Features

December 9, 2011 Tomorrow, Amazon.com will offer customers a discount of five percent—up to five dollars, total—to go into a local store, scan the barcode with a smartphone, and then go home and order the same product from Amazon. It’s a one-day-only promotion, and it will save customers very little money, probably less than the cost of the gas it takes to drive to the local store and try out that little price-checking app on the iPhone or Android. Consequently it will cost Amazon itself relatively little money, certainly not as much as to costs them to sell the Kindle for less than the price of manufacturing it. But, just as underselling the Kindle is really an effort to drive the market for ebooks, the point of this promotion is not to drive additional online sales on December 10. The point is to get more customers comfortable with a gizmo that will make it even easier for Amazon to drop the local bookstore, and every other kind of store selling nonperishables, onto the dustheap of history. People, please don’t do it.

November 16, 2011 Two months ago, Ann Patchett and Karen Hayes hired Tristan Hickey—Chapter 16’s summer intern—to help them launch Parnassus Books. On Saturday the store officially opens its doors to the public. Today Hickey gives a behind-the-scenes account of the launch of the Nashville bookstore the whole country is talking about.

November 14, 2011 It’s not every day that attendees at a poetry reading are asked whether they mind being filmed by an MTV camera crew, but that’s what happened at the opening event of last month’s Meacham Writers’ Workshop in Chattanooga. The reading was held at Chattanooga State Community College, where one of the stars of MTV’s reality show “Teen Mom” is a student. It was an unusual beginning to a three-day conference that is itself unique. The Meacham workshop is held twice each year, primarily on the campus of the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga.

November 10, 2011 Maybe this is simply five months of deprivation talking, but walking into Barnes & Noble at Vanderbilt for the first time feels a bit like visiting the Sistine Chapel. It is, frankly, grand. The new campus store is only 7,000 square feet larger than the old Rand location, but the place feels, for many reasons, about a million times bigger. Inside the new Nashville bookstore, 67,000 trade titles are waiting, along with a total of seventy-nine employees to help readers find new books they’ll love.