Learncrest Blog

Monthly Archives: February 2011

Barnes & Noble’s Conquest of Space

By blueZhift | February 25th, 2011

The growing popularity of eBooks, the success of online bookseller Amazon, and the implosion of Borders would seem to argue that large bookstores are more liability than asset. But Barnes & Noble is seeking to refute that logic by hosting in-store events to promote PubIt authors. PubIt is the eBook self-publishing platform Barnes & Noble […]

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Are Physical Books Really Dead Yet?

By blueZhift | February 23rd, 2011

A new Amazon Kindle ad has Crave writer David Carnoy speculating that Amazon has pronounced the physical book dead. Long live the physical book! He writes, By saying that the physical book “lives on,” Amazon is implying that it died at some point. That’s not exactly true, of course, but the messaging seems pretty clear, […]

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What About Borders? Let There Be Libraries!

By blueZhift | February 17th, 2011

A quick Googling of “Borders” will turn up a lot of stories about how difficult it will be to fill the building vacancies that the store closings are going to bring. Many of these buildings are two stories and on the order of 20,000 square feet. I thought some about the closing Borders in my […]

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Pump Up The Manga On The Nook!

By blueZhift | February 17th, 2011

After reading this excellent review of Sundome on the UK Anime Network site, I popped over to Barnes & Noble’s web store to see if it was available on the Nook. It was no big surprise to me that it was not available as an eBook. But I was surprised and happy to see that […]

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Rise of the Manga Entrepreneur?

By blueZhift | February 16th, 2011

Now that Borders has filed for bankruptcy and the local Borders is closing, maybe its time to dust off those plans to open a manga cafe in the neighborhood! My wife suggested this, perhaps only half seriously, in response to yesterday’s post. We started talking about the idea a few years ago. The idea was […]

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Borders Bankruptcy For The Manga Reader

By blueZhift | February 15th, 2011

The Wall Street Journal has reported that Borders is in the final preparations for declaring bankruptcy. When this happens, a lot of Borders bookstores are going to close. Borders currently operates about 650 bookstores and various reports estimate that they will likely close 150 of these. I think, for no reason other than things often […]

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Selling eBooks: Some Thoughts

By blueZhift | February 14th, 2011

A tweet this morning from WriterDonna lead me to The Quest for eBook Sales on Green Ink. In answer to the perennial question of how to get more eBook sales, the author had this to say. The good news is that indie authors can get sales on a very limited monetary budget; the bad news […]

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All In The Family for eBook Lending

By blueZhift | February 9th, 2011

If the publisher allows it, eBooks for the Nook or the Kindle can be loaned out to another person to read on their eReader for a limited time. We’re all familiar with lending and borrowing the books of friends and this is often the way we discover new authors. Reading, while in itself, a solitary […]

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Borders Cuts Kobo To $99.99 Permanently

By blueZhift | February 8th, 2011

Borders has cut the price of the Kobo eBook reader to $99.99 permanently. This may mean that the earlier promotional cuts spiked sales of the readers and eBooks enough to significantly help the bottom line of the embattled bookseller. So anyone who’s been on the fence about eBook readers due to price should definitely take […]

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Courting Failure: Xoom Tablet May Be Overpriced

By blueZhift | February 7th, 2011

Ars Technica reports that the upcoming Motorola Xoom will launch at $799.99 and will require a data plan from Verizon to enable WiFi networking. That’s right, there’s no escaping a data plan, WiFi will be crippled unless users sign up with Verizon for at least one month. I’d been watching the Android Honeycomb powered tablet […]

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