Publishing: Onnesha Roychoudhuri in the Boston Review has an article on the impact of Amazon on the bookselling trade. It’s a long one (though not quite as long as the scrollbar might make it look) but it’s thorough and very interesting. The comments, sadly, fall into the pro- and anti-digital debate, rather than discussing the thrust of the article, though they’re still worth skimming, and the article helpfully links to Who Moved My Buy Button? which is especially useful for authors whose publishers are being squeezed.

In the meantime, Borders (US) is in trouble. It’s been defaulting on payments to small publishers for a while, but now it’s begging the big ones to let it off the hook where they can. B&N aren’t impressed with this, and insist if Borders gets special terms they ought to as well. For print books brick and mortar stores are still making the majority of sales, but if Borders goes that’s going to leave a large proportion of that market without a b&m bookshop to go to. Amazon’s stranglehold tightens.

In the UK, since Borders closed last year (well, December 09) there’s been an overall drop in book sales of more than 3%. Waterstones, their biggest competitor, has seen a rise in sales but has still had to close 20 stores nationwide (partly due to its sister chain, HMV, which had a poor season and is closing about 40 of its own shops). The Borders unit in my city still hasn’t been filled, and though Waterstones is a little busier I wouldn’t say it was Borders-customer-base busier.

Interest Piquing: EREC shares it’s annual data in graph form. It’s interesting that apart from one jump, titles still within their first year have remained fairly constant in terms of sales, while all other data being tracked rose. I wonder if that’s something to do with readers buying up digital backlists, and there being more digital backlists to buy now.

InsPiring: Two from the National Georgraphic today – a prehistoric predator found in a kitchen counter and a forest inside a cave.

Procrastination: The Adventures of Superhero Girl. Originally appearing in a newspaper in Canada, the artist is uploading it strip by strip for the rest of the world to enjoy!