Chhhanges in Book Selling

That last line's not true. There are winners and loser aplenty. The winners are PSU interests and their overpaid employees and the losers are taxpayers in general and the people served in particular.

Yes, the winners are the government -- including Federal, Provincial and local -- and those involved with them. The losers are the tax payers who keep re-electing these bozos and putting up with this garbage.

This is especially true as no one in the government is ever held accountable for these types of screw-ups.

Case in point, the work on 16th Avenue N in Calgary more than doubled the originally approved expenditure.

In response, Mayor Nenshi said, "He wouldn't point fingers."

Translated to, "Yeah we screwed up and wasted tax dollars but no one is going to get fired, disciplined or lose his job. We can just dump it on the tax payers."

In fairness, it was Bronco Davey and not Nenshi who was mayor at the time that the expenditure was approved including the cost-over-run.

But, Nenshi could still have pilloried the "unaccountable" bureaucrat responsible for the mess rather than just say, "Oh well."

Talk about 2 classes of society: government workers and the rest of us, read the second last paragraph of the article:

"USA Today reports that 'federal employees’ job security is so great that workers in many agencies are more likely to die of natural causes than get laid off or fired' "

Unsustainable? You bet. Time for massive public sector layoffs across the board: federal, provincial and municipal. Do. It. Now.

mhb23re

Sad in a way as it removes that immediacy of picking up a book and be reading it at home an hour later. Now I buy books online and, maybe a week or two later I get a box of books and sometimes wonder WTF did I order this book forgetting the late-night alcohol fueled impulsive decision that I just had to read about a certain topic. That's the other problem with online ordering and I should probably hide my visa card so I can't use it after midnight.

Ebooks are not even close to the real thing. There's no such thing as rapidly flipping the pages of a book to get a msec glimpse at a diagram I know is next to the section I want. Ebook readers are tiny and some books are made large for a reason. Ebook readers are fragile and books survive much better when they're dropped if the reader nods off. Books are EMP proof. Ebook readers use DRM and I don't buy anything with DRM. Maybe when we have intelligent paper that one can scrawl ones own comments on I'll think about Ebooks. That's the other thing about Ebooks - one can't write notes in the margins.

OTOH books take up a huge amount of space and most of mine are stored in boxes and it's a momentous job to sometimes find one particular book that I just need to have at the time.

Now we just have to figure out how to get rid of PSU's. Downsizing government 10%/year would be a start.

late-night alcohol fueled impulsive decision

Loki, I love you like a brother, truly.

My family will miss Borders; it was pretty much par for the course for my wife to drop me and our two daughters at Borders while she went clothes shopping on our trips to Buffalo. It had great atmosphere and selection. I'm sorry it's lost its way.

I was in Indigo this afternoon with my younger daughter. On a Saturday afternoon, with nearly a dozen people in line behind us, there were only two cashiers open, and the smarmy lad serving us seemed more concerned with signing us up for the current loyalty campaign than he did moving us through quickly, so he could get to the backlog behind us. I think I'll find Heather on facebook, and give her a piece of my mind.

KevinB, I also fondly remember spending hours at Borders or other Seattle bookstores while my wife was clothes shopping (never could figure out how women can spend so long on this activity). What was nice about Nordstroms in Seattle was that they had comfortable chairs with nearby electrical outlets and I'd join the groups of men sitting there with their laptops programming away. It must have increased sales as I'd see many men just give a brief glance as a woman walked up with an expensive dress and say "sure it looks good on you honey" then get back to the serious business of coding.

I'm not using my Visa card tonight although I'm enjoying a last few glasses of wine before I get into a month of straight work in August (poor planning on my part but the extra money will help support my book habit). There's got to be a place where us bibliophiles can hang out. Perhaps the bookstore of the future will allow one to look at the contents of a book online, not the frustrating Amazon preview but the whole book, and then print out a copy there on the spot if you want to buy it. What I miss on Amazon is the accidental find when I was taking a shortcut through a section of books I don't normally look at and just having a good overview of what's available on a given subject. There's some good used bookstores where I live now and have made some great finds there but the only good bookstore I know of now is located in Portland which precludes regular browsing:-(

Lamestream media is warbling on about e-books killing Borders, no mention of economic decline in general having anything to do with it - maybe that would go against their 'recovery Summer' theme, or was that last Summer?

Boo-hoo,life goes on.

That's the way it is. I miss cheesy haircuts and the cheesier girls that laughed afterwards.
I don't miss getting up to change the channel.

" Case in point, the work on 16th Avenue N in Calgary more than doubled the originally approved expenditure.

Wow,I worked at the Mohawk there back in 1982,and they were talkin about moving the businesses then. Peter's drive-in and their greasy burgers and great milkshakes did move.
HEH,peakin,or was it freakin at the Beacon,Mitzi Dupree,Nash the Slash, memories.

Ch-ch-ch-ch-Changes
(Turn and face the strain)
Ch-ch-Changes
Don't want to be a richer man
Ch-ch-ch-ch-Changes
(Turn and face the strain)
Ch-ch-Changes
Just gonna have to be a different man
Time may change me
But I can't trace time
David Bowie

Life goes on. We still have libraries.

Two things of note that I came across last week, both from Amazon.Com.

First in the previous month ebooks outsold the hard copy version on Amazon for the first time.

Second Amazon plans on introducing a tablet to the market. their business plan is exactly the opposite of Apple. Apple sells electronic devices and provides media with the expressed aim of supporting the devices. Amazon sells digital media and plans to sell the electronic device to further the demand for their media.

The companies that embrace new technology and change are the ones that will survive and prosper, those that cling to the old ways will have the same fate as buggy whip makers had when the automobile took over.

Bailout's will only delay the demise of companies that are not progressive.

Barnes and Noble is still in business, so perhaps the claims of bookstoremageddon are, shall we say premature?

Did y'all know that vinyl records are still sold and there's still record stores that sell them? Uh huh.

When the guy at the corner variety is printing off a whole book and binding it, colour cover and all in two minutes for five bucks, -then- I'll say the bookstores are all doomed.

OTOH, until Heather leaves off with her ban on gun magazines, I'll be doing my share to see that Chapters joins Borders on the dungheap of f-ed companies.

It occurred to me today with all the enviro levy's and user fees foisted onto us by gov't. That this is the result, not of higher costs but of bureaucrats coming up with creative ways to keep the money flowing into the machine, all with the goal of saving their own jobs. It's on out of control ponzi scheme set to collapse on itself.