BTW News Briefs

NRF Calls Black Friday Weekend a "Blockbuster"

According to the National Retail Federation, the past Thanksgiving holiday weekend was a blockbuster for the nation's retailers, as 133 million shoppers "flooded stores hunting for popular electronics, clothing, and music." The average shopper spent $265.15 this weekend, bringing total weekend spending to $22.8 billion, a NRF survey conducted by BIGresearch found.

NRF reported that, of the people who shopped, 64.6 percent headed out on Friday, but consumers were also shopping on Saturday (54.1 percent) and Sunday (25.3 percent). Moreover, nine million people went shopping on Thanksgiving Day. According to the NRF survey, 49.1 percent of consumers purchased clothing or clothing accessories, while 45.5 percent bought books, CDs, DVDs, videos, and video games. Also, the survey noted that most shoppers headed to discounters (61.8 percent), though department stores (44.3 percent) and specialty stores (40.5 percent) also saw strong traffic.

Booksource Bowing Out, Bookazine Stepping In

Booksource, a St. Louis-based book wholesaler, announced that it plans to stop distributing to retailers by the end of this year. The company attributed its decision to diminished profits because of consolidation in the publishing industry and the growth of chain retailers, as reported by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Booksource instead will focus on selling books to school districts, many of which are bolstering their classroom libraries to encourage students to read, Neil Jaffe, the president of Booksource, told the Post-Dispatch. The changes will be effective December 23.

The article also reported that Booksource has reduced staff size by approximately a dozen and is planning more cutbacks before the year's end. Furthermore, "as part of the switch to children's library books, Booksource will reduce its title base from between 45,000 and 55,000 titles to roughly 25,000. It also will reduce the number of publishers with which it works," Jaffe told the Post-Dispatch.

Soon after Booksource announced that it was bowing out of retail distribution, Bookazine announced that it would be stepping in to fill the market void left by Booksource.

Library of Congress Announces Winners of John W. Kluge Prize

On November 29, Librarian of Congress James H. Billington announced the award of the second John W. Kluge Prize for Lifetime Achievement in the Human Sciences to Jaroslav Pelikan of New Haven, Connecticut, and Paul Ricoeur of Paris, France. Billington will present the shared award at a formal ceremony at the Library of Congress at 7:00 p.m. on Wednesday, December 8.

The Kluge Prize of $1 million is given for lifetime achievement in the humanities and social sciences -- areas of scholarship for which there are no Nobel Prizes. In announcing the award, Billington said, "Jaroslav Pelikan is an historian who deals with the whole of the Christian tradition from the ancient near East to the present…. He is concerned with the history and practice of worship in its doctrinal and creedal forms over two millennia….

"Paul Ricoeur is a philosopher who draws on the entire tradition of western philosophy to explore and explain common problems…. He is a constant questioner -- always pressing to understand the nature and limits of what constitutes our humanity."