"New" online bookstore

I received an email promotion from Borders today with the lofty tagline, "introducing a real bookstore. Online." If only it were.

I clicked on the "books" tab of the landing page, well, since they were promoting that it's a bookstore, right? The tab leads to a list of topsellers, with star ratings, covers, and basic bibliographic information. To get to non-bestsellers, or most other titles, various links are offered across the top and left side bars to navigate, etc. Then I clicked on the link to "Are you there vodka, it's me, Chelsea." I'm not a fan of Chelsea Handler's, so her marketing department did a great job suckering me in with the nostalgic Judy Blume reference.

The book page in no way suggests a "brick" bookstore. The book description consists of three paragraphs, and given the title, I would bet that the marketing department that handled the book is equally disappointed in the presentation here. Oh, wait, after a minute of searching I've found the skimpy "Customer Reviews" link. I suppose in that way it's like a bookstore--sometimes it takes a few minutes to find someone else who's read the book.

So, this is not a real bookstore--online. There are no books to browse, it takes one a while to find a way around the "bookstore," and there are no books to browse! Amazon's not perfect, but at least they have that part right.

ChunkIt! ChuckIt?

I don't get it. Christopher Bell praises a new beta program, ChunkIt!, which shows previews of websites before one clicks on them. I admit to a love/hate relationship with Google, but doesn't it do that, anyway? I know there aren't any pretty pictures, but the one or two sentences are usually enough to tell me if I'm going to arrive at aaupnet.org or aaup.org.

What he doesn't mention, but may be implied by his writing for School Library Journal, is that this could benefit those with problems reading, be they 5-year-olds or impatient 36-year-olds.

Reports from AAUP

Inside Higher Ed today features a report from the annual AAUP meeting by Scott McLemee. His pessimistic coverage is balanced by the report from Jennifer Howard, published before the meeting even ended.

The Future of (Self/Academic) Publishing

Today Chronicle of Higher Ed features an article on up-and-coming textbook piracy websites, Textbook Piracy Grows Online, Prompting a Counterattack From Publishers.

As I said earlier, I'm looking forward to seeing how some experiments in ebooks turn out. We can't follow the example of the RIAA, and I'm skeptical of Ithaka and their recommendations, even when I agree with them.

I wonder if the survivors of the "new economy" of print might be those who translate the services provided by old companies into a new format. What I mean is that we currently look at ourselves as book publishers. That's what we do. But part of what we do (as has been mentioned many places by others) is add value to academics' work--editors and reviewers, typesetters and designers, marketers and royalty experts. It might be that those who succeed are those that offer the value-added services, say, blind reviews, for a fee, through an easy-to-access web interface. And, if a manuscript passes the reviewers, the author might be offered an opportunity to purchase additional editing, and to choose how she or he wishes to make the book available. I know, there are plenty of self-publishing services, but I don't think there is anything like this model, yet. A Google search for academic self-publishing returned, first, Self-Publishing Textbooks and Instructional Materials, available as a paperback for $32.95.