent company, Musicland was bought by Best Buy in 2001. Best Buy sold it to Sun Capital Partners in 2003.

October bookstore sales of $979 million were down 5.1% from $1.032 billion in the same period a year ago, according to preliminary estimates from the Census Bureau.

This marked the seventh month of the year that bookstore sales in a particular month were lower than the same month a year earlier.

For the year to date, bookstore sales are $12.759 billion, down 2.5% from $13.091 billion in the first 10 months of 2004.

By contrast, general retail sales in October rose 6% to $310.378 billion and for the year to date, general retail sales were $3.077 trillion, up 7.5%.

Cool idea of the day: during the last few weeks before Christmas, Roxanne Coady, owner of RJ Julia Booksellers in Madison, Conn., and RJ Julia at Elm Street Books, New Canaan, Conn., promotes the stores' Just the Right Book and Personal Shopper services with daily evening e-mails highlighting potential gift books.

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The Berkeley Daily Planet remembers Debi Echlin, owner of A Great Good Place for Books, Oakland, Calif., who died at 52 on November 25 (Shelf Awareness, November 29).

Hut Landon, executive director of the Northern California Independent Booksellers Association (Echlin was a board member), told the paper: "I hear from people they've really lost a friend, not just a retail person who everybody likes in the community, this is much deeper than that."

Kathleen Caldwell, Echlin's friend and colleague who has taken over the store, commented: "She believed that this was a community, she made it her community and she really instilled that in all of us. . . . She treated the customers as if they were our best friends."

The Today Show presented LightWedge with an early Christmas gift. A mention on yesterday's show of the LightWedge Mini during a segment on suggested gifts for seniors led to some 414 orders from retailers and wholesalers. "We were hammered," owner Jamey Bennett said. (The product also was named by Wired as one of its 30 under $30 "gizmos, gifts & stocking stuffers.")

Introduced in June, the Mini is pocket-sized and retails for $14.95. Among its fans is Roger Doeren, chief operations officer at Rainy Day Books, in Fairway, Kan. He called the Mini "the perfect cost-effective stocking stuffer in size and shape. It's something someone can turn on, use and appreciate immediately." He praised the Mini's "versatility. It has the capability to illuminate part of the page and magnify part of the line and also works as a flashlight. It can fit anywhere, is easy to operate and comes with a protective case and batteries." He noted that besides being used for books, it can light up and magnify menus, maps and other things.

A former lighting designer, Doeren (who told Shelf Awareness that when he started at Rainy Day, he moved from "lighting to enlightenment") said that when he discovered LightWedge at this year's BEA, he spent an hour and half talking lighting and put in orders for every product. "LightWedge is such an innovation," he continued. "Light travels downs the wedge and is evenly transmitted onto the page, illuminating it evenly. It doesn't bounce off the page."

Rainy Day markets LightWedges in its e-mail newsletter and has done well with it ever since its first order arrived in July. That day, a customer, watching staff begin to set up a display, bought a package of six at $39.95 each "before we even had put them into our computer system," Doeren said.

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Early next year LightWedge is "shifting gears a little," as Bennett put it, and introducing a line called Great Point Lights. Priced under $20, the line includes LED reading lights and magnification products. "We'll have four or five models, each with four to six colors," he continued. "In magnification, products tend to be lenses with a clunky black handle." LightWedge aims to change the design and use trendy colors. "The theory is that buying a magnifier doesn't have to make you feel old," he commented. "Lots of people need them, and we might as well make them fun."

The company will also package the Great Point Lights line in transparent packaging that will allow people to try them out easily. In addition, it's offering batteries that fit the products--perhaps the only batteries in the world with ISBNs.

LightWedge shipped its first orders in June 2002 and now has some 70 different SKUs.

Today on WAMU's Diane Rehm Show, a divorce special:

Elizabeth Marquardt, author of Between Two Worlds: The Inner Lives of Children of Divorce (Crown, $24.95, 0307237109).
Brooke Lea Foster, author of The Way They Were: Dealing with Your Parents' Divorce After a Lifetime of Marriage (Three Rivers Press, $14.95, 1400082102).

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Today the View talks with Gloria Estefan, author of The Magically Mysterious Adventures of Noelle the Bulldog (Rayo, $17.99, 0060826231).

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Tonight the Charlie Rose Show is scheduled to evolve into a discussion of Charles Darwin, featuring:

• Edward O. Wilson, editor of From So Simple a Beginning: Darwin's Four Great Books (Norton, $39.95, 0393061345), which includes The Origin of Species and Voyage of the H.M.S. Beagle.
• James Watson, author of Darwin: The Indelible Stamp: The Evolution of an Idea (Running Press, $29.95 0762421363).

On Monday on All Things Considered, Alan Cheuse gave the gift of his holiday book list:

• Madeleine Is Sleeping by Sarah Shun-lien Bynum, "a wonderful combination of Virginia Woolf and Freud and Jung, and Bynum's own gifts for imagery and wordplay."
• The Library of America Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, A Death in the Family, and Shorter Fiction edition of work by James Agee. The prose poem "Knoxville, Summer of 1915" offers "some of the most sublime pages in American literature."
• Transcendent by Stephen Baxter, a science fiction novel by the author who "collaborates from time to time with Sir Arthur C. Clarke, and his own work comes close to inducing the same sense of wonder as Clarke's."
• The Color of Law by Mark Gimenez, a legal thriller about "a high-flying Dallas lawyer whom a federal judge calls upon to defend a black Dallas hooker accused of murdering the son of a Texas senator."
• The Lost Painting by Jonathan Harr, "for the art lover you know," a book about the search for a lost Caravaggio masterpiece that "reads like a novel."
• Herman Melville by Andrew Delbanco "for someone who wants to read about the lives of novelists, in this case, one of our greatest."
• The Planets by Dava Sobel is "delightful and idiosyncratic. I especially love the opening of the chapter about the moon, called 'Lunacy.' "
• There and Then: The Travel Writings of James Salter, "a collection of the maestro's recollections of kicking about France, skiing, climbing."

For children:

• Little Stevie Wonder by poet Quincy Troupe, a "boldly told biography . . . lavishly illustrated by Lisa Cohen" with an accompanying CD.
• Encyclopedia Prehistorica: Dinosaurs, "one of the most striking and elaborate pop-up books you'll ever wrestle away from your child and play with on your own."

And for everyone:

• Reading Rumi in an Uncertain World, a DVD featuring Robert Bly and Naomi Shihab Nye reading the poetry of the great 13th century Persian Sufi mystic Rumi. "Long after the images are gone you'll remember the words."

Elster is, among other things, a logophile--a lover of words. In this compendium of language conundrums and curiosities, he explains how we get words like skosh, meaning "a little bit" (it entered the English language in the 1950s during the Korean War, being Korean pidgin from Japanese sukoshi), and comes up with new words: when asked for a word for the awkward pulling in of the knees in order to let someone by, he concocts the delightful genusuction. In addition to clarification on the usual suspects--lay and lie, i.e. and e.g.--every chapter features brainteasers, puzzles, literary trivia, and truly horrible puns.