Brooklyn native Matthew Miller acquired Koren Jerusalem, a venerable 50-year-old Israeli publishing company, in 2005. It now has an American warehouse and sales team, and partners with the new book divisions of Yeshiva University and the Orthodox Union. Some of its latest titles are particularly hot: The first printings of (British Chief Rabbi Jonathan) “Sacks Rosh HaShana Mahzor” and “Mesorat HaRav Siddur with Commentary by Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik” quickly sold out.

More details in the future.

LINCOLN, Neb. (AP) — The University of Nebraska Press will purchase the nearly 250-title inventory of the Jewish Publication Society, which bills itself as the oldest publisher of Jewish books in the United States.

The Nebraska board of regents approved the $610,000 purchase at its Friday meeting, clearing the way for Nebraska Press to publish and market all current and future books by the Philadelphia-based society, the Lincoln Journal Star reported (bit.ly/qOgkFN).

Nebraska Press director Donna Shear said the deal will allow the society to continue to find and develop new titles but with the Nebraska Press taking over publication.

‘We’re basically going to be taking over the process from manuscript publication through distribution and sales,’ she said. ‘They will develop the content, but we will handle the rest of the process.’

Rabbi Barry Schwartz, the society’s chief executive officer, said it, like many small independent publishers, has struggled in recent years to continue to publish its inventory of titles and has been looking to partner with a university press.

‘We primarily looked at university partnerships because we’re an academically oriented press dedicated to scholarship,’ he said.

Schwartz said Nebraska Press was selected because of its already-strong inventory of Jewish books.

Nebraska Press owns nearly 3,000 titles and publishes about 150 a year. It owns about 50 Jewish studies titles and publishes four a year.

‘We really feel that the University of Nebraska Press, which has had award-winning volumes in Judaic Studies, will benefit from this association,’ Schwartz said. ‘It will make the University of Nebraska Press a leader in the field.’

The 123-year-old Jewish Publication Society sells more than 50,000 copies of the Jewish Bible each year, accounting for about half its sales, Schwartz said. That Bible is among the titles being acquired by Nebraska Press.

Shear said the society’s annual revenue is between $1 million and $1.5 million.

Original Greenwichtime.com online article.

(Via Jewish Book Review.)

During 2010, 7,339 new Israeli titles were registered by the Legal Deposit Department of the National Library: 6,285 books, 725 new periodicals, and 329 non-print titles, such as CDs and cassettes. In addition, some 16,500 issues of current periodicals and newspapers were received in the National Library of Israel. Although not covered by Legal Deposit, the Library also received 1,380 masters’ theses and 1,038 doctoral theses. The Library’s catalogue is the most comprehensive in Israel, and includes the vast majority of the titles published in Israel.

See here for more statistics.

Bookshelf Porn presents pictures of rooms that are filled with bookshelves. What a website. (hat tip)

For anyone who is looking to add a book to their bookshelf, The Book on the Bookshelf is recommended.

From Gary Becker.

The decline of bookstores, theatres, laundries, and other retail industries with physical facilities illustrates a trend that runs counter to older ideas about the effects of economic development. The process of development has been presumed to cause a substitution of market activities for home production. For example, households in poor rural societies have not only grown their own food, but also made much of their clothing, washed their clothes, baked their bread, and cooked from scratch their other food. As countries underwent economic growth, many of these productive activities left the home and migrated to the marketplace. Factory-made clothing was substituted for clothing made at home, and bakeries and laundries developed to make bread and sweets, and to wash, clean, and dry clothes.

Further technological developments,however, such as small motors used in home washing and drying machines, and small machines that cooked bread easily at home, shifted many activities back into the home, and thereby saved on time and energy spent in the shopping process. The online digital revolution is a further major step in this trend of returning activities to the home. Time and effort are saved, for example, when instead of going to movie theatres, consumers both order and download films online to be viewed at “home”, either on television sets, or increasingly on computers.

From this perspective, what is happening to bookstores is not unusual. “Books” are still read at “home”, but increasingly they are also purchased at home, and not only in hard copy form. Digital books are a true revolution, but their effects on bookstores are only a small part of a broader technological development that has brought important activities into the home.

From Richard Posner, who has written lots of books.

The substitution of online for bookstore distribution of books will provide a substantial social saving and, as I said, increase the demand for books by reducing their retail price. As for the effect on publishers and authors of books, there is concern that it will be adverse, but that seems unlikely. A seller tries to minimize his cost of distribution, just as he tries to minimize his other costs; the publisher is the ultimate seller, and the bookstore part of the chain of distribution. But there is an important, and potentially relevant, exception, and that is where a distributor provides point-of-sale services that increase the demand for the product. This is the rationale for resale price maintenance: manufacturers of some goods place a floor under the retail price of the goods, thus deliberately increasing the retailers’ margin, but hoping by doing so to induce them to engage in nonprice competition that will increase the demand for the goods. Bookstore staffs, by decisions they make concerning choice and display of books to carry, and by making purchasing suggestions to customers, can, in principle, increase the demand for books. But these services cannot guarantee the survival of many bookstores, because unless the services are valued by a greater margin than seems realistic to expect, there will be too few customers to defray the bookstore’s fixed costs at acceptable prices.

The question then becomes whether the loss of point-of-sale services that bookstores provide will hurt publishers (and therefore authors, whose prosperity is linked to that of publishers) more than it will help them by reducing their distribution costs. That too is doubtful. As technology continues its forward march, online booksellers will find it increasingly feasible to duplicate and indeed improve on the point-of-sale services that bookstores offer. Bookstores will decline, and perhaps vanish when the current older generation, consisting of people habituated to printed books (as to printed newspapers), dies off. Yet this may well represent genuine economic progress, just as department stores and supermarkets represent progress though they cause the demise of countless small retailers.

I wonder how the following comments of his relate to Hebrew printing.

Q: What did you find most interesting of the trends that you uncovered in your study of the early book industry?

A: Two things. The first is the extent to which the new book market was underpinned by books that hadn’t played any role in the conventional narrative of what’s called the “print revolution.” The earliest commentators welcomed print, celebrating it as an essential part of the civilizing process on the way to modernity.

But inevitably this view concentrates on the most eye-catching of the newly-printed books: the great Bibles of Gutenberg and Plantin, Copernicus and scientific books, atlases, maps. The fact is that these big books almost always lost money. The engine room of the new industry turned out to be small books and pamphlets, at most two days’ work in the print shop, which could turn a quick profit. I think our project is the first thing that has really spelled this out in quantitative terms.

The second thing is our discovery of what you might call a two-speed Europe. The conventional geography of print always emphasizes how quickly it spread throughout Europe. Within 50 years of print’s invention, over 200 places had a printing press. But most of those early presses only survived a few years—they quickly went out of business and print contracted. What we discovered is around 85 percent of print output was produced close to the geographical center of European trade—in France, Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands. This was the heart of production. Outside this central zone, Spain, England, Scandinavia, Eastern Europe had essentially dependent markets.