ALA Reports Record Spike in Book Titles Challenged in 2023 (publishersweekly.com)

Retail sales that occurred outside of stores increased 6.8% compared with October 2016. That's a major deceleration from September, when nonstore sales increased 9.2% year over year. New October retail sales data out this morning suggests that the fourth quarter could be off to a rocky start for e-commerce. Growth in U.S. retail sales that take place outside of stores, known as nonstore sales, decelerated in October, with sales dropping 0.3% compared with September 2017, according to the U.S. Commerce Department. Click Read More below for additional information.

Schools minister Lotta Edholm moves students off digital devices and on to books and handwriting, with teachers and experts debating the pros and cons. Since young children went back to school across Sweden recently, many of their teachers have been putting a new emphasis on printed books, quiet reading time and handwriting practice, and devoting less time to tablets, independent online research and keyboarding skills. The return to more traditional ways of learning is a response to politicians and experts questioning whether Sweden’s hyper-digitalised approach to education, including the introduction of tablets in nursery schools, had led to a decline in basic skills.

While the material and equipment costs of the traditional two-step lamination process were once a deterrent in choosing lamination over synthetic paper, the environmental impact of using lamination has arrived as the key detractor for choosing lamination as robust sustainability initiatives have become the norm across nearly every industry. This leaves end users and printers alike with an important question: Are there sustainable alternatives to traditional laminates that offer the same degree of substrate strength and protection? The short answer is yes, and, here, we’ll look at a couple of ways choosing sustainably manufactured synthetic paper can provide superior protection for your print media in a more eco-friendly way. Synthetic paper is manufactured to be 100% recyclable. While some laminates can be recycled and reused for other purposes, the process involves removing the laminate from the substrate, which is a time-consuming and costly process.