Bank Run at Borders

[Clawhammer]

I was listening to a radio interview on Friday about Boarders and Angus & Robertson. There were a number of ex-fanchiseees that said the problem wasn't the industry or market or legislation favouring o/s or online trading...it was just that these chains had a s#!th@use business model.

One ex-fanchisee is now running a successful private book shop in the same spot where he had a failing Angus & Robertson store just a year earlier. He said K-Mart and Target routinely sell "front stock" (new titles) for 25-50% , so all the trade went there for new books. Whereas 60% of the demand in his store was for "back stock" older titles which the fanchise made it difficult order. He added that they centrally ordered books based on American tastes, not Aussie demand and could barely order for 1 store let alone over 100.

This guy went out on his own as a specialty store ordering what the people wanted and was thriving.

Moreover, another fanchisee added that the boarders model was too chaotic, based on paying exorbitant commercial rents and then putting coffee shops and all sorts of other 'faff' in the store so no one really knew what the core business was anymore.

Boarders and A&R essentially just filled a neiche' no one really wanted. The slack had been taken up by the chain stores selling new titles and the smaller specialty shops selling back order titles.

 

[Guest]

eBooks just aren't going to work until they sort out the Digital Restrictions Management issues - the prices are nearly equivalent to physical books, you can't lend them, the seller can lock you out of them (or in Amazon's case, remotely delete them from your reader device) and many of the ones I've seen have been badly OCR'd so you get text that reads "...and then hemotostscoblin down to theroadand waited forme [????] at the end..." or some sort of random gibberish.

Wow, that's definitely a swag of reasons not to own one.

For the record, I won't buy one anyway. I still prefer to have the tried and true in hand on the train. No batteries. No faulty downloads. 100% ownership.

I like that ideology.

 

[Nugget]

eBooks just aren't going to work until they sort out the Digital Restrictions Management issues - the prices are nearly equivalent to physical books, you can't lend them, the seller can lock you out of them (or in Amazon's case, remotely delete them from your reader device) and many of the ones I've seen have been badly OCR'd so you get text that reads "...and then hemotostscoblin down to theroadand waited forme [????] at the end..." or some sort of random gibberish.

I can't help you with poorly encoded eBooks but I find reviews have been helpful.


As to the DRM issues ......... http://calibre-ebook.com/

 

[intelligencer]

eBooks just aren't going to work until they sort out the Digital Restrictions Management issues - the prices are nearly equivalent to physical books, you can't lend them, the seller can lock you out of them (or in Amazon's case, remotely delete them from your reader device) and many of the ones I've seen have been badly OCR'd so you get text that reads "...and then hemotostscoblin down to theroadand waited forme [????] at the end..." or some sort of random gibberish.

Thats what turned me off buying. I bought from Amazon Dune 40th Anniversary edition. Found 22 errors which I highlighted and emailed to them. They claimed corrupted download. Tried it on an iphone with fresh download. Same errors. Posted back. They pulled the file for a week and put back up. Still same errors.

So I just "acquire" the books elsewhere. I dont feel too bad about this as I have the hard copy already.

They will definitely have to lift their game if they want a pedant like me back in the store.

 

[intelligencer]

eBooks just aren't going to work until they sort out the Digital Restrictions Management issues - the prices are nearly equivalent to physical books, you can't lend them, the seller can lock you out of them (or in Amazon's case, remotely delete them from your reader device) and many of the ones I've seen have been badly OCR'd so you get text that reads "...and then hemotostscoblin down to theroadand waited forme [????] at the end..." or some sort of random gibberish.

Wow, that's definitely a swag of reasons not to own one.

For the record, I won't buy one anyway. I still prefer to have the tried and true in hand on the train. No batteries. No faulty downloads. 100% ownership.

I like that ideology.

I've got an A1 condition Kindle 2 with same condition cover that I'd swap for 4 ounces of silver. It has 3G and allows free browsing of websites.

You can put your own pdf and mobi formatted books on it.

 

[Guest]

Soz Intelligencer, I don't trade my real money for depreciating luxury items.

The stack is strong with this one...

 

[intelligencer]

Soz Intelligencer, I don't trade my real money for depreciating luxury items.

The stack is strong with this one...

I have to say though I dont consider these as luxury gadgets etc. I've read more books, more conveniently in the time I've had them than in the ten years before. Its definitely a paradigm shift for those who enjoy reading. I felt ambivalent before I got one.

I've bought a lot of things in my life and it really is not an understatement to say that an ereader has been one of the best buys ever. Its paid for itself many times over in purely the knowledge and enjoyment I've gotten out of it.

Some libraries were thinking of lending these out at one poibt. Try one out for a while and you'll see what I mean.

 

[hawkeye]

Perhaps it's just the Kindle reader and it's user interface I don't like.

I have to say it's very uninspiring. Navigation is far from intuitive. It's not very smooth. Doing anything with the keyboard is just awkward.

I actually looked round to see if anyone had written a better interface that I could install on it, but no such luck.

Maybe touchscreen would be better. Anyway, I'm considering an Android pad atm, don't know what they are like as readers though.

Tried calibre and "free" books but found it was lot of hit and miss.

 

[hawkeye]

you can't lend them,

This is one of the major downsides to ebooks, I love lending my books and borrowing other's books. Obviously books with photos don't really work either. Music(CDs) and movies(DVDs) will be virtually totally replaced by digital equivalents. I would even say also newspapers and magazines the same. Books, I'm not so sure yet.

 

[SpacePete]

Necro-thread police... activate maximum knicker twist - I am reviving a thread from 2011.

Is "American Psycho" still a banned book here?

I remember that years ago it was allowed for sale here but had to be plastic wrapped, not sure now but I believe that I have seen it on the shelves in bookshops in Sydney.

Exciting development with "American Psycho". Someone spotted it on a bookshelf in Adelaide without the citizen safety plastic. A police raid ensued and now Adelaide's book-browsing public is once again safe from exposure to this bookshop terror. Hoorah!

Adelaide Bookshop Raided By Police For Selling Unwrapped Copies Of 'American Psycho'

In the most dramatic event to happen to Adelaide since it was stripped of the title 'The 20 Minute City', police have raided a book shop and removed illegal unwrapped editions of Bret Easton Ellis' American Psycho.

For those of you haven't read it, American Psycho is about a Manhattan businessman who is also a serial killer.

Co-owner of Imprint Books, Jason Lake, told the ABC that police had received a complaint about his shop selling the new edition of American Psycho without its usual sealed plastic. Since its release in 1991, the Australian government has classified American Psycho as R18, which prohibits sales of the book to young readers and also means that you can't have open copies on the shop floor.

Lake said that other novels which deal with similar subject matter and have been released since 1991 have weirdly not been restricted. He doesn't even think American Psycho is the best Wall Street gore horror out there: "It's not a great book at all, but it's a work of satire for goodness sake," he told the ABC. "In a liberal society people should be free to read what they want to read."

Why Was It Even Censored?

Even though it caused controversy when it was first published, the sale of American Psycho is not restricted in America. But it was the first mainstream novel in Australia to be given an R rating by the Australian Office of Film and Literature Classification, with chief censor John Dickie saying that although the book "as a satire on yuppies, has a lot going for it", he also found it "distasteful". And for some bizarre reason, the sale of American Psycho is completely banned in Queensland.

American Psycho was deemed problematic for a few reasons. Overseas. many prominent feminists like Gloria Steinem and Tara Baxter felt that it was a misogynistic backlash to feminist movements of the 1960s and '70s, and essentially acted as a guide to abusing and killing women. In 1991, Baxter was arrested for reading passages of the book out loud in a Santa Cruz bookstore where it was sold. But it's unlikely that the Australian government were solely concerned about the anti-feminist overtones; it was probably all that graphic murdering, torture, mutilation, cannibalism and necrophilia that did it.

Since When Are We Even Censoring Books?

The Australian government is stricter than you think when it comes to book censorship. In a 1996 Sydney Morning Herald interview, former Australian chief censor Janet Strickland warned that the country was entering a more conservative period. "It's going to get worse," she said. "God knows what kind of society we'll be living in in ten years' time. It could be like Victorian times again, with all the hypocrisy and double standards."

(Another reason to read that SMH article: George 'Mad Max: Fury Road' Miller, fresh off the success of Babe, warns that "an endless diet of entertainment showing muscular figures spraying bullets into dozens of nameless antagonists, combined with easy availability of deadly high-powered guns, is a lethal mix". LOL, 1996.)

Strickland's prediction certainly came true in the case of films that's a whole other article but the list of books banned in Australia is quite extensive. In recent years, the classification board has restricted the sale of Pictures by photographer Robert Mapplethorpe; banned the sale of books Defence of the Muslim Lands and Join the Caravan in 2006 for "inciting violence" (although some academics disputed that claim); and banned The Peaceful Pill Handbook by Dr Philip Nitschke and Dr Fiona Stewart. Whether you believe in censorship or not, it's interesting to think that there's still a body of government workers out there deciding what books, films and computer games will be damaging to our collective psych.

American Psycho is pretty gross, sure but what better way to get kids reading again than by slapping a sticker on it telling them that they're not allowed to? Take note, YA authors.

http://junkee.com/an-adelaide-books...ing-unwrapped-copies-of-american-psycho/61564

 

[l***g]

For those of you haven't read it, American Psycho is about a Manhattan businessman who is also a serial killer.

It is so not. There's a reason it's called 'American Psycho' and not just 'psycho', and it's not because of copyrite.

 

[House]

For those of you haven't read it, American Psycho is about a Manhattan businessman who is also a serial killer.

It is so not. There's a reason it's called 'American Psycho' and not just 'psycho', and it's not because of copyrite.

Well then is it because of the capitalization of a book title?

 

[l***g]

For those of you haven't read it, American Psycho is about a Manhattan businessman who is also a serial killer.

It is so not. There's a reason it's called 'American Psycho' and not just 'psycho', and it's not because of copyrite.

Well then is it because of the capitalization of a book title?

It's because of capitalisation.

 

[SpacePete]

It is so not. There's a reason it's called 'American Psycho' and not just 'psycho', and it's not because of copyrite.

Well then is it because of the capitalization of a book title?

It's because of capitalisation.

Good guess, House.

 

[l***g]

There's a reason it's called 'American Psycho' and not just 'Psycho' and it's not due to copyrite but it is due to CAPITALISatioM.