Amazon fired the opening salvo in the latest skirmish over eBooks with mega-publisher Macmillan. Macmillan, one of the largest publishers in the world is at odds with Amazon over the pricing of Kindle books, so Amazon deleted all of the “Buy Now” buttons from all Macmillan published titles! I’m sure Amazon can predict the impact [...]

It’s less than a week before Steve Jobs takes the stage atop a unicorn showing the world the fabled Apple Tablet (iSlate). And it appears that Amazon thinks there is going to be a real battle for books. In the past two years, Amazon has used its size to bulldoze its way through publishing. But [...]

Not ten. Ten is too many. But five is doable. I was shopping this weekend and stopped in a few local indie stores. They had nice tables showing “NY Times Bestsellers” and the like, all of which was great, but didn’t help me at all. So here I offer you five things that I want [...]

It looks like Birmingham is loosing another indie bookstore. After almost six years in business and just weeks after setting up their Twitter feed, Linda Brown has sent out a very sincere and personal note about plans to close Milestone Books or at best, let it change hands. I have pasted her message, in its [...]

I opened the Birmingham News this Sunday morning and saw the great feature story The Alabama Booksmith owner Jake Reiss. It’s always fun to learn more about the people in the stacks of some of our favorite stores.

The annual Local Author Expo has been in full swing since 11 a.m. today and ends at 3 p.m. for the day. If you didn’t make it out today, you can go by the Birmingham Library tomorrow (Sat., Dec. 5th) and mingle with some of Birmingham’s literary minds.
Over 140 local authors are attending this year [...]

Exciting things are happening over at LibraryThing and they tie in locally. So I am making a few changes to help bolster their efforts and build buzz for local Birmingham bookstores. This first change, really will affects the handful of visitors that have subscribed to the {head}:sub/head Google Calendar. I have decided to stop updating [...]

Retailers can’t run fast enough down the pricing ladder. Last week’s announcement from WalMart was the opening shot, stating that certain best-seller hardback books can be pre-sold for $10 (so Stephen King’s upcoming $35 book could be ordered for $10). Not to be outdone, Amazon made the same offer, but for the low low price [...]

After a few years of trying to find its place in the Birmingham scene, independent bookstore and publishing house Greencup Books has announced it’s going-out-of-business after the November 2nd, el Dia de los Muertos (Day of the Dead) festival. The shop has been struggling over the past few months, having never really regained its footing [...]

I noticed the tents up out in front of the Vestavia Hills Library this weekend’s Tent Booksale Blowout.
The library’s hours are 9a-6p, on Saturday and 1p-5p, on Sunday.
Happy book hunting!