In an open e-mail letter to the community, Philip Rafshoon, owner of Outwrite Bookstore & Coffeehouse, Atlanta, Ga., said that the store's sales "have not been immune to the downturn in the economy and the impact technology has on how people buy and read books." The store is "in jeopardy," he said, but "to ensure a successful future, we're doing a lot of work: we're realigning our business model, refocusing our products and services, and upgrading the store to meet the changing needs of our customers and the community."
But he asked customers to help buy "as many of your books, CDs and DVDs from Outwrite as possible"; buy e-books from the store online; visit the coffeehouse; use the coffeehouse lounge for free for meetings of companies, businesses or organizations; volunteer to help the store in web design, bookkeeping, finance, banking, retail management, retail sales, collections and legal services; and tell others about the store.
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Amazon responded to B&N's launch of the Nook Simple Touch Reader (Shelf Awareness, May 25, 2011) "with a new ad-supported version of the Kindle 3G for $164," Cnet News reported, adding that the device, "like its $114 Wi-Fi-only counterpart, is called the Kindle 3G With Special Offers. It costs $25 less than the standard Kindle 3G."
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The Onion A.V. Club paid a visit and its respects to City Lights bookstore, San Francisco, Calif., noting that it "might be the most respected bookstore in the world.... We stopped by for a quick history lesson courtesy of City Lights' events director [Peter Maravelis], and we even corralled local hero Daniel Handler--better known as Lemony Snicket--into talking with us about his experiences as a customer."
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As you prepare for the imminent deluge of summer beach read lists, take a moment to savor Jessica Gelt's Los Angeles Times piece, "A deep sense of kinship with Virginia Woolf." She recalls her first encounter--in Tucson, Ariz.--with A Room of One's Own, noting that "in the summer, reading took on a particularly heroic quality--it provided escape from the searing misery of triple-digit heat. And in August 1991, when I turned 15, it changed the person I was becoming with a revelatory flash--the first, but certainly not the last, time literature would affect me like that.... So, as I tiptoed into Woolf's solitary room each day, leaving the sidewalks of Tucson radiating heat in waves and the pungent scent of dry creosote for the grassy lawns of early 20th Century Oxford, upon which Woolf, and women in general, were not allowed to tread, I began to feel something I hadn't before.
"It was a deep sense of kinship--the delicate, magical string that a good book can sew through the human experience. Pulled tight enough, that string can draw the whole of history around your shoulders to make you realize that you are not alone."
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New York Press suggested an alternative to summer book lists by showcasing the city's numerous reading series: "Put your tawdry beach reads back on the shelf--these reading series will keep your summer wordy, nerdy and hot."
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The Telegraph featured the five all-time biggest selling books adapted for film.
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The arrival of a new James Bond novel is a military operation in England. The Guardian reported that "abseiling marines delivered the first copies of Jeffery Deaver's new James Bond book to the author today, in a scene straight out of a 007 novel." Carte Blanche, which "updates Bond for the 21st century," was authorized by the Fleming family.
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Stephen Kelman, author of Pigeon English, selected his top 10 outsiders' stories for the Guardian. Kelman observed: "For both reader and writer, the outsider is an instrument that allows us to see the world in an unfamiliar way, and that for me is one of the prime aspirations of literature.
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Book trailer of the day (because BEA brought the sun back to New York this week): Shine by Lauren Myracle (Abrams).
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Antoinette de Alteriis has joined Pelican Publishing Company as promotion director. She was formerly general manager of Ripley's Believe It or Not! Museum in New Orleans and earlier was a business consultant, taught school and worked for Waldenbooks for 13 years. And very coolly, she is also costume historian and consultant for the Krewe de Jeanne d'Arc.