More readers are using cell phones and PDAs to read e-books, and e-book sales in the second quarter more than doubled to $8.1 million compared to the same period in 2006, according to today's New York Times. In another sign of growing consumer acceptance, e-book bestsellers are no longer dominated by SF novels "and other titles favored by men," the Times wrote. Lately the lists "are led by romance and women's fiction."

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Yesterday shares of Borders Group rose 6.9% to $15.77 on volume of 3.1 million shares, more than double the usual volume and on a day the Dow Jones Industrials rose just 0.3%.

A likely cause: in recent days, according to Seeking Alpha, Spencer Capital indicated in an SEC filing that it had increased its stake in the company to 7.9% (a little more than 4.6 million shares) from the 6.8% stake disclosed last month, and SAC Capital now has a 5.1% "passive" stake in Borders.

In a July SEC filing, Spencer Capital said, "In late June 2007, representatives of the Filers had conversations with the chief financial officer of the Company concerning the business of the Company. The Filers intend to seek to engage in further discussions with members of the board of directors or management of the Company and to discuss with them the business of the Company. Based on discussions with these or any other representatives of the Company, the Filers may formulate plans or proposals with respect to the Company."

Citadel and Pershing Square Capital also have significant stakes in Borders.

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More on diversity among SF writers: Tobias Buckell, who considers himself multi-racial although "I'm one white looking dude," addresses the issue on his blog. "I jokingly have been called 'an undercover brother,' " he writes. "Vin Diesel calls people like me 'shadow people,' neither one race nor the either due to circumstances and self-identity, and considers himself one, yet another reason for my close attention to his career."

Buckell, author of Ragamuffin and Crystal Rain (both published by Tor Books), had recently received e-mails from people suspicious that he might be "a poser" wanting "the 'advantages' of being hip and multi-racial."

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In honor of Newbery Medalist and Geisel Honoree Kate DiCamillo, Candlewick Press has established a grant called Light the Way: Outreach to the Underserved that will reward libraries that have developed "innovative approaches to engaging traditionally underserved populations."

The grant will be made by the Association for Library Service to Children's Library Service to Special Population Children and Their Caregivers Committee. DiCamillo is the author of, among other titles, Because of Winn-Dixie, The Tale of Despereaux and The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane.

"When I was a child from a broken home in search of comfort, librarians handed me a book," DiCamillo said in a statement. "I am proud to join with ALSC today in this ongoing effort to put books into the hands of children who need the books, the light, the most."

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Sometimes all is not well that ends well. According to Bloomberg News, "William Hill Plc, a London-based bookmaker, will pay out on a number of bets on the fate of Harry Potter because of an 'ambiguous ending' to the seventh and final novel about the boy wizard. The bookmaker repaid 50,000 pounds ($101,060) in wagers and a further 40,000 pounds to fans who either bet that he died, killed himself or was killed by his nemesis Lord Voldemort."

The wagers on HP7's conclusion were the first the bookmaker had ever taken on the ending of a book. "Three employees at the bookmaker read the novel by J.K. Rowling and failed to agree on the ending," said William Hill spokesman Rupert Adams. "Now we have to hope that Rowling doesn't bring out another Harry Potter book in the next two years. We have already taken 12,500 pounds on that bet.''

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Harry Potter et les Reliques de la Mort? Non.

Not yet, anyway. The Guardian reported that a 16-year-old boy "was detained in Aix-en-Provence in southern France after he posted the unauthorised translation of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows on the Internet." The official French version will not be published until late October.

 

The Book Industry Study Group and Green Press Initiative have launched the U.S. Book Industry Climate Impacts and Environmental Benchmarking Survey, which aims to track the book industry's impact on the climate and progress toward environmental improvements.

The first step is a benchmarking survey, and BISG and GPI, which focuses on paper conservation, hope that the entire book industry, including printers, manufacturers, paper mills, publishers, retailers and wholesalers, will participate. Organizations interested in completing the survey should visit here to request a survey link.

The sponsors are staging a 30-minute web seminar at 1 p.m. on Tuesday, August 14, to help those interested in participating get the most from the project. Register here.

The results of the Environmental Benchmarking Survey will appear in a report this December. BISG and GPI will also present survey results during an event near the end of the year.

This morning on Good Morning America: David de Rothschild, author of The Live Earth Global Warming Survival Handbook: 77 Essential Skills to Stop Climate Change (Rodale, $14.95, 9781594867811/159486781X).

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Today on the Diane Rehm Show: Norman Pearlstine, whose latest book is Off the Record: The Press, the Government, and the War over Anonymous Sources (FSG, $25, 9780374224493/0374224498).

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Today on Fox and Friends: Charlotte Hays, author of The Fortune Hunters: Dazzling Women and the Men They Married (St. Martin's, $24.95, 9780312246464/0312246463).

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Today on KCRW's Bookworm: Kurt Vonnegut, whose last bestseller was A Man without a Country (Random House Trade Paperbacks, $13.95, 9780812977363/081297736X). As the show described it: "The late Kurt Vonnegut has been astonishing us from the 1960s on. In this archived edition of Bookworm, originally broadcast on April 6, 2006, the magnificent satirist, critic, dreamer and grouch who he speaks as a socialist disappointed by human behavior, our country and our times. He 'wants to go home.' "

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Tonight on the Daily Show with Jon Stewart, Tal Ben-Shahar, who teaches the most popular course at Harvard, talks about Happier: Learn the Secrets to Daily Joy and Lasting Fulfillment  (McGraw-Hill, $21.95, 9780071492393/0071492399).

Book TV airs on C-Span 2 from 8 a.m. Saturday to 8 a.m. Monday and focuses on political and historical books as well as the book industry. The following are highlights for this coming weekend. For more information, go to Book TV's website.

Saturday, August 11

6 p.m. Encore Booknotes. In a segment first aired in 1999, James Glassman, author of Dow 36,000: The New Strategy for Profiting from the Coming Rise in the Stock Market, discussed the reasons for, and future of, the stock market strength in the late 1990s.

7 p.m. Peter Navarro, author of The Coming China Wars: Where They Will Be Fought and How They Can Be Won (Financial Times Press, $24.99, 9780132281287/0132281287), talks about the challenges facing China as it moves into the 21st century as well as the impact of China's growth and politics on the rest of the world.

8:20 p.m. Michael Belfiore, author of Rocketeers: How a Visionary Band of Business Leaders, Engineers, and Pilots Is Boldly Privatizing Space (Collins, $26.95, 9780061149023/0061149020), discusses the commercialization and privatization of space travel and speculates on the future of space exploration and space tourism. (Re-airs Sunday at 11:15 p.m.)

9 p.m. After Words. Gerald Seib, Washington, D.C., bureau chief for the Wall Street Journal, interviews Alastair Campbell, author of The Blair Years: the Alastair Campbell Diaries (Knopf, $35, 9780307268310/0307268314). Campbell served as former Prime Minister Tony Blair's press secretary and director of communications and strategy from 1994 to 2003. (Re-airs Sunday at 6 p.m. and 9 p.m.)
    
Sunday, August 12

1:30 a.m. Michael Eric Dyson, author of Know What I Mean?: Reflections on Hip Hop (Perseus, $19.95, 9780465017164/0465017169), talks about Hip Hop culture, controversies surrounding the music and its stars and how Hip Hop has survived in a mainstream culture that has not always supported it. (Re-airs Monday at 6:30 a.m.)     

11 a.m. John Lott, author of Freedomnomics: Why the Free Market Works and Other Half-Baked Theories Don't (Regnery, $27.95, 9781596985063/1596985062), contends that free markets liberate the best, most creative and most generous aspects of our society while efforts to constrain economic liberty, no matter how well-intentioned, lead to increased poverty and injustice. (Re-airs Monday at 12 a.m.)
 
12 p.m. History on Book TV. A panel discussion focusing on Ronald Porambo's No Cause for Indictment: The Explosive Story of the Newark Riots (Melville House, $18.95, 9781933633213/1933633212). The book, first published in 1967, has been re-released to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the 1967 riots in Newark, N.J. Panelists include Fred Bruning, Sally Carroll, Robert Curvin, Danny Schechter and Leonard Weinglass.   

3 p.m. Humberto Fontova, author of Exposing the Real Che Guevara: And the Useful Idiots Who Idolize Him (Sentinel, $23.95, 9781595230270/1595230270), argues that the popular image of Che as a righteous freedom fighter is inaccurate; that he was overrated as a soldier; and that he was responsible for executing many hundreds of his political enemies.

5:15 p.m. Robert Frank, author of Richistan: A Journey Through the American Wealth Boom and the Lives of the New Rich (Crown, $24.95, 9780307339263/0307339262), suggests that the influence of the "new rich" extends well beyond the almost ten million households that make up its population as the nonstop quest for status and an insatiable demand for luxury goods reshapes the entire American economy. (Re-airs Sunday, August 19, at 12 p.m.)
     
8 p.m. At an event hosted by the Writer's League of Texas as part of an agents' and editors' conference in Austin, Lee Gutkind, author of Almost Human: Making Robots Think (Norton, $25.95, 9780393058673/0393058670), discusses his experiences observing the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University to learn about the cutting edge of robot technology.

J.W. Marshall, who co-owns Open Books: A Poem Emporium, a poetry-only bookstore in Seattle, Wash., has won the 2007 Field Poetry Prize from Oberlin College, according to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. He receives $1,000 and publication of his first collection of poetry, Meaning a Cloud, by Oberlin University Press in March. Congratulations!

Marshall owns Open Books with his wife, Christine Deavel, also a poet. The store, which stocks more than 6,000 new, used and out-of-print poetry and related titles, is located at 2414 N. 45th St. Seattle, Wash. 98103; 206-633-0811; www.openpoetrybooks.com.

Today's New York Times highlights the bestselling victories of Lone Survivor: The Eyewitness Account of Operation Redwing and the Lost Heroes of SEAL Team 10  (Little, Brown, $24.99, 9780316067591/0316067598), the June 12 memoir by Marcus Luttrell, a recently retired Navy Seal who was the sole survivor of a 2005 battle in Afghanistan during a mission to capture or kill a Taliban leader. That mission claimed the lives of 11 Seals and is the focus of the book, co-written with Patrick Robinson.

Helped by "strong support from military blogs and right-wing pundits like Michelle Malkin" and appearances on the Today Show, the Glenn Beck Program and CNN Headline News, Lone Survivor has 275,000 copies in print after a first printing of 75,000 and will be No. 1 on the Times hardcover nonfiction list this coming Sunday.

"The baby-faced Mr. Luttrell, with his commanding physical presence and soft-spoken delivery, made for an intriguing presence in his television interviews," the Times wrote. In addition, the book is "spiked with unabashed braggadocio and patriotism, as well as several polemical passages lashing out at the 'liberal media' for its role in sustaining military rules of engagement that prevent soldiers from killing unarmed civilians who may also be scouts or informers for terrorists."

One of our favorite booksellers, Mary McCarthy, director of merchandising at Ingram Book Group, told the Times, "It's obvious that there are some people reading [the book] who aren't traditional military readers."

Luttrell has set up a trust for all proceeds of the book that will be used to benefit the families of the dead Seals and military charities.

The title may seem curious at first, but nearly halfway through this gripping first novel, readers discover that it is taken directly from Chairman Mao's own teachings about the class struggle: "A revolution is not a dinner party . . . it cannot be so refined, so leisurely and gentle. . . . A revolution is an insurrection, an act of violence by which one class overthrows another." The book opens in the summer of 1972 in Wuhan, in central China, when narrator Ling is not yet nine years old, and ends shortly after Mao's death in 1976. Although it is a work of fiction, the author explains (in an afterword) that she bases the novel on actual events, and young Ling's unusual situation gives her a vantage point rarely seen in books about this era. In Ji-li Liang's memoir, Red Scarf Girl (1997), which takes place a few years earlier in China, readers observe the author change from a passionate Mao follower to a disillusioned teen; in Peter Sís's The Wall (reviewed in Shelf Awareness, May 24), which covers similar events in Cold War-era Czechoslovakia, the hero similarly comes of age as a Young Pioneer and later grows critical of the oppressive government. By contrast, here Ling starts out suspicious of Mao's teachings and remains so; her challenge is how to stay true to herself while also safekeeping her family.

Ling's mother is a traditional doctor of Chinese medicine who uses herbs and acupuncture needles, and Ling's father is a surgeon, trained by Dr. Smith, a Western doctor. Dr. Smith invited Ling's father to practice in the U.S., but ironically considering what was to come, "Father decided to stay to help build the new China." Her father teaches Ling English and encourages her to ask questions. By the second chapter, Comrade Li, the new political officer of the hospital, comes to live in the family's study. He soon strips Ling's father of his surgical duties and puts him to work as a janitor. Compestine does not shy away from the "act[s] of violence" to which Mao refers. A baby doctor commits suicide rather than humiliate her family, an antirevolutionary writer tries to drown himself, and Ling's father is betrayed by a close family friend. But through it all, Ling's father adheres to the physician's creed, a kind of antidote to Mao's teachings ("A great physician should not pay attention to status, wealth, or age. Nor should he question whether his patient is an enemy or friend"). He secretly performs surgery, and saves even the men who would imprison him. His power of example emboldens Ling, who literally fights for food rations and confronts a member of the Red Guard. As readers watch Ling grow ever stronger in her convictions, they also experience the smells, sights and sounds of a nation struggling to find its identity. More than a book about facing adversity, this is an inspiring story of what one young person can do to fight for her beliefs.--Jennifer M. Brown

"The web was a neighborhood more efficiently lonely than the one it replaced. Its solitude was bigger and faster. When relentless intelligence finally completed its program, when the terminal box brought the last barefoot, abused child on line and everyone could at last say anything instantly to everyone else in existence, it seemed to me we'd still have nothing to say to each other and many more ways to say it."--Richard Powers, Galatea 2.2

Maybe.

Or perhaps booksellers do have something to say online; something like, "I read a book and liked it. You might like it, too." As the bookstore websiteseeing tour bus cruised last week, we visited a few small press recommendations posted by booksellers who had something significant to say to their patrons about independent and university press books and were using one of the best tools at their disposal to say it.

When my column appeared early Wednesday morning, Kathy L. Patrick, owner of Beauty and the Book, Jefferson, Tex., responded quickly with her own indie pick: "I would like to recommend to you Rain Village by Carolyn Turgeon (Unbridled Books, $24.95, 9781932961249/1932961240). Her story is of a small town Kansas girl who runs away from her abusive father and family to be rescued by a librarian who used to be a trapeze artist. The librarian teaches the young girl everything she knows and the girl eventually runs away with the circus. Magical and I can hardly wait for her next release, Godmother, which promises to be an even better read. This is a writer to watch and Unbridled Books to me is discovering authors of extreme merit. I just could not wait to tell you about this small press book!"

And because the universe operates on a system at once beautiful and unfathomable, the next e-mail to arrive came from Unbridled Books publisher Fred Ramey, who wrote, "Thanks for that column, Robert. It raises the kind of awareness the industry really needs: That there are worthy titles and powerful reading experiences outside of those designated in the mediastream and that the independent booksellers are always in a position to deliver so much more to their customers than the chains acknowledge exists." Ramey also mentioned that he liked the mildly optimistic tone of the column "when abstracted fellows like me so often sound either like Eeyore or like Jonathan Edwards."

What else could I do but climb back aboard the bus and keep the tour going?

Joan at the Odyssey Bookshop, South Hadley, Mass., writes that The Light Within the Light: Portraits of Donald Hall, Richard Wilbur, Maxine Kumin & Stanley Kunitz by Jeanne Braham (David R. Godine, $24.95, 9781567923162/156792316X) "is a wonderful book about four of New England's most senior and most eminent poets. Jeanne Braham's stellar skills of interviewer and writer shine throughout this volume. She blends together the lives of the poets, their influences, their landscapes and their poetry in such a skillful manner that one immediately goes searching for the poetry, essays and other works of these four writers. Barry Moser's full page engravings of each poet add artistic beauty to this gem of a book."

Phil, of Small World Books, Venice, Calif., offers a concise verdict for Your Body Is Changing by Jack Pendarvis (MacAdam/Cage, $13, 9781596921917/1596921919): "Pretty hilarious stuff. Bizarre, contemptible and pitiful characters barely functioning in the jerkwater south."

At The Kaleidoscope: Our Focus Is You, Hampton, Iowa, Keri suggests My Half of the Sky by Jana McBurney-Lin (Komenar, $24.95, 9780977208111/0977208117), calling it her favorite new book. "Li Hui, a modern young Chinese woman of marriageable age who has recently graduated from Xiamen University . . . struggles with finding love and acting with honor. . . . This original and insightful work is in the best traditions of classic novels that explore people caught in the crucible of change in complex cultures."

Katherine, a bookseller at Politics and Prose bookstore, Washington, D.C., offers her customers a peek into the future, recommending Earthquake (Turtle Point Press, $10, 9781933527116/1933527110), which will be published in September. "In this slim volume, Susan Barnes applies wonderfully lyrical prose to bring together seemingly disjointed childhood memories. Barnes' exploration of the relationships between nature and freedom, and between movement and restriction, is straightforward, beautifully written, and never sentimental."

Nothing to say to each other?

The reading tastes and handselling eloquence of booksellers like these help to keep the small press conversation alive online.--Robert Gray (column archives available at Fresh Eyes Now)