German media conglomerate Bertelsmann SE announced earlier this month it would close its bookselling business in its German-speaking markets, after years of declining sales.
The company's retail locations as well as the online store, branded under the "Der Club" label, will cease operations in Germany, Austria and Switzerland by the end of 2015, spelling the end to almost all of Bertelsmann's remaining bookselling activities.
The first retail store opened in 1964 and they then expanded across Germany. Meanwhile, the book-club business grew across Europe and North America, offering book subscriptions at a discount by signing readers up for bulk purchases.
By 1992, there were more than 300 stores in Germany alone and more than seven million members enrolled in the Bertelsmann book club. Today, only 52 locations remain and sales have fallen sharply, down to less than €100 million, or roughly $136 million, from a peak of €700 million in the mid-1990s.
With the rise of the Internet, German book-buying habits have sharply changed over the past decade. Last year, some €1.6 billion of books—16.3% of all books sold—were sold via the Internet. About 70% of online and mail-ordered printed and digital books are sold via Amazon.com Inc., according to industry data.
All the german Amazon angst is over eleven percent market share?!!
Since the 1960s, Bertelsmann has diversified into other media channels, buying and then selling stakes in music ventures like Sony Music as well as other joint ventures like an ill-fated deal with AOL Inc. in the 1990s.
The company has also acquired assets such as the German magazine publisher Gruner & Jahr, German television stations under RTL Group, RTL.BT +0.37% and the U.S. book publisher Random House, all areas where the company continues to look for growth.
"Bertelsmann has come a long way from bookselling," said Bettina Deuscher, a media analyst at Landesbank Baden-Wuerttemberg. "The bulk of its revenues today come from TV, publishing and business services.
Help us choose a book as the July 2014 eBook for the MobileRead Book Club. The poll will be open for 5 days. There will be no runoff vote unless the voting results a tie, in which case there will be a 3 day run-off poll. This is a visible poll: others can see how you voted. It is You may cast a vote for each book that appeals to you.
We will start the discussion thread for this book on July 20th. Select from the following Official Choices with three nominations each:
Amazon.com Review Oliver Sacks on Your Inner Fish:
(Since the 1970 publication of Migraine, neurologist Oliver Sacks's unusual and fascinating case histories of "differently brained" people and phenomena—a surgeon with Tourette's syndrome, a community of people born totally colorblind, musical hallucinations, to name a few--have been marked by extraordinary compassion and humanity, focusing on the patient as much as the condition. His books include The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, Awakenings (which inspired the Oscar-nominated film), and 2007's Musicophilia. He lives in New York City, where he is Professor of Clinical Neurology at Columbia University.)
Your Inner Fish is my favorite sort of book—an intelligent, exhilarating, and compelling scientific adventure story, one which will change forever how you understand what it means to be human.
The field of evolutionary biology is just beginning an exciting new age of discovery, and Neil Shubin's research expeditions around the world have redefined the way we now look at the origins of mammals, frogs, crocodiles, tetrapods, and sarcopterygian fish—and thus the way we look at the descent of humankind. One of Shubin's groundbreaking discoveries, only a year and a half ago, was the unearthing of a fish with elbows and a neck, a long-sought evolutionary "missing link" between creatures of the sea and land-dwellers.
My own mother was a surgeon and a comparative anatomist, and she drummed it into me, and into all of her students, that our own anatomy is unintelligible without a knowledge of its evolutionary origins and precursors. The human body becomes infinitely fascinating with such knowledge, which Shubin provides here with grace and clarity. Your Inner Fish shows us how, like the fish with elbows, we carry the whole history of evolution within our own bodies, and how the human genome links us with the rest of life on earth.
Shubin is not only a distinguished scientist, but a wonderfully lucid and elegant writer; he is an irrepressibly enthusiastic teacher whose humor and intelligence and spellbinding narrative make this book an absolute delight. Your Inner Fish is not only a great read; it marks the debut of a science writer of the first rank.
A rare and remarkable cultural history of World War I that unearths the roots of modernism
Dazzling in its originality, Rites of Spring probes the origins, impact, and aftermath of World War I, from the premiere of Stravinsky's ballet The Rite of Spring in 1913 to the death of Hitler in 1945. Recognizing that “The Great War was the psychological turning point . . . for modernism as a whole,” author Modris Eksteins examines the lives of ordinary people, works of modern literature, and pivotal historical events to redefine the way we look at our past and toward our future.
The alimentary canal—the much-maligned tube from mouth to rear—is as taboo, in its way, as the cadavers in Stiff, and as surreal as the universe of zero gravity explored in Packing for Mars. In Gulp we meet the scientists who tackle the questions no one else thinks—or has the courage—to ask. How much can you eat before your stomach bursts? Why doesn't the stomach digest itself? Can wine tasters really tell a $10 bottle from a $100 bottle? Why is crunchy food so appealing? Can constipation kill you? Did it kill Elvis? We go on location to a pet food taste-test lab, a fecal transplant, and into a live stomach to observe the fate of a meal.
Why is crunchy food so appealing? Why is it so hard to find words for flavors and smells? Why doesn’t the stomach digest itself? How much can you eat before your stomach bursts? Can constipation kill you? Did it kill Elvis? In Gulp we meet scientists who tackle the questions no one else thinks of—or has the courage to ask. We go on location to a pet-food taste-test lab, a fecal transplant, and into a live stomach to observe the fate of a meal. With Roach at our side, we travel the world, meeting murderers and mad scientists, Eskimos and exorcists (who have occasionally administered holy water rectally), rabbis and terrorists—who, it turns out, for practical reasons do not conceal bombs in their digestive tracts.
Like all of Roach's books, Gulp is as much about human beings as it is about human bodies.
When baseball great Ty Cobb died in 1961, Ritter got the idea to interview the few remaining contemporaries of Cobb before they too all died. The result was a highly respected best seller, an oral history.
"Almost perfect . . . a vivid, gentle, and humorous narrative, accompanied by marvelous photographs." - The New Yorker
"Easily the best baseball book ever produced by anyone." -- -- Cleveland Plain Dealer
"I could happily reread every summer for the rest of my life that greatest of all baseball books..." -- -- Stephen Jay Gould, The New York Times Book Review
"Quite simply the best sports book in recent memory." -- -- Wilfrid Sheed, The New York Times Book Review
"The single best baseball book of all time." -- -- Red Barber
"There's not a dull moment in the whole book." -- The Raleigh (N.C.) News and Observer
"The Glory of Their Times will be around as long as baseball." -- -- Nelson Algren
Pulitzer Prize–winning author Siddhartha Mukherjee, a leading cancer physician and researcher, selects the year’s top science and nature writing from journalists who dive into their fields with curiosity and passion, delivering must-read articles from a wide array of fields.
Some of the more intriguing sounding titles in this collection of essays include "On Tenderness", "Beyond the Quantum Horizon", "Is Space Digital?", "The Sweet Spot in Time", "Machines of the Infinite", "Altered States", "Super Humanity", "Is Facebook Making Us Lonely?", "The Wisdom of Psychopaths", and much more.
The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology's New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of Its Sacred Texts
In this groundbreaking work that sets apart fact and legend, authors Finkelstein and Silberman use significant archeological discoveries to provide historical information about biblical Israel and its neighbors.
In this iconoclastic and provocative work, leading scholars Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman draw on recent archaeological research to present a dramatically revised portrait of ancient Israel and its neighbors. They argue that crucial evidence (or a telling lack of evidence) at digs in Israel, Egypt, Jordan, and Lebanon suggests that many of the most famous stories in the Bible -- the wanderings of the patriarchs, the Exodus from Egypt, Joshua's conquest of Canaan, and David and Solomon's vast empire; -- reflect the world of the later authors rather than actual historical facts.
Challenging the fundamentalist readings of the scriptures and marshaling the latest archaeological evidence to support its new vision of ancient Israel, The Bible Unearthed offers a fascinating and controversial perspective on when and why the Bible was written and why it possesses such great spiritual and emotional power today.
In the US anyway, not sure if this is also in other markets or not...
As the American Library Association Annual Conference kicks off in Las Vegas, Simon & Schuster has announced that, following a "successful pilot program” in 20 select library systems, it will now open its catalog of e-books to all libraries nationwide.
S&S e-books are currently available through the 3M, Baker & Taylor and Overdrive platforms. Each title licensed by a library is usable for one year from the date of purchase, for an unlimited number of checkouts during the one-year term, on a one user/one copy model. Frontlist and backlist titles are available simultaneously with their print publication. In addition, Simon & Schuster’s e-book program includes a “Buy It Now” capability, with a portion of each patron purchase going to the library.
This also affects books that were for all intents and purposes already ready - galleys/ARCs sent out to reviewers, release dates a few weeks from now.
I'm sad as a reader, both because Strange Chemistry put out some of my favourite YA releases of the last couple of years - some of their books missed the mark for me, but I really appreciated how they were willing to experiment and release books that weren't just a collection of currently trendy clichés - and because I've liked the Angry Robot way of publishing for some time now: books that are a little bit off mainstream, no DRM, subscriptions for those who like the idea, and so on. It's a pity to see that at least for their YA and mystery imprints, this approach apparently didn't work well enough.
Bertelsmann getting out of book retailing
WSJ link:
You may cast a vote for each book that appeals to you.
In the US anyway, not sure if this is also in other markets or not...
It's finally happening --- after a year of waiting:
Really not good news: 
Science fiction author Daniel Keyes has died: 
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