At The Bookseller, talk was of the upcoming merger of Penguin and Random, which is expected to be finalized in July and will create “the largest trade publishing business ever.” In honor of the upcoming nuptials, the paper asked a number of industry insiders their recommendations on what the company’s new management should do. Read more here
SABA members will be shocked and saddened to learn the news of Frikkie Nel’s passing this morning. He knew the book trade intimately and as National Manager of SABA served the trade above and beyond the call of duty.
Always friendly and approachable, we will miss his wise counsel and commitment to us as a trade. He was a very caring person and kept in touch with many people after they had retired. Some of us have known and loved Frikkie for very many years and he leaves a gaping hole in all our lives.
Mag hy sag rus.
Worldreader and Paperight have partnered with Short Story Day Africa to take African fiction to a global audience. The initiative brings together writers, readers, booksellers, publishers, teachers and school children from all over the globe to write, submit, read, workshop and discuss stories – and to foster the love of reading and writing African fiction.
Booksellers are invited to send in nominations for the books they most enjoyed reading, promoting and selling in 2012 for the Booksellers Choice Award. Please note the following when considering nominations:
1.Only books written by a South African author and published in SA during 2012 can be nominated, any other nominations that does not meet this criteria will not be considered.
2. Look at this list of the Bestselling titles 2012 as a guideline, but you may nominate any other book (that meets criteria as in 1)
3.Entries are not limited to one per bookshop, any number of staff of a bookshop are entitled to enter. Please encourage your staff to submit their nominations.
For more information on the Booksellers Choice Award, download the Bookseller letter 2013 from Nielsen.
Download the Nomination form 2013 here.
In a recent edition of the Wall Street Journal, it was reported that Barnes and Noble, the largest book retailer in the United States, plans to close 20 stores a year over the next 10 years. This frightening statistic prompted a South African Trade magazine for shopping centres (ShoppingSA) to raise the question of whether brick-and-mortar bookshops are living on borrowed time. The editor asked various booksellers and chain-outlets for their thoughts on survival against the digital onslaught of e-books, improving buying experience and the challenge of luring as many as possible feet through their doors that bring not only browsers, but buyers, and the outcome was, comfortingly, quite positive.
For many people working in public libraries, March and April of this year brought welcome changes to the e-lending debate and it seems as if finally, some progress is being made.
The UK Government published its recommendations about e-lending in March. Named the Sieghart review, the report has effectively altered the tone of the conversation around e-lending and already we are seeing changes. E-books in libraries are still a very new development worldwide. OverDrive’s first entry into libraries was in 2003, in America. In the UK, public libraries only started lending e-books five years ago with OverDrive followed by Bloomsbury and Askews. Today, according to an article by Helen Leech on futurebook.net, two-thirds of UK public library services offer e-books and the third that don’t give three reasons for non participation: “the poor range of stock available, the volatility of the technology and the market, and the set-up costs.”
Open Access (OA) literature is digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions. In an Academic context, it refers to the practice of providing unrestricted access via the Internet to peer-reviewed scholarly journal articles. It is a worldwide movement that is gaining a serious groundswell of support. It has direct and widespread implications for academia, medicine, science, industry, and for society as a whole, as well as (and this is the more worrying part) serious implications for the publishing and bookselling industries, as yet another of their revenue streams comes under threat.
Juta and Company Limited (Juta) and Times Media Proprietary Limited (Times Media) have reached an agreement whereby Van Schaik Booksellers (Van Schaik) will acquire the assets in Juta’s retail operation as a going concern. The transaction, which is subject to Competitions Commission approval, anticipates the rebranding and integration of the existing Juta Bookshops into the operations of Van Schaik, a division of Times Media.
Loyalty programmes are a way for the retailer to encourage the continued patronage of customers, allowing retailers to gather data on customer behavior in order to decipher trends, appropriately reward loyalty, and influence shopping behavior. When properly designed and correctly implemented, it can encourage long term loyal buying behaviour, serve as an interface between companies and their customers, and foster constant engagement.
Why is it that some outstanding books peak at sales of a couple of hundred thousand (if you’re lucky) while others go on to sell many millions? The answer is less likely to do with their respective merits (insert literary witticism here) but more to do with word of mouth on a vast scale, and social pressure to keep up with the Bridget Joneses.
