The business case for the Babysitters Club, and other news from the world of books

Because we still haven't mastered the growing-money-on-trees trick: "If you sell too cheaply you are going to have to compromise somewhere else. And we thought, 'Well, you can't compromise service, you can't compromise information, you can't compromise your display because that's all about making it a special place for your customer.' So our customers, I think, appreciate that."

You never know what aspect of customer service will do the trick: "[Harvard Book Store] cashier kindly gave me a free pen on Tues bc I was having a rough day. Today I went there to buy books instead of Amazon."

The only SXSWi-related link you'll find in this post: "It's easy to think that 'public' and 'private' are binaries...What people experience when they talk about privacy is more complicated than what can be instantiated in a byte."

For those of us of a certain age: "Ms. Martin imparts two more important messages that modern readers need to hear: Teen girls are capable of handling far more responsibility than we give them credit for, and they, like the rest of us, can choose to make their own way in the world."

If both regular March Madness and the Tournament of Books aren't your thing, check out SLJ's Battle of the Books: "Argh! This is a horribly evil match."

That accounting textbook I never managed to get through? Might have been a page-turner if Don Linn (ably assisted by Nick Harkaway) had written it: "Thinking about long term capital needs isn't as sexy as talking about technology and content, but capital markets are ruthlessly efficient in sorting out winners and losers, survivors and dinosaurs. Unless we can attract capital to this industry (and not only to the Big Six) we will have very little control of our future."

Your vocabulary word for the week (well, mine, at least): "There's a category of information that slowly changes throughout the course of a lifetime. Sam Arbesman calls them mesofacts."

Posted at 11:10AM Mar 19, 2010 by Sarah Rettger in General  |