Barnes & Noble is buying used books. They’re marketing it as a way to sell your old textbooks, but they’re buying other books too. They’ve set up a simple site that lets you check titles and find out if they’ll take them and how much they’ll pay. You then send your books to Barnes & Noble and they cover the shipping. As far as I can tell, the prices are fairly comparable to what you might get selling your books to your local used bookstore, maybe even a little better.
Selling used books online
Appearing Elsewhere
NY-based readers are invited to “Step Inside the Book” at a reading/party I’m doing this Friday with Alex Rose (The Musical Illusionist) and Alex Itin (Orson Whales). Alex will be working his narrative/surroundsound magic, Other Alex will be screening his multimedia books, and I’ll be showing art and reading fiction from A Field Guide to the North American Family. Drinks are on the house, I’m told, so if you’re free, stop by the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Swing Space, at 125 Maiden Lane, between 7 and 9 p.m. We now return to our regularly scheduled programming…
Wiki Wiki Amazon
After bringing us rankings and tags and reviews and recommendations and lists and blogs and discussions, Amazon, which never met a feature it didn’t want to add to its product pages, has now added wikis. They live way down close to the bottom of the page. There aren’t many of them yet, and it’s hard to see a reason why they would really take off at this point, but who knows. To give an example here’s the text that currently resides in the wiki for James Frey’s infamous A Million Little Pieces: Author James Frey was born in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1969. He was educated at Denison University and the Art Institute of Chicago. In 2000, he spent a year writing A Million Little Pieces, which was published in 2003 by Doubleday Books, a division of Random House, Inc. He is married and has one child. In early 2006 he admitted that much of the content in A Million Little Pieces, which is presented as a memoir, had been fabricated.That’s it. Not very exciting, is it. But perhaps there are more exciting wikis floating around in Amazon-space. If you’re inclined to explore, the list of most-edited wikis might be a good place to start.
Appearing Elsewhere
My mildly contrarian take on the print version of Watchmen appears today at More Intelligent Life. Name-checked within the piece: Thomas Pynchon, Toni Morrison, Malcolm Lowry, Jean Rhys, Charles Dickens, Georges Eliot and Saunders, Chris Ware, Lynda Barry, Herman Hesse, Jack Kerouac, Batman, Art Spiegelman, James Wood, Kenneth Turan,and a couple of guys who worked at a little comic-book shop in North Carolina in the early 1990s.Notwithstanding this cavalcade of stars, I found Watchmen somewhat frustrating, for reasons I attribute to the term “graphic novel.” This may or may not be original and/or provocative. Still, I’m bracing for comments from Watchmen enthusiasts and Comic Book Guys of all stripes…
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Disappearing Bookstores
Scott’s Friday Column is a thoughtful look at why independent bookstores in the Bay Area, and everywhere else, seem to be disappearing.All this has taken a toll on me, the book shopper. Whereas I once aimlessly browsed through local bookstores thinking of nothing other than a new book, I now keep an eye out for warning signs, wondering which one will be the next to fall.
Quickie
Quote from the book I’m reading right now: I have always been suspicious of countries (or subcultures) in which a majority of the men wear mustaches, but Tunisia is a delight.
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NYRB Classics: Not Just for Grownups
We’re not shy about our praise for NYRB Classics. Their volumes are smartly edited and well designed and quite a few favorite books of The Millions contributors – The Dud Avocado, Wheat That Springeth Green, and, of course, The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll – were first encountered in their NYRB Classics incarnations.While I had always planned on passing NYRB Classics books down to my progeny one day, I’ve just discovered that I may get to do that sooner than I had anticipated. NYRB Classics has a line of children’s books, the NYR Children’s Collection.One of the latest to come out under the imprint is James Thurber’s The 13 Clocks with an introduction by Neil Gaiman and illustrations by Marc Simont. The new book provide fodder for Sonja Bolle’s sentimental (in a good way) essay in the LA Times.The 13 Clocks is the first book I remember loving, and it is one of the few books I managed to wrest from my family’s library and preserve through all the mundane disasters of my life. Everything about it is dear to me: The texture of the cover, the cloth spine now in shreds, the gorgeous endpapers with the Duke’s shadowy castle on the hill overlooking the sunlit town.Young readers – and the older readers who are trying to get young readers to read good books – will likely find many more such discoveries among the NYR Children’s Collection.
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