Book News Roundup: The diversity in publishing edition

In 2014, Amazon's warehouses--65 million square feet of space--employed roughly 30,000 full-time workers and 104,000 part-time and seasonal workers. But including all the jobs lost from stores whose sales Amazon supplanted, Amazon sales "produced a net loss of 135,973 retail jobs."

Matt Cunningham of Civic Economics noted, too, that in 2014 Amazon book sales were about $5.618 billion, some 11.6% of Amazon retail sales. That amount of sales represents about 3,600 "bookshop equivalents and 40,000 bookstore employees," which he called "a sobering statistic."

  • The results of the Diversity Baseline Survey, investigating diversity in publishing, has been released. You should go read all the results, but in short the publishing industry is overwhelmingly straight, white, and female, though predictably the executive level is much closer to an even male-female split.

  • With that in mind, please enjoy this story about a girl who was "sick of reading about white boys and dogs" and so started the #1000BlackGirlBooks hashtag.

  • Scientists have named a new type of leech after author Amy Tan. When she heard of the honor, Tan was delighted.