While overall revenue and sales are down, from the previous year, Books-A-Million’s CEO Clyde Anderson is stepping aside. Starting March 13, 2012, the CEO seat will be filled by Terry Finley. Finley will add the job to his current duties. So his title will now be CEO/President/COO. That’s quite a business card!
Books-A-Million is based in Birmingham. They closed 21 stores and opened 41 new stores in the past year, giving them a total of 256 stores in 31 states.
The folks over at We Love Typography are mobilizing the world’s font faithful in a very cool new project mapping cool fonts around the world. To participate all you have to do is have the iOS Instagram app installed, have geotagging turned ‘on’, snap a pic and upload it with the tag #wlt or #welovetype. Then the crawlers will grab it an place it on the correct place on this Google Map.
No doubt it’s going to get crowded fast. But it’s a great idea.
There are also two new FREE iOS apps for font and type geeks:
Fontli, has an Instagram-feel, and is trying to build a social network around fonts. The idea being that you could submit a snap shot of some type and your virtual rolodex of font-ish friends could help you identify it. Also, there is…
Fontmaker, which lets you create your own font variations to use in text messaging and emails sent from your mobile device. Not super-useful, but I could see where some would get a kick out of throwing in some random ligatures and letter forms.
Carrie Rollwagen (twitter), who owns Church Street Coffee & Books, is set to launch a new site Monday called PostScript Blog. Rollwagen is a proponent of shopping small and great book stores. Two things I like too. In a recent post on her Shop Small Blog she said the new site will:
“…I think books are so important, and because I think the battle of independents versus Amazon is such a great Small Shop case study, my new blog, PostScript Blog, will focus on books — kind of.
I say “kind of,” because it will really be about more that books. There will be book reviews, and I’ll talk about publishing (and Amazon) sometimes. But mostly, it’ll just be about interesting stuff — movies, music, shopping, community — and the way books intersect with those parts of our lives.”
She also says that Church Street Coffee & Books will ship and distribute all books and ebooks purchased through the new site. That’s a great step that all bookstore owners should take. A reader’s choice in format is not necessarily an “either/or” proposition, but “with”. I think that smart shop owners and their customers will be better served if they figure out how to live with both.
I hope Birmingham continues to gain book-friendly voices in 2012.
Google has launched a new digital content portal called Google Play. As part of the launch they are offering an ebook for 25 cents, every day. They are calling it their “Play of the Day”. Today, it’s Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club. Not to be outdone, Amazon is mimicking every price move that Google is making this week. So today folks with Kindles can get Fight Club for only 25 cents. I’m not sure what they will offer tomorrow or how long these promotional cheap e-books will last.
This is Economics 101. While two big monolith companies duke it out over readers’ attention and try to one-up each other on price… the consumer wins. For the short term anyway. The long term game is a whole other sport, which is why Amazon and Google are paying so much attention to books this week. Competition is a good thing.
