Showing posts with label bookstores. Show all posts
Showing posts with label bookstores. Show all posts

Monday, January 30, 2023

How Barnes & Noble Came Back From Near Dead; The New York Times, January 28, 2023

Ezra Klein, The New York Times; How Barnes & Noble Came Back From Near Dead

[Kip Currier] Bookstores and libraries have their own distinctive communities and cultures. In 2004, during my doctoral studies at the University of Pittsburgh, I took a still-resonant ethnographic studies course taught by the phenomenal Dr. Maureen Porter in Pitt's School of Education. For my term-long ethnographic study that term, I sat in, observed, and became an unwitting participant in the culture and community of the cafe in a strip plaza location of the now (sadly!) defunct Borders book store chain in the South Hills of Pittsburgh. In a wistful, encomiastic New York Times OpEd this week, frequent tech culture commentator Ezra Klein opines on the sense of community and "third place" that brick-and-mortar bookstores and libraries can continue to provide in the digital age...

FYI: "How Barnes & Noble Came Back From Near Dead". (1/28/23). The New York Times.

[Excerpt]

"Barnes & Noble’s resurgence is a reminder that there is nothing inevitable about its (or any bookstore’s) demise. Great bookstores and libraries still provide something the digital world cannot: a place not just to buy or borrow books, but to be among them."

Thursday, February 17, 2022

Opinion: I witnessed brutal censorship in Iran. We should all take U.S. book bans as a warning.; The Washington Post; February 14, 2022

Azar Nafisi, The Washington Post; Opinion: I witnessed brutal censorship in Iran. We should all take U.S. book bans as a warning.

"Azar Nafisi is the author of “Reading Lolita in Tehran.” Her new book, “Read Dangerously: The Subversive Power of Literature in Troubled Times,” comes out in March.

First they burn books, then they kill people!”

That line often came to mind when I was living in the Islamic Republic of Iran, every time the regime closed a bookstore or a publishing house, every time it censored, banned, jailed or even killed authors. It never occurred to me that one day I would repeat the same sentiment in a democracy, in my new home, the United States of America...

It is alarming to think that American communities in 2022 are actively seeking to deprive people of the reading experiences for which my students in Iran paid such a heavy price. For I can tell you: Book bans are canaries in coal mines — indicators of the direction in which a society is moving.

In recent years, we have seen how truth is replaced by lies, and how dangerous a cultivated ignorance can be, especially when it is embraced by our political leaders and our loudest media commentators, those with the largest bullhorns. Book-banning is a form of silencing, and it is the next step along a continuum — one that I worry even in the United States presages a further slide toward totalitarianism."

Monday, July 25, 2016

Hong Kong book fair subdued after bookseller disappearances; Guardian, 7/25/16

Ilaria Maria Sala. Guardian; Hong Kong book fair subdued after bookseller disappearances:
"The controls on travellers have been strengthened, and many who came to Hong Kong to buy books censored in mainland China have stopped buying them, as they may get into trouble at the border.”...
What has befallen the five booksellers has cast a heavy pall across the industry in Hong Kong. “We now have problems at both ends of the book chain”, says Bao Pu, of New Century Press, a publishing house known for high-quality political works banned on the mainland. “Printers are not willing to print politically sensitive books, throughout the Hong Kong printing industry. This is a very serious situation. The printers are deciding what can be read. At the other end of the chain there are the bookstores, and most of them will no longer sell this kind of book because it is considered dangerous.
“Also, you see fewer political books because in this situation, we publish less. I think that Hong Kong is no longer a place that supports independent publishing, since the Causeway Bay Books event [when Gui Minhai was arrested].”"

Thursday, September 19, 2013

Expanding Privacy Legislation to Include Ebooks; American Libraries, July/August 2013

Mariam Pera, American Libraries; Expanding Privacy Legislation to Include Ebooks: "While privacy continues to be an issue on the national scene, at least two states—Arizona and New Jersey—have taken steps to expand their library privacy laws to include ebooks... Arizona and New Jersey follow in the footsteps of California, which in 2011 passed the Reader Privacy Act, extending library records protections to print-book and ebook purchases."