You will know by now that Amazon has opened a bricks-and-mortar bookshop in Seattle. And you will know by now of the practice of "showrooming", the bugbear of independent bookshops, in which people – you may be one of them –  go into a bookshop, browse the shelves, make their choice(s) and then do their business online. So hats off to one Paul Constant, who offered a gift certificate from the Elliott Bay Book Company, which describes itself as "a full-service bookstore, home to over 150,000 titles, set on cedar shelves in a multi-level, inviting unique atmosphere", to the first person to showroom and prove it from the Amazon shop. Swiftly, one Allison Stieger tweeted a picture of Alice Hoffman's The Marriage of Opposites on the Amazon shelves swiftly followed by a receipt from another Seattle bookshop, Queen Anne Book Company. Stieger got a $75 voucher as her prize.

Long bombs to Harms

You can blame the 1977 Grand Final replay and more specifically Ron Barassi for the phrase   "long bombs to Snake". That saying is back as the name of a new magazine specialising in long-form journalism about sport, which is the brainchild of Footy Almanac founder John Harms.  As Harms puts it in his "welcome" to the first edition: "In a poetic sort of way, Long Bombs to Snake seemed to encapsulate something about Australian sport." If you like the Almanac, then some of the contributors, who include Harms himself, Matt Quartermaine​, Mathilde de Hauteclocque​ and Phil Dimiatridis​, should be familiar to you. The first edition is available now in print or digital form from footyalmanac.com.au

Stacks of copies in neat piles

If you're sick to death of the colouring-in craze – who isn't? – and want to see another unexpected title rocket to the top of the bestseller lists, watch out for Lars Mytting​'s Norwegian Wood, which is published in Australia next week by Maclehose Press. It's a book about ... "Chopping, Stacking and Drying Wood the Scandinavian Way" and there's not a Beatle or Japanese novelist in sight. (Christopher Maclehose​ has had huge success with Scandinavian titles; he published Stieg Larsson's Girl with a Dragon Tattoo books.)  Of course, the weather here at Christmas is somewhat different from that in northern Europe and thoughts might not be turning to roaring fires (other than the bush variety), but the title been a huge success since publication in 2011 in Norway and is No. 18 on amazon.co.uk. 

Pearson hangs on ... for now

There's been renewed speculation about what Pearson wants to do with its 47 per cent stake in Penguin Random House. This comes after the Pearson share price received a battering last week following comments about growth and profit by boss John Fallon. Britain's Bookseller magazine reported that while Fallon reiterated that nothing would happen next year – "it's more likely to be a 2017 than a 2016 issue" – he did confirm Pearson would "at some point" consider selling the stake. Why not now? Because restructuring was ongoing and PRH was in the process of renegotiating e-book terms.