I just read over on Gasp! that Mountain Brook bookseller Jonathan Benton’s is going out of business. March 31st will be the last day the doors are open. The owners and operators blamed all the online book sites and such. The Jonathan Benton site has been down for months, but this is such a shame. It’ll be sad to see that empty space in the Mountain Brook Village shopping Center.
The number of non-mega-chain stores is dwindling here in Birmingham…
I just noticed this button at the bottom of the Birmingham Public Library site, which links to a webpage full of mini-video tours of the central downtown branch and five of the Birmingham branches.It’s powered by Alabama360.com, so you have the ability to zoom, pause, pan and tilt.
Some of the older tours are powered by MapWing which pinpoints still images rather than allowing you to pan through a panoramic shot.
The Linn Henley Research Library tours don’t do the murals justice. It’s just one of those things best seen in person.
There is a great post over at Rich Rennicks’ blog The Word Hoarder, where he posits ideas and questions about how publishers and bookstores operate. I’ve read through it twice and have yet to comment. There’s just so much there. I’ll keep checing on it and hope to comment soon.
But I wanted to post the link because this is a discussion that many in the publishing industry should be having.
The folks over at the Abebooks blog have published their picks for 30 Books Worth Buying For the Cover Alone. Only seven of the 30 use photographs. So illustration seems to be the way to go if you want to get noticed in the cover design crowd (of course, these are all fiction titles).
I REALLY like these two:
But have to wonder about this choice:
The image just seems to literal and obvious to be chosen as worth “buying for the cover alone”.
