Round up #145: sight-reading vs. listening, B&N CEO O-U-T
The ILMK Round ups are short pieces which may or may not be expanded later.
One Murder More reportedly wins three Silver Falchion awards!
I’m waiting for
Killer Nashville
to post the official results before I do a full post (and celebration), but I thought some of you would be curious: my sibling’s first novel, One Murder More (at AmazonSmile: benefit a non-profit of your choice by shopping*), won three Silver Falchion awards this past weekend! That’s amazing, and puts Kris in good company, including Anne Perry, John Sandford, Dean Koontz, and Sue Grafton.
More to come…
Barnes & Noble loses CEO
In this
press release
Barnes & Nobles announced the “departure” of its Chief Executive Officer, Ronald D. Boire (after not quite a year in the post).
This is being reported both as Boire being fired, and as Boire “stepping down”…but regardless, this is a negative for the Big 5 traditional publishers (who are still reliant on brick and mortar bookstores…I’m a former manager of one). Nobody who is already established in business likes uncertainty, and this is B&N’s third CEO recently.
The press release says that the Board determined Boire wasn’t “a good fit”…and that’s the Board’s fault.
One of my proudest things after I became the training manager at a franchise (where I think we had five owners in seven years…something like that) was that I lengthened the average longevity of my team significantly. When I was hired there, I was told there was a ninety-day “ramp up” period. I asked how many people didn’t get through that period, and I was told two out of three! Sure enough, I was hired with two other people, and I was the only person still there after three months.
That’s just…inefficient hiring, in my opinion.
I’ve hired a lot of people over the years, and I think I’m pretty good at it.
After I was the Training Manager for a year, the average longevity went from under three months to over a years, as I recall…basically, nobody left. Yes, I hired people during that year, but not that many because turnover was low. If I hired them, they stayed.
If the Board hired somebody who wasn’t a good fit, that’s likely to be mostly their fault.
This is odd timing, because we are heading into the most important time of the year…the last three months of the year, in a retail business like this, can easily be 90% of the year’s sales.
Maybe if Boire had made it a full year, the departure would have cost them more?
Replacing the CEO at the end of August is a little bit like replacing your pilot while your plane is at the gate readying for takeoff. 😉
However, Leonard Riggio, who was going to retire in a few weeks (Riggio has been a driving force at B&N since buying the company forty-five years ago) is going to take the helm for now.
The publishers may see that as a good thing…they understand Riggio, even if the leadership is only temporary and therefore limited in determining the strategic direction.
I thought this
RetailDive post by Corinne Ruff
had intelligent insight.
B&N has had some good signs recently…none of them said “Books for Sale in Our Stores”, though. 😉 The strategy has been to move the stores more into other things (especially the cafes), cut back on the NOOK even more, and try to remake the online presence. Those strategies aren’t likely to change.
MarketWatch: physical bookstores rebounding
In this
MarketWatch article by Trey Williams
they report a clear rebound for brick-and-mortar bookstores in the USA, continuing last year’s reversal of a downward trend which had been in place since 2009. I’m not sure I agree with Whitney Hu of
The Strand Bookstore in New York
a marvelous institution. Hu says in part:
“The recent growth in sales is a result of the waning novelty of e-readers, such as Amazon.com Inc.’s Kindle…”
On the other hand, Hu is more likely to be right than another authority they quote…Ronald D. Boire, the aforementioned outgoing CEO of Barnes & Noble. 😉
Are audiobooks cheating?
Regular readers know I listen to text-to-speech (software which reads books out loud to you) a lot. It’s typically hours a week in the car. I sight read every day, too…on my now discontinued Kindle Fire HDX (that’s what does the text-to-speech in the car for me), on a
All-New Kindle Paperwhite, 6″ High-Resolution Display (300 ppi) with Built-in Light, Wi-Fi – Includes Special Offers (at AmazonSmile: benefit a non-profit of your choice by shopping*)
and a
Kindle Voyage (at AmazonSmile: benefit a non-profit of your choice by shopping*)
depending on where I am in the house (I also read different books in different parts of the house…I’ve always done that).
I will admit, though, that there has been a slight, nagging thought: is listening to the book somehow “inferior” to sight-reading it?
Turns out, I wasn’t the only one with that thought. 🙂
This
CNN post by Melissa Dahl
resonated with me…it was the same question.
Fortunately, Dahl was referencing this
blog post by Daniel Willingham
The bio states that Willingham is a Professor of Psychology at the University of Virginia.
Willingham addresses the idea of whether or not listening to an audiobook is “cheating”.
I was actually hoping for an fMRI (functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging) study showing that what the brain was doing was similar during sight-reading and listening, but the post isn’t that.
It’s talking more about the process, and how it will “mostly” be the same (although there may be an advantage when reading more complex material to sight-reading it, an adult reading a typical novel should be pretty much the same).
It was interesting to me that the article was at least partly what I would consider to be philosophical…questioning the value of defining reading as “work”, something to be more rewarded when you put something more into it.
I do think some “literati” have that attitude: if a book was harder to read, it was better for you and more worthwhile.
I don’t buy that myself.
I think there is value in reading a “popcorn book”, one which reads with little effort. People used to (and some still do) call them “page turners”, although “button masher” became the digital equivalent for a short time (when was they last time you used buttons to “turn the page” on an e-book reader?).
In fact, and maybe I am a bit of a lazy reader in this regard, I tend not to like very “dense” epics…I describe them as when the sentence is better than the paragraph, the paragraph is better than the page, the page is better than the chapter, and the chapter is better than the book. 😉
You know the type…I would put The Worm Ouroborus by E.R. Eddison into that category.
Still, it’s nice to know that a professor of psychology has the opinion that listening to an audiobook isn’t cheating. 🙂 I intend to comment on the blog post (if the requirements to do so are not overly restrictive) to ask about text-to-speech versus audiobooks…I suspect that the TTS cognitive processing is much more similar to sight-reading than audiobooks are. I’d be interested to hear what the professor thinks about that…and about the fact that I generally don’t experience prosody (hearing voices when you read). 🙂
What do you think? Have you thought of listening to books as “cheating”? Will Barnes & Noble continue to have physical bookselling in dedicated brick-and-mortar stores as a major component of their business? If they don’t, what does that mean for tradpubs? Why do you think brick-and-mortar bookstores have been rebounding? Is it because of a decline in e-book use…or maybe it’s coloring books? 😉 Feel free to tell me and my readers what you think by commenting on this post.
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* I am linking to the same thing at the regular Amazon site, and at AmazonSmile. When you shop at AmazonSmile, half a percent of your purchase price on eligible items goes to a non-profit you choose. It will feel just like shopping at Amazon: you’ll be using your same account. The one thing for you that is different is that you pick a non-profit the first time you go (which you can change whenever you want)…and the good feeling you’ll get. 
Shop ’til you help! By the way, it’s been interesting lately to see Amazon remind me to “start at AmazonSmile” if I check a link on the original Amazon site. I do buy from AmazonSmile, but I have a lot of stored links I use to check for things.
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