Melville House Books

Bookselling

• ‘Just a joke’: Amazon gets more money from UK government grants than it pays in tax

  In the continuing saga of Amazon’s tax dodging (see here and here for just a couple of our reports on this), it was revealed this week that the company’s UK operation made £4.2bn in sales… Read more »

• Canadian booksellers celebrate 40 years

    Barb and Doug Minett, owners of The Bookshelf in Guelph, Canada, opened their bookstore forty years ago. Today, The Bookshelf is still going strong after rising above the competition and… Read more »

• 50 annotated first editions—going to the highest bidder

  It’s an impressive feat to collect 50 first editions of some of the most eminent authors writing today. But it’s a rare event when each of those fifty books has… Read more »

• Tim Waterstone to launch Read Petite

  Tim Waterstone, founder of the eponymous UK bookshop chain Waterstones, is launching Read Petite, a digital book service that will publish both new and old short fiction and non-fiction and eventually long-form journalism.… Read more »

• New scholarships offered specifically to booksellers

  More great things are afoot from the BINC Foundation of Ann Arbor, Michigan. As we mentioned in November, the Book Industry Charitable Foundation was begun in 1996 to aid Borders… Read more »

• The inverse of Amazon: more useful, just as many photoshopped abs

  Never let it be said we’re unwilling to take minor things far too seriously. Case in point: look at this fun bit of code put together by Hilary Mason of… Read more »

• The future of book scanning

  It turns out that when robots aren’t trying to kill all humans in a grim sci-fi dystopia, they can actually be pretty neat. To wit, the Ishikawa Oku Laboratory at… Read more »

• Relief for booksellers in need

  One foundation is working to help booksellers when disasters, wet and windy or otherwise, make lives difficult… Read more »

• Talking shop with an indie bookseller

  This is a new and occasional series that asks some of our favorite independent booksellers a handful of simple questions. The questions are the same, but the answers (predictably) vary.… Read more »

• Cops trashing books: not just for the NYPD anymore

  Last Friday morning in the Al-Nabi Daniel bookstalls of Alexandria, security forces — reportedly sent by newly elected governor Mohamed Atta Abbas — destroyed sixteen of the market’s forty-eight stalls.… Read more »