Costco Plans to Stop Selling Books Year-Round
I had heard from a Book Riot reader that they were seeing some weird activity around the books section at their local Costco, so this story about Costco scaling back their stocking of books isn’t a huge surprise. We definitely need as many places for people who don’t go out of their way to find books to have a chance to pick something up at the spur of the moment, and Costco is one of the largest players left like that. Costco is a logistics company more than it is a retailer, so it makes some sense that the physical realities of carrying books (they turn over a lot, have to be placed by hand, etc) were spotlighted as reasons for the change.
Layoffs Hit Little, Brown Editorial; Tracy Sherrod, More Depart
The headline is about layoffs, but the story to watch is another high-profile Black woman being laid off from a high-profile position. Unless you are in these rooms and part of these decisions, there is no way to know the whys and what-fors about any specific staffing decision, but the fact is that there are so few Black people in the highest echelons of publishing that the loss of any one of them is a setback. I look forward to the day when these changes don’t make headlines because there are so many Black people in books that it doesn’t seem like a story at all.