It wasn’t a love of books that led him to start an online bookstore. “It was totally based on the property of books as a product,†Shel Kaphan, Bezos’s former deputy, says. Books are easy to ship and hard to break, and there was a major distribution warehouse in Oregon. Crucially, there are far too many books, in and out of print, to sell even a fraction of them at a physical store. The vast selection made possible by the Internet gave Amazon its initial advantage, and a wedge into selling everything else. For Bezos to have seen a bookstore as a means to world domination at the beginning of the Internet age, when there was already a crisis of confidence in the publishing world, in a country not known for its book-crazy public, was a stroke of business genius.
Do you know any “Noble Librarians Faced with Adversity?”
If so, please nominate them for the new Lemony Snicket Prize for Noble Librarians Faced with Adversity, handed out by the American Library Association:
Th[is] award, which ALA intends to present at its Annual Conference, recognizes a librarian who “has faced adversity with integrity and dignity intact.†It will be given annually to a deserving librarian…
In honor of past and present U.S. Presidents during this month of “Presidents’ Day”, we have a wide selection of books on their various presidencies. Come join us at the Todd Library and learn more about them and their influence on our Nation.
The Pew Research Center reported last week that nearly a quarter of American adults had not read a single book in the past year. As in, they hadn’t cracked a paperback, fired up a Kindle, or even hit play on an audiobook while in the car. The number of non-book-readers has nearly tripled since 1978.
