Notes: Borders Cuts; Bookworm Helps in Earthquake Relief
Eight people at the "director and v-p level" at Borders Group were let go on Tuesday. Sources indicated that longtime buyers Beryl Needham and Tom Dwyer are gone, and Rob Teicher is leaving, although he reportedly was in the process of retiring.
Other affected areas apparently include planning, finance and benefits.
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The Bookworm, which operates several English-language library/bookstores in China, reports that the staff at the company's Chengdu branch, near the epicenter of Monday's earthquake, is safe.
The Bookworm is "co-ordinating our efforts to help the people of Sichuan during this difficult time," the store said. "The Bookworm Chengdu has become a focal point in assisting those groups currently providing on the ground support for those in Sichuan affected by the tragedy."
Bookworm stores in Beijing and Suzhou as well as the Chengdu store are "gathering much needed emergency materials to be sent to victims."
Bookworm's first store opened in Beijing in 2004. The Chengdu branch opened two years later and stocks some 5,000 volumes in several languages, including English and Chinese, has a café and restaurant and sponsors many literary events and author talks.
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Describing the Red Balloon Book Shop, St. Paul, Minn., as "an independent bookstore for the child in all of us," the Twin Cities Daily Planet profiled the shop and its owners, Carol Erdahl and Michele Cromer-Poiré.
The article particularly noted the Red Balloon's events for young readers and homey atomosphers, as well as its experienced staff.
"We have teachers and librarians on staff," Cromer-Poiré said. "The cumulative knowledge of the people who work here is tremendous."
Erdahl told the paper that one of the reasons for the bookshop's success is that it fills a need in the community. "We are a niche store. Being a specialty in children's books we have more titles than any Barnes & Noble. We try to make intelligent and caring choices about the books we carry."
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Bloomberg
offered a "roundup of the scariest financial books on the market. It's
gloom-and-doom season for purveyors of financial books, so pull out a
can of beans from your ammo case in the bomb shelter and warm it up.
You're going to need some nourishment."
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What is the
defining issue of digital publishing? If you answered "search," give
yourself a virtual prize. Reporting on the adjustments magazine and
book publishers are making in an increasingly digitized environment,
the Guardian
reported search "is as critical to the success of an online publication
as WH Smith is to magazine retailers, and it represents the
task-oriented nature of the web, very different from the laid-back,
packaged gloss of magazine publishing."
The Guardian
added that, according to Daniel Heaf, outgoing director of digital
ventures at BBC Worldwide, "the problem of realising search's potential
is still only 5% solved." In addition, he "cited mobile as another area
of enormous opportunity for publishers and one that most have so far
largely ignored. For the BBC's Lonely Planet titles, the potential is a
new incarnation that is always on, up-to-date, portable and
location-sensitive."
Henry David Thoreau's ideas seem particularly relevant at a time when "going green" and "sustainability" are part of the national discourse. From March 1845 to September 1847, Thoreau recorded journal entries that were eventually published as Walden; or, Life in the Woods. He built a 10' x 15' house with a bed, table, desk, three chairs, a fireplace for cooking and keeping warm, and a lantern by which he read and wrote. If you've read Walden, you know all this already. And you may well know the quotations that Porcellino selects, which come not only from Thoreau's "experiment in living," but also from his other essays (he touches on the jail episode that led to writing "Civil Disobedience," for instance). Porcellino arranges these by season, constructing one year on Walden Pond. Just as Thoreau took complex ideas and framed them in simple phrases that everyone could understand, Porcellino uses deceptively simple strokes of the pen to convey some very complex ideas. Over his pen-and-inks, Porcellino uses a wash in the same color as the "light and sandy soil" in which Thoreau planted his five-and-a-half acres of vegetables. And in this inspired graphic-novel treatment, Porcellino also is able to chronicle the silences on Walden Pond--those awe-inspiring moments that can occur only when one communes with nature utterly alone.