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This article explores the phenomenon of the gift enterprise bookstore in the mid-nineteenth-century United States. An early form of premium marketing, the gift-book enterprise promised to reward each book purchase with a surprise 'gift', ranging from pencils to dress patterns to cutlery to jewellery. A novel form of marketing books, the gift enterprise bookstore teetered on a thin line between sensation and sham. Although decried as form of illegal lottery gambling and beset by accusations of dishonesty, gift-book enterprises grew immensely popular. Drawing on extensive archival research on one of the most successful gift-book enterprises, the bookstores of G.G. and D.W. Evans--operating in urban centres from 1856-1861--this article examines gift enterprise bookselling in the context of mid-nineteenth-century American print cultures. As savvy entrepreneurs, the Evans' leveraged the national reach and perceived authority of the newspaper by engaging in debates over the morality and legality of the business in the columns of widely-circulating papers and capitalised on editorial and reprinting practices to endorse their business model and market their bookstores. In addition, in lengthy bookseller catalogues distributed across the nation, the Evans' created a bookstore in print and shaped inclusive imagined and real communities of readerbook buyers. Examining the print culture of Evans' gift-book enterprise offers new insights into nineteenth-century book marketing and the ways in which gift enterprise bookselling was intimately connected to and inseparable from contemporary print forms, networks, and practices. Taking the gift-book enterprise seriously expands the histories of American bookselling and decentres the dominant focus on large publishers. In addition, the gift-bookstore phenomenon highlights how bookselling is always entwined with larger cultural dynamics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper deals with four cultural and historical features of book industry that still determine the nature of book business. The paper concentrates on how these features impact book industries in linguistic communities with a relatively small number of speakers. The paper also examines the reasons for absence of the publishing education and contemporary publishing research in the world of academia. In its final part, the paper shows the reason why, at least for the time being, e-books will not outperform printed books and stresses that current developments have triggered not only new research on contemporary books, but also created a set of threats and opportunities for book business in small language communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article handles general developments and changes in book trade and book publishing which took place in Estonia during the second half of the 19th and in the early 20th century. The aim is to show the formation of bookshops trading with Estonian books, to analyse the activities of Estonian booksellers as publishers and their role in publishing books in the Estonian language. The paper is based on the retrospective national bibliography of Estonian books that were published from 1850 to 1917, on research literature and on the data collected by the author for her doctoral thesis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]