Better News Re: St. Mark's and Their Rent Problems
Earlier in the week things weren’t looking so good for St. Mark’s. They’ve been asking Cooper Union for a $5,000/month break in their rent (which is currently $22,500/month), but Cooper Union was using their own financial difficulties to explain why such a decrease was impossible. Well, apparently ...
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Bad News for St. Mark's Bookshop
From the NY Daily News: The struggling St. Mark’s Bookshop was dealt more bad news Tuesday when its owners were told they will not receive a rent reduction. Owners Bob Contant and Terry McCoy found out their bid for a $5,000 rent cut was nixed by landlord Cooper Union in a meeting with T.C. Westcott, a vice ...
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Some Reasons on Why We Fight
Over at the New Yorker’s Book Bench blog, Macy Halford has a post entitled “Should We Fight to Save Indie Bookstores?” The basis for her post is the petition to Save St. Mark’s Bookshop that’s going round the Internets and is focused on the difficult the store is having paying market rent in the ...
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"Here's My Million Dollar Idea: A Sort of Spotify for Books"
For those of you who listen to our (semi) weekly Three Percent podcast, you may remember a discussion Tom and I had a month or so ago about the idea of a “Spotify for books,” whereby someone could subscribe to have unlimited access to all ebooks available on a given platform. As with Spotify, you wouldn’t ...
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Three Percent #10: So Long, Borders!
We’re finally back from our respective vacations, and back to podcasting. The big news from when we were gone was the liquidation and ultimate demise of Borders, so this week we talked about bookselling. About the fallout of Borders closing down, about the big losers, about the possibilities for the resurgence of ...
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Richard Nash on Borders, Bookselling
Nice piece by Cursor founder, Red Lemonade publisher, former Soft Skull director Richard Nash on CNN’s website about the fall of Borders and the role of booksellers: There are many reasons why the tiny, scrappy independent publisher I ran from 2001 to 2009, Soft Skull Press, became a publisher with a Pulitzer ...
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Numbers that Make You Go Ouch
So, Borders is basically dead-and-nearly-gone, what with their liquidation starting tomorrow and almost 11,000 employees losing their jobs in the next few weeks. This was a long time in coming, and is a surprise to no one. That said, it’s a tricky thing to formulate an adequate response to. On the one hand, over the ...
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