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Bookshops are one of the most visible places for books in public space. No bookshop can ever offer every book available; rather it is in its selection that each bookshop is unique. Value, writes Michael Bhaskar in Curation (2016), no longer resides in access, but in curation—in selecting and arranging. The article argues that curating practices in bookshops can be mapped from four main aspects: space, selection, display, and experience. In order to understand the day-to-day practices in a bookshop, and the different form of curation that takes place, an ethnographic observation study was performed. The results in this study point to the bookshop being a place where more than books are sold: there is also selling the experience and sensation of being in a bookshop. In the borderlands of culture and commerce, bookshops are important curators of books.
Abstract
Streaming services for audiobooks and ebooks have grown rapidly in recent years. The shift in consumption patterns has transformed both reading and publishing. One visible change is the attraction and importance of backlist titles. The article investigates how the relationship between frontlist and backlist in the bestseller segment has developed, and discusses the shift in the power balance between the two. By examining large-scale consumer behaviour data (6.23 million streams) from one of the key players in subscription-based digital bookselling – Storytel – we track book consumption both in detail and at a structural level. Our results show that backlist titles are increasingly important for bestselling authors who continue to publish frontlist titles, especially for fiction written in series. Streaming services foster new types of book consumption behaviour thanks to a combination of technology, media, reading habits, and social change.