Private-equity firm Najafi Cos. has emerged as another potential buyer of Borders Group. The Wall Street Journal reported that Najafi, "a boutique Phoenix-based firm that usually makes investments of $1 billion or less," is in competition with Gores Group (Shelf Awareness, June 2, 2011) to acquire the chain. Both firms are discussing the possibility of purchasing more than 200 of the remaining 265 Borders superstores and would "keep the bookstore chain operating as a going concern." They would also buy the bankrupt chain's website operations and customer lists.
The Journal added that Najafi and Gores are negotiating terms with Borders "ahead of a potential bankruptcy-court auction later in the summer. Borders hopes to soon select one of the suitors as a so-called stalking-horse bidder that would make an offer others must top in the bankruptcy auction."
The company is already known in the book retail and publishing industries. In a profile of Najafi Cos. and Jahm Najafi, the Journal noted that in 2008 the firm acquired [from Bertelsmann] Direct Brands Inc., a direct-marketing company home to brands such as the Book of the Month Club, Doubleday Book Club and Columbia House DVD.
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Amazon's Kindle business will account for 10% of the company's overall revenue by 2012, according to Citi analyst Mark Mahaney, who estimates that total Kindle revenues last year were $2.5 billion (7.2% of Amazon's total revenue), will hit $3.8 billion this year (8%) and $6.1 billion in 2012 (9.9%), TechCrunch reported. He also "increased his estimate of how many Kindle devices Amazon will sell this year from 16.5 million to 17.5 million units, and he expects another 26 million Kindles to be sold in 2012."
Mahaney expects the number of Kindle books sold to reach 314 million this year, compared to 124 million in 2010, and projects that this number will grow another 140% in 2012 to 752 million. TechCrunch noted that "digital book revenues should surpass device revenues in 2012, when Mahaney estimates that Amazon will make $2.4 billion from device sales and another $3.7 billion from Kindle book sales."
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The Kindle Million club is getting crowded. Amazon announced that Lee Child and Suzanne Collins are the fifth and sixth authors to sell more than one million Kindle books, joining Stieg Larsson, James Patterson, Nora Roberts and Charlaine Harris. Collins is the first children's author to reach this milestone.
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Julia Donaldson, author of the bestselling picture book The Gruffalo, is the new British children's laureate, succeeding illustrator Anthony Browne for a two-year term, the Guardian reported.
"The laureateship is an honor but it's not the kind of honor you can just bask in, so I'm planning to have quite an active two years," she said. "I'm hoping to bring some drama and music to the job. I always act out my own stories with lots of audience participation so I'm planning to do lots more of that. I hope to encourage and inspire children to act stories out, though it's too early to say whether there will be one major theatrical event."
This is the first year that the children's laureate post includes the Waterstone's name in the title. BBC News asked Donaldson if she had any reservations about the branding. "I feel okay about it," she replied. "Waterstone's are the biggest sponsor and you can see why they want their name there. That's not to say I can't be a spokesperson for independent bookshops. I do feel very strongly about them and I'm hoping to do a tour of small independent bookshops."
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In an Atlantic magazine column headlined "The Serious Business of 21st-Century Book Publishing," Peter Osnos, founder and editor-at-large of PublicAffairs, recalled that in June 1990, "at the annual book industry trade show in Las Vegas, Random House hosted a lavish bash in the grand ballroom of the new Mirage Hotel for the forthcoming publication of Donald Trump's Surviving at the Top." The book "was published in late summer and disappeared so fast that I'm guessing Random House's bills for the champagne reception--let's say $100,000--had barely been paid."
How much have things changed for the book trade since then? "This year's trade show was again at New York's Javits Center. All of the parties hosted by publishers put together probably cost a fraction of the Random House fete for Trump," Osnos observed. "Instead, there were long days of education sessions and panels, mainly and understandably focused on the digital transformation of the book business. The big issues--the roll-out of e-readers, digital rights, self-publishing, and the future of the traditional bookstore--were discussed, over and over.... The overall sense in publishing is that, rather than being pushed to the margins, the industry is making dramatic changes with skill and flexibility that surprises everyone involved."
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The author event is free, but you have to bring your boarding pass. The Wall Street Journal reported that authors are increasingly using airport bookstores to promote their works: "Airport book signings won't supplant traditional book tours anytime soon, but maximizing publicity opportunities, even during an author's travel layover, makes sense for publishing houses as marketing budgets shrink and traditional bookstores vanish." Sara Hinckley, a Hudson News v-p, said that transit locations make up 10% or more of total sales for some books that the retailer keeps in heavy stock.
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The New York Times chronicled the meteoric success story of Adam Mansbach's Go the F*** to Sleep, from an e-mailed book proposal that Johnny Temple, publisher of Akashic Books, "was tempted to brush off" to the finished book, which currently has nearly 300,000 copies printed and more than 50,000 sold, "many in preorders, since the book does not officially go on sale until next week. It has already spent 43 days in the top 100 on Amazon.com, reaching the #1 spot weeks ago."
Although some stores, including Wal-Mart, have refused to carry the book, independent bookstores "have adopted a much breezier attitude toward the profanity," the Times noted.
"The word is not there in all its glory," said Lyn Roberts, general manager of Square Books, Oxford, Miss., which ordered 40 copies and will display it "on the front counter, where humor titles are usually placed. In the children's section, which is in a separate building, the book is discreetly kept behind the counter."
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Imagine a B&N NookCafe. That's what ZDNet's Scott Raymond did in an article claiming that the "outmoded bookstore paradigm needs to change.... Picture this: The Barnes & Noble NOOKCafe(tm). Current B&N stores already partner with Starbucks and have their own menu sandwiches and desserts. They could easily expand that into a full-blown bistro. Imagine being able to sit in a booth, and shop for e-books on a touchscreen display at your table. Slide your membership card, your registered credit card in the attached magnetic reader, or use Near-Field Communication payment and have your selections automatically downloaded to your e-reader."
Raymond noted the limitless array of retail possibilities "for a business that is flexible and willing to change with the times" and asked: "Is Barnes & Noble that kind of company? Maybe with a media corporation like Liberty behind them, they can be."
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Obituary notes:
Lilian Jackson Braun, a mystery novelist whose best-selling "Cat Who" series "repeatedly plumbed the hearts, minds and digestive tracts of her crime-solving feline heroes," died last Saturday, the New York Times reported. She was 97.
Josephine Hart, "the bestselling novelist and committed poetry ambassador," died last week, the Guardian reported. She was 69. Hart's novel Damage was adapted into a film starring Jeremy Irons and Juliette Binoche. She also founded Gallery Poets, now the monthly Josephine Hart Poetry Hour at the British Library, which matches actors with poetry for a series of public readings.
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"Books are being thrown away, or sometimes packed away, as digitized versions become more available. This is an important time to plan carefully for there is much at stake," noted the Internet Archive's blog in chronicling its mission to keep "a copy of the books we digitize if they are not returned to another library. Since we are interested in scanning one copy of every book ever published, we are starting to collect as many books as we can."
When Internet Archive began this ambitious project, it "solicited donations of several hundred thousand books in dozens of languages in subjects such as history, literature, science, and engineering. Working with donors of books has been rewarding because an alternative for many of these books was the used book market or being destroyed. We have found everyone involved has a visceral repulsion to destroying books."
In 2009, engineer Tom McCarty started designing, building and testing a modular storage system he "developed around the most used storage design of the 20th century, the shipping container. Rows of stacked shipping containers are used like 40' deep shelving units. In this configuration, a single shipping container can hold around 40,000 books, about the same as a standard branch library, and a small building can hold millions of books." This month a production facility "leveraging this design" will be launched in Richmond, Calif.
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Our advice: Call the Internet Archive. We've all used the phrase "too many books" when reorganizing our collections, but for a Canadian couple, the words have become all too literal. CBC News reported that Shaunna Raycraft assumed responsibility for a collection of 350,000 books when a neighbor threatened to burn them after her collector husband died, but now the Raycrafts "don't know what to do with all the books and are forced to contemplate burning some books themselves." They are soliciting suggestions for an alternative.
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Yesterday in her Motherlode parenting column in the New York Times, Lisa Belkin introduced the Motherlode Book Club: "The plan at the moment is this: You'll take about two weeks to read the chosen book, and during that time I will run a post or two about one or more of its themes. You'll use the comments to give your thoughts and questions as we go (you can find a link to the current book, and, eventually, an archive of past books, in the right-hand column of the Motherlode page). Next, I'll sit down with the writer in front of a video camera and talk about what's on your mind. Periodically we'll invite some readers to join in person, like a real book club. (I'll bring the wine.) I'll post that chat on Motherlode, where the conversation will continue in the comments."
The first Motherlode Book Club selection is Torn: True Stories of Kids, Career and the Conflict of Modern Motherhood by Samantha Parent Walravens (Coffeetown Press).
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Alternative Reel featured its selections for "Top 10 Drunk American Writers," with appropriately (or inappropriately) incriminating quotations.
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Word Up, the pop-up bookstore that will open for a month on June 14 and mentioned here yesterday, has sent word down about location: the store will be at 4157 Broadway at 175th Street in the Washington Heights neighborhood in upper Manhattan.
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Congratulations to Bookmans Entertainment Exchange, which has six stores selling used books, music, movies and more in Arizona, for winning a National Silver ADDY Award from the American Advertising Federation for its delightful book domino video, which we featured last October. Enjoy it again here.
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Book trailer of the day: The Declaration of Independents: How Libertarian Politics Can Fix What's Wrong with America by Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch (PublicAffairs). The authors are the editors-in-chief of Reason.com and Reason magazine, respectively.
"There's no such thing as the contemporary novel. Before I seem the complete reactionary, let me add that I've happily joined in many discussions about 'the contemporary novel' where what that usually, unproblematically means is novels that have appeared recently or may appear soon. But the novel that's contemporary in the sense of being wholly 'of now' is an impossibility, if only because novels may take years to write, so the 'now' with which they begin will be defunct by the time they're finished. Nonetheless, the idea of the novel that's wholly of now persists. There's an undeniable thrill in seeing what's most current in our lives offered back to us in fictional guise, but it soon dates and it's never enough."
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Originally the hurler was slated to appear at the store on May 22, but several days before--after many hundreds of copies of Knuckler had arrived--the store learned that Wakefield, back in the starting rotation, was scheduled to pitch the day of the event. Quickly the store let his many fan-customers know that the event would be rescheduled--someday.
As a teaser for the fourth season of True Blood--the hit series based on the novels of Charlaine Harris--HBO has unveiled the first six minutes of the premiere episode. The initial three minutes, released last week, revealed that "Sookie Stackhouse (Anna Paquin) knows that the land of the fairy godmothers light fruits isn’t all that it seems," while in the next three minutes, "Sookie and her grandpa Earl notice the massive time warp and catch up over the not-so-peaceful death of his wife before things turn dark in the land of supposed perfection," the 
The Welcome, which premiered at the Ashland Independent Film Festival in Oregon earlier this spring, is a documentary film "about a group of veterans who met over Memorial Day weekend in 2008 to use poetry and storytelling to come to terms with their experiences in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. You can read some of the resulting poems and watch videos of the veterans reading them at the 
Formerly editorial director with the American Library Association, 
Book you've faked reading:
With this brilliantly constructed novel, told alternately in prose and visual sequences, Brian Selznick may have topped even his Caldecott Medal–winning The Invention of Hugo Cabret. He expands on the framework he created for Hugo as he tells the story of 12-year-old Ben Wilson in words, and the story of 12-year-old Rose Kincaid in images. When the two stories--which begin 50 years apart--join, their convergence delivers an intense emotional impact. That's due, in part, to the way Selznick creates ripples of resonances in the two stories, and partly because he taps into the universal passions of childhood.