LISNews: Librarian News

A tit-for-tat price war between Wal-Mart and Amazon accelerated late on Friday afternoon when Wal-Mart shaved another cent off its already rock-bottom prices for hardcover editions of some of the coming holiday season’s biggest potential best sellers, offering them online for $8.99 apiece.

“If readers come to believe that the value of a new book is $10, publishing as we know it is over,” said David Gernert, Mr. Grisham’s literary agent. “If you can buy Stephen King’s new novel or John Grisham’s ‘Ford County’ for $10, why would you buy a brilliant first novel for $25? I think we underestimate the effect to which extremely discounted best sellers take the consumer’s attention away from emerging writers.”

Article in the NYT

An Urban Bookstore In Philly Finds Its Niche: Even in the recession, a Philadelphia bookstore that specializes in urban fiction, Black and Nobel is flourishing. Many of the titles are written by people who live in Philly. Owner Hakim Hopkins says urban fiction has increased in popularity over the past few years, following the trend of hip-hop music.

Story on "Morning Edition" on NPR

Kelly Carmichael is a Sacramento State University senior studying to be an elementary school teacher. A book for one of her child development courses cost more than $170. But when a professor mentioned that she didn't have to buy the book because she could rent it for the semester, Carmichael says it was a no-brainer.

"For any title that is for rent, you'll see a sign that will show the new and used price, but also the rent-it-for price. So, for example, this text here, Infants, Child and Adolescents — new it would be $142, used it would be $106.50, and you can rent it for $58.34."

Wired's Epicenter blog details the latest venture to come out of Mountain View CA, public domain books printed on demand.

"What’s hot off the presses come Thursday? Any one of the more than 2 million books old enough to fall out of copyright into the public domain.

And now Google Book Search, in partnership with On Demand Books, is letting readers turn those digital copies back into paper copies, individually printed by bookstores around the world."