Despite doomsayer predictions, brick-and-mortar bookstores’ demise hasn’t come. In fact, local bookstores—and revived big-brand chains—are luring customers in with new incentives, merch, and cultivated communities.
The Rising Popularity of Brick-and-Mortar Bookstores: An Inside Look | CO- by US Chamber of Commerce
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As we reflect on the past year, which was a healthy one overall for mergers and acquisitions in the printing industry, it’s a good moment to assess what drove the activity in 2025 and what’s likely to carry the momentum forward into 2026.
The industry’s two principal segments — packaging and commercial printing — have different financial parameters. But the macroeconomic trends underpinning them are the same, and those forces remain encouraging for buyers and sellers alike.
Especially reassuring is the fact that the pace of M&As is coming back up to what it was in the early years of the present decade. 2021 and 2022 were record breakers in terms of transactions completed — as M&A advisers, we were never busier. Although not quite as hyperactive, 2023 was a blockbuster in its own right.
We can report that the pace has picked up again in 2025, so much so that in the remainder of the year and into 2026 we expect activity to look more like it did in 2023 than it did in 2024.
Marketers are always looking for ways to influence how consumers perceive their brands to build more than simply transactional relationships. They know that effective brand positioning helps separate them from the competition and not just capture but keep a larger share of both consumers’ minds and wallets, driving long-term customer loyalty. Here are six of the most common brand positioning strategies that companies use. Depending on the product category, some will be more effective than others and all come with some potential drawbacks. Get the details at: https://www.jschmid.com/blog/customer-loyalty-2-brand-positioning/
Reading is good for you. That’s not just an opinion—it’s the consensus of a growing number of researchers who see reading as not only vital to our ability to learn new things, but also important for our overall state of mind.
There’s something to be said about the feel of paper—the physical, tactile experience of holding a book and turning its pages has real advantages over pixels on a glowing screen. And it turns out the data backs up what most of us already sense. A major study tracking more than 236,000 Americans over two decades found that reading for pleasure has declined by nearly 40% since 2003—a trend researchers at University College London called “deeply concerning.” Co-author Daisy Fancourt put it plainly: “The research is clear. Reading is a vital health-enhancing behavior for every group within society, with benefits across the life-course.”
The irony is that most people already know they should be reading more. Studies consistently show that the gap between how much people read and how much they wish they did is wide—and that the vast majority of adults view reading as a meaningful investment in their own well-being.