Britain’s Postal Workers Begin Voting on Strike (printweek.com)

Unable to find a buyer for 72-year-old Vermont Life, the state’s Agency of Commerce and Community Development announced Thursday that it will cease printing the quarterly magazine after its summer issue. Vermont Life‘s status as a state-funded publication had made its future a subject of debate over the past year, with state lawmakers estimating that it ran an annual deficit of around $400,000. The state sought proposals for a sale last September, but officials said they elected to maintain ownership after finding none of the offers to be satisfactory. Click Read More below for additional information.

In another move to combat the spread of counterfeit textbooks, Cengage, Elsevier, McGraw-Hill Education, and Pearson announced an agreement with Barnes & Noble Education to implement the industry’s Anti-Counterfeit Best Practices. The best practices were developed earlier this year by the Educational Publishers Enforcement Group (EPEG) with the goal of assisting publishers and distributors looking to tamp down on the growing availability of counterfeit print textbooks. In agreeing to adhere to the best practices program, B&NE will verify the sources of its textbooks. It will also inspect inventory that has a high risk of being counterfeit, and prevent it from infecting the rest of its inventory. And, according to the agreement, when B&NE finds counterfeit books it will share information about the title and supplier with publishers. Click Read More below for more of the story.

Costco Wholesale Corporation reported net sales of $17.60 billion for the retail month of July, the four weeks ended July 30, 2023, an increase of 4.5 percent from $16.85 billion last year. For the forty-eight weeks ended July 30, 2023, the Company reported net sales of $214.53 billion, an increase of 4.6 percent from $205.19 billion during the similar period last year.