Category Archives: The Economist

Jan 17th 2008 | GUADALAJARA

Sales of books in Spanish are booming, and there is plenty of room for growth

AT THE Feria Internacional del Libro (FIL), the largest Spanish-language publishing event, held a few weeks ago in Guadalajara, in Mexico, an eager teenager cadged your correspondent’s badge at the exit. That young people might want to sneak into book fairs would be the stuff of dreams in many countries, where competition from other media is pushing books aside. But as FIL demonstrates with more than 500,000 visitors, up by 7% from 2006, Spanish-language publishers, and readers, have much to celebrate.

Read it on The Economist’s site…

Dec 13th 2007 | VANCOUVER

Lululemon, a Canadian clothing firm, rides the yoga boom

IF THERE is no seaweed in a T-shirt, does it still reduce stress and make your skin feel softer? That was the worry that threatened to distract North America’s yoga practitioners from their routines last month. Shares in Lululemon Athletica, a Canadian firm that sells yoga clothing and equipment, fell after news reports claimed that tests had failed to find any trace of seaweed fibre in some of its garments, which were supposed to contain the stuff. Lululemon insisted that its own test results showed seaweed really was present, though it agreed (at the request of Canadian regulators) to withdraw unsubstantiated claims about its supposed therapeutic benefits.

Read it on The Economist’s site…

Nov 15th 2007 | SAN FRANCISCO

A new machine could reshape the speciality-coffee business

NEAR the hard-working espresso machine at Ritual Coffee Roasters, a café in San Francisco, sits a stainless-steel box about the size of a desktop computer. This box, the Clover, produces a cup of coffee with a spectacle of streaming water, whirring motors and an ingenious inverse plunger. Zander Nosler, the industrial designer who invented the Clover nearly three years ago, seems to have done the impossible: attracted a cult following for a new coffee-making machine that is both slower and vastly more expensive than other machines and requires the undivided attention of a trained operator.

Read it on The Economist’s site…