More jolting news about Barnes & Noble in New York. Due to a whopping rent increase, its popular Upper West Side megastore on West 66th Street is closing its doors at the end of January 2011. The four-story store has been a neighborhood fixture since opening in 1995, a space where celebrity authors held book signings and book readings for Lincoln Center visitors. It also houses a cafe and a music section, one of the few remaining bricks-and-mortar locations selling CDs and DVDs in New York, with the closings of Tower Records and Virgin Megastores over the last few years. Even non-book buyers are sad to see the location closing.

Meanwhile, billionaire investor Ronald W. Burkle is locked in a dispute for control of Barnes & Noble, whose shareholders believe he is unfit to serve on its board.

Mitch Albom, world famous author of the Locus Publishing bestselling books “Tuesdays With Morrie,” “The Five People You Meet In Heaven,” “For One More Day,” and “Have a Little Faith,” will be visiting Taiwan this week.

On Thursday, September 2nd, Mr. Albom will be giving a lecture entitled, “How One Story Touches Another and Another” from 7:30-9:00 p.m. at The Taipei International Convention Center, Taipei 101 Building, No. 1 Hsin-Yi Road, Section 5 in Taipei.

Unfortunately, due to incredibly great demand, all the tickets to this unique event have been given away.

For those with tickets, doors open at 6:30 p.m. and close at 7:15 p.m. so please arrive on time in order not to miss this special engagement with Mitch Albom in Taiwan.

Evan Osnos, a staff writer in Beijing, reports in his Letter From China blog at The New Yorker magazine that despite the historic news that China has overtaken Japan as the second greatest global economy, Chinese media and even Chinese people in the street have reacted with less than elation and even an air of incredulity at the news.

Recently, Chinese media has played up the fact that the world’s biggest chocolate show– Chocolate Wonderland– was held in Beijing and that China has had the world’s largest I.P.O. with the Agricultural Bank of China, and yet becoming an economic superpower is received with gloomy self-criticism by the Chinese. Shouldn’t there be a more positive and ebullient response as China ascends?

Barnes & Noble failed to change with the times fast enough, according to James B. Stewart at the Wall Street Journal. He sensed “an air of desperation” about their move to sell the bookstore, while company officials explained that the reason for the sale was because its shares weren’t valued high enough.

In his perceptive article, Stewart gives a personal response as to why Barnes & Noble stumbled and fell while Amazon.com kept on rising. Barnes and Noble promised free same-day delivery in Manhattan if ordered on-line by 11 a.m. but consistently did not deliver his goods to him on the same day, while Amazon delivered every package on time and even earlier than promised. Barnes & Noble’s clinging to traditional paper books and bricks-and-mortar stores, resisting e-books and the Web, was another chink in their armor.

At Bucknell University, their new university bookstore is a Barnes & Noble, as are many university bookstores across the United States. Crowds flock to the Market St. Barnes & Noble bookstore for books and coffee until late, later than other small booksellers in the college town of Lewisburg, Pennsylvania. Its grand opening will be over the Aug.27-29th weekend. Officials at Bucknell, a top liberal arts institution founded in 1846, are not worried about the sale of Barnes & Noble and do not foresee any changes. The bookstore sells a lot of Bucknell University textbooks and will keep doing that.

Stewart also has an optimistic view of the future, that Barnes & Noble’s troubles could be good for smaller independent booksellers:

I enjoy the community of other people who love books. I like talking to someone both before buying a book and after reading it. I think independent bookstores may be able to provide these services … I may be naive, but I’d like to think there are new opportunities for booksellers.

China finally overtakes Japan as the world’s number 2 economy. After three decades of robust growth, government calculations on Monday reveal how China has become a new superpower that commands respect from the world. China had already zoomed by Germany, France and Great Britain in the economic race, with the United States, the world’s top economy, firmly in its sights.

What will this mean for America and the world?

Will there be a surge in demand to learn Mandarin Chinese?

The Shanghai Book Fair 2010 is taking place from August 11-18, 2010 at the Shanghai Exhibition Center.

The venue for the Shanghai Book Fair, the Shanghai Exhibition Center (SEC), was established in Shanghai City in 1955, and provides large-scale international and domestic conference and exhibition services. For 40 years, the Shanghai Exhibition Center has held numerous important political and diplomatic events. Now, the Shanghai Exhibition Center has become Shanghai’s main conference center. In 1989, with its unique Russian style architecture and elegant decorations, the Shanghai Exhibition Center was awarded as one of “Shanghai’s top 10 Architecture sites for the period of 1949-1989.” In 1999, during the 50th anniversary of the establishment of the People’s Republic of China, the Shanghai Exhibition Center was awarded a gold medal for being one of “Shanghai’s Top 10 Classical Architecture Sites.” In 2001, the Shanghai Exhibition Center was refurnished to provide a better environment and more reliable facilities. Located at the heart of JingAn district, the Shanghai Exhibition Center has an area of 9.3 square meters with 42 exhibition halls and over a hundred conference rooms, as well as offices, cinema, a banquet hall and a cafe.

The Shanghai Exhibition Center
1000 Yanan Road, Shanghai 200040, China
上海展览中心
上海市延安中路1000号
Tel: 021-62790279
Fax : 021-62476980

At the Shanghai Book Fair 2010 , approximately 10,000 books will be in foreign languages, with the bulk of them in English. There will also be more than 400 cultural activities, including the appearance of renowned economists Wu Jinglian and Justin Yifu Lin, as well as Haim Dotan, designer of the “seashell” Israel Pavilion of the World Expo. Wu Jinglian will deliver a speech at the fair’s opening ceremony, while Dotan, a well-known Israeli architect, will launch his new book about architecture. In addition, a book exploring ancient Chinese literature collected by Spanish libraries will be launched in the Spain Pavilion. Tourists will be able to visit free of charge during the evenings on August 13-15. They will get a 20 percent discount on books if they hold an Expo ticket from August, ID cards or Shanghai tour cards. The book fair runs from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. on August 11, 12, 16 and 17, and from 9am to 9pm on August 13-15.

During the book fair, take time to enjoy the following special lectures on a wide variety of classical English and Chinese literature:

Shanghai Book Fair Lectures
Venue: Multifunction Hall, Shanghai Library
1555, Huai Hai Zhong Lu (Central Huai Hai Road), 200031, Shanghai, China
Tel.: 021-64455555; Fax: 021-64455001

Date: 14th August

10:00-11:30 a.m.
Speaker: Prof. Zhen He-zhou (周振鶴), Fudan University, Shanghai
Topic: On Records of the Historian: “Biographies of Usurers” by Sima Qian（《史記貨殖列傳》）

1:30-3:00 p.m.
Speaker: Prof. Wang Bang-wei (王邦維), Academy of Oriental Studies, Peking University
Topic: Vagarious Characters, Vagarious Land and Vagarious Book: On Pilgrimage to the West in the Tang Dynasty by Xuanzang (《大唐西域記》)

3:15-4:45 p.m.
Speaker: Prof. Leung Ping-kwan (梁秉鈞), Lingnan University, Hong Kong
Topic: The Beauty of the Returned Soul: On “Red Plum Blossom” by Zhou Chao-jun (《紅梅記》)

Date: 15th August

1:30-3:00 p.m.
Speaker: Prof. Chang, Hsiao-hung (張小虹), National Taiwan University
Topic: On “A Room of One’s Own” by Virginia Woolf

3:15-4:45 p.m.
Speaker: Prof. Lu Gu-sun (陸谷孫), Fudan University, Shanghai
Topic: Fun of Mystery: On “Hamlet” by William Shakespeare

On Tuesday August 3rd, the board members of Barnes & Noble, America’s largest bookseller with 720 chain stores across the nation, decided to put the company up for sale. The sale comes as the book business struggles, competing with burgeoning online retailers and the increasing revenue from e-books. Pressure has been mounting on traditional bookstores like Barnes & Noble due to a decline in reading, with book buyers tending to purchase books at stores like Wal-Mart and Target.