Sales at Barnes & Noble in the fourth quarter ended January 31 fell 4.8% to $1.4 billion and sales for the full year fell 2.7% to $4.5 billion. Sales at stores open at least a year fell 7.3% in the fourth quarter and 5.4% for the year. Sales at Barnes&Noble.com in the quarter fell 10.4% to $157 million and fell 1.3% to $466 million for the year.

Net earnings were $81.2 million in the fourth quarter and $75.9 million for the full year. Excluding several special charges--$2.5 million for severance for eliminated corporate positions and $9.7 million for selling its majority interest in Calendar Club--net earnings were $93.3 million in the fourth quarter and $88.1 million for the full year. Net earnings were higher in the comparable periods a year ago. In the fourth quarter of last year, net earnings were $115 million and for the year $135.8 million.

B&N expects comp-store sales in the first quarter to fall in a range of 6%-9% and for the year to fall 4%-6%.

In a statement, B&N CEO Steve Riggio said, "While 2008 proved to be the most challenging year that the company and the industry have ever experienced, we are proud of our financial results in light of the macro retail environment. Despite a sales decrease of 3%, gross margins improved by 50 basis points [0.5%], inventory levels were reduced by 11%, and our focus on expense control and capital expenditures enabled us to generate operating free cash flow of $150 million, exceeding our expectations. As we look to 2009, we expect the challenging environment to continue. Sales forecasts have been planned accordingly and expenses have been cut. The strength of our balance sheet remains a top priority. And, while we are reducing overall expense levels where appropriate, we will continue to invest in the growth areas of the business, as evidenced in our recent acquisition of Fictionwise."
 

In a move intended to dampen the Kindle firestorm, Sony is making some 500,000 public domain books that Google has scanned available for its Sony Reader. The e-books will be free.

Amazon, which recently launched the Kindle 2, has some 250,000 titles available for sale. As the New York Times noted, Amazon "stresses that they are the books people are most interested in reading, like new releases and bestsellers."

Google has been promoting the ePub open e-book format and hopes to increase the number of non-copyrighted books available to Sony and others using open formats. When the settlement of the Google suits involving publishers and authors is approved, Google may be able to sell copyrighted e-books, too, in this manner.

Sony has sold more than 400,000 of its Readers, according to the Wall Street Journal.

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This weekend Left Bank Books, St. Louis, Mo., is celebrating the grand opening of its second location, which is downtown. Author events feature Michael Lux, author of The Progressive Revolution, D.A. Powell, author of Chronic: Poems, Patricia McKissack, author of Porch Lies and Goin' Someplace Special, and Jeanie Ransom, author of What Really Happened to Humpty? The store is serving wine and cookies at events (and juice during children's storytimes), will give away gift certificates, offer discounts and gifts for Friends of Left Bank Books, and more. Congratulations!

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After 20 years in business, the Cook's Library, Los Angeles, Calif., is closing April 30, the Los Angeles Times reported. Owner Ellen Rose told the paper that she is "extraordinarily proud of what I've done" and said she believes some business was lost to Amazon. The Times wrote: "She and her staff might spend 30 minutes with a customer, she says, only to have them write down the recommendations and leave--to buy the books over the Internet, she thinks."

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Jonathan Benton Bookseller, Birmingham, Ala., will close March 31, according to the Birmingham News, which added that "within hours of putting up a going out of business sign, customers converged on the shop in Mountain Brook Village."

"Amazon and everybody else has really put a hurt on us," said Ryland Randolph, owner of the Daily Cup coffee shop and part owner of the bookstore. "We've pretty much known since September this was going to happen, but we wanted to get through Christmas and pay a lot of bills."

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Cool idea of the day. Cambridge University Press is holding mini galley parties at lunchtime on Fridays in Washington Square Park in New York City, "12:30 under the Arch," Jonathan Gaugler wrote. "What else to do with the extras?"

Kicking off the parties tomorrow, the press will give away limited quantities of galleys of The Letters of Samuel Beckett as well as . . . some hot dogs.

During the summer, the parties may move to Thursdays. Updates on Twitter.

Today on NPR's Here and Now: Laurie Halse Anderson, author of Wintergirls (Viking, $17.99, 9780670011100/067001110X).

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Tomorrow morning on the Today Show: Gail Blanke, author of Throw Out Fifty Things: Clear the Clutter, Find Your Life (Springboard Press, $19.99, 9780446505796/044650579X).

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.

8:45 a.m. For an event hosted by the Strand Bookstore, New York, N.Y., Jonah Lehrer, author of How We Decide (Houghton Mifflin, $25, 9780618620111/0618620117), describes how the brain makes decisions that combine reason and feeling and can change depending on the situation.  (Re-airs Sunday at 1:30 a.m. and 4:30 p.m.)
     
6 p.m. Encore Booknotes. In a segment that first aired in 1993, John Podhoretz, author of Hell of a Ride: Backstage at the White House Follies 1989-1993, described the White House from the perspective of mid-level staffers.
      
8 p.m. Thomas Cahill, author of A Saint on Death Row: The Story of Dominique Green (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, $18.95, 9780385520195/0385520190), examines the criminal justice system, the prison system and capital punishment through the journey of one death row inmate. (Re-airs Sunday at 8 a.m. and Monday at 4 a.m.)
     
9 p.m. For an event hosted by the Clinton Book Shop, Clinton, N.J., Bruce Chadwick, author of I Am Murdered: George Wythe, Thomas Jefferson, and the Killing That Shocked a New Nation (Wiley, $24.95, 9780470185513/0470185511), recalls the murder of the man who represented Virginia at the Constitutional Convention. (Re-airs Sunday at 5 a.m. and Monday, March 23, at 2 a.m.)

10 p.m. After Words. Greg Ip of the Economist interviews former U.S. Ambassador to France Felix Rohatyn, author of Bold Endeavors: How Our Government Built America, and Why it Must Rebuild Now (S&S, $26, 9781416533122/1416533125). (Re-airs Sunday at 9 p.m., Monday at 12 a.m. and 3 a.m., and Sunday, March 29, at 12 p.m.)

Sunday, March 22

6 a.m. Neil deGrasse Tyson, author of The Pluto Files: The Rise and Fall of America's Favorite Planet (Norton, $23.95, 9780393065206/0393065200), talks about the controversy over re-classifying Pluto as a comet. (Re-airs Sunday at 6 p.m. and Sunday at 10 p.m.)
     
8 p.m. For an event hosted by Politics and Prose Bookstore, Washington, D.C., Rashid Khalidi, author of Sowing Crisis: The Cold War and American Dominance in the Middle East (Beacon Press, $25.95, 9780807003107/0807003107), examines how the involvement of the U.S. and Soviet Union in the Middle East influenced what is happening there today. (Re-airs Sunday at 8 p.m. and Monday at 1 p.m.)

Seamus Heaney won the prestigious £40,000 (US$57,144) David Cohen prize for literature. The Guardian reported that the Irish poet "was recognised for the 'sheer scale' of his literary achievements." In honoring Heaney, poet laureate Andrew Motion said his body of work has "crystallised the story of our times, in language which has bravely and memorably continued to extend its imaginative reach."

The Cohen winner also receives £12,500 to donate to a literature organization that supports young writers or an individual writer under the age of 35. Heaney chose "an annual poetry speaking competition open to all post-primary students in Ireland, Poetry Aloud."

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Fourteen authors from 12 countries have been named to the shortlist for the £60,000 ($85,716) Man Booker international prize, which is "awarded once every two years to a writer for their contribution to fiction on the world stage," according to the Guardian.

The contenders include Evan S. Connell, Joyce Carol Oates and E.L. Doctorow (U.S.), Mahasweta Devi (Bangladesh), James Kelman (U.K.), Mario Vargas Llosa (Peru), Arnošt Lustig (Czech Republic), Alice Munro (Canada), V.S. Naipaul (Trinidad/India), Antonio Tabucchi (Italy), Ngugi Wa Thiong'O (Kenya), Dubravka Ugresic (Croatia), Peter Carey (Australia) and Ludmila Ulitskaya (Russia).

Chair of judges Jane Smiley said that choosing the shortlist had made the judges aware of "how unusual and astonishing the literary world really is. . . . We've all read books by authors we had never heard of before and they have turned out to be some of the best books we've ever read. It makes me wonder who else is out there untranslated into English."

Machines Go to Work by William Low (Holt, $14.95, 9780805087598/0805087591, 42 pp., ages 2-6, May 2009)

Low (Old Penn Station) here presents a vehicle-loving child's dream: one by one, the narrative introduces a backhoe, firetruck, helicopter, cement mixer, tugboat (pulling a container ship down a river) and freight train. The six machines (each with a tantalizing sound effect) work together to a common purpose--to keep a community running smoothly. Each machine features in a brief (two-spread) vignette with a foldout page that reveals a surprise. "Gzzzzzzzzzk!" the backhoe begins, as it makes its way down a horizontal expanse of thick green grass; a small group of red and yellow tulips appear at the lower right-hand corner. In the next spread, the perspective shifts, and the backhoe seems to be coming right toward readers, surrounded by lush green trees and the tulips in the foreground, with the slightest suggestion of pink blossoms in the upper right corner: "Is the backhoe digging up the flowers?" The foldout page, which extends to the right, answers the question: "No, it's digging a hole for new crab-apple trees. The flowers are safe." Those subtle pink blossoms from the previous spread turn out to be the crab-apple blossoms on the trees to be planted. A fire engine ("Wwaaaaawwwwwwwwrrrr!") pulls up beneath a cluster of cherry blossom trees ("Is there a fire . . . ?" poses the text), and the foldout page reveals a kitten stuck in their upper branches. Fans of Make Way for Ducklings will appreciate the surprise twist that called a helicopter to the scene of a traffic jam, and children also witness a tension-filled moment before the drawbridge lifts to allow the tugboat and its container ship to pass. The pièce de résistance is an expansive double-foldout spread of a freight train's route, which offers readers a bird's-eye view of the entire town and all of the previous vehicles' part in its continued success. Endnotes offer curious readers additional information about each of the vehicles presented (with a bonus explanation of the container ship and also the railroad crossing sign), including detailed labels. Low created the artwork, with its appearance of thickly applied oil paint, with computer programs that literally simulate the act of brushing on paint. You can see a demonstration of how he works here. Part vehicle book, part mystery, this tale stresses the importance of the many collaborative efforts that make our neighborhoods work.--Jennifer M. Brown

Conerning yesterday's story about Baker & Taylor Marketing Services: only the warehouse operations of the wholesale club book division are moving to B&T's distribution center in Indianapolis, Ind., from Woodland, Calif. The BTMS offices remain in San Diego, Calif. Our apologies!

"The [publishing] industry seems to want a return on investment, quickly and guaranteed," Stephen Roxburgh said. "The difficulty is that the people at the end of that chain, paradoxically enough, are artists and authors who need time to develop a project."
 
As a result, in recent months, Roxburgh started namelos (which means "nameless," as in the invisible-to-the-reader hand of the editor), a "consortium of independent publishing professionals," and Kara LaReau launched Bluebird Works (inspired by the bluebird of happiness), which offers creative services that include editing and manuscript evaluation. Both companies strive to help creators of children's books to develop projects at their own pace and until they're ready to be submitted to an agent or editor. In some cases, an agent or editor (rather than the author) may hire Bluebird Works or namelos to edit a project. Both principals have edited and published high-profile, award-winning children's book authors and artists--LaReau at Scholastic and Candlewick; Roxburgh at Front Street (which he founded), Boyds Mills (which purchased Front Street) and Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

Their companies' model shifts the financial responsibility to the authors up front rather than the traditional model under which, after paying an advance, the publisher works with them to develop the project. "That will happen with increasingly fewer people," said Roxburgh. "The industry's capacity to serve and cultivate and develop the talent is much diminished in the face of the contraction and consolidation it confronts now. The model [namelos is] proposing is to acknowledge the hard truth, but I think it also happens to reflect the evolution of the industry."
 
LaReau will review a picture book manuscript or the first 10 pages of a novel plus synopsis for no charge initially. "I'll evaluate whether [the project] has creative merit, and whether the author, their work and I are a good match. Once I believe that's true, I recommend an editing plan," she said. Fees will be determined based on that plan. At namelos, an author pays a $200 nonrefundable fee in advance and receives a written evaluation (for up to 10,000 words of a single project--fiction or nonfiction, a complete picture-book dummy or a picture-book manuscript), including an assessment of the viability of the project and a recommendation for how to proceed with the input of the namelos team, which includes an art director (see the complete list).
 
There are two things to consider, according to Roxburgh: the first is to get the manuscript ready, the second is to "make it public," whether by publishing it in traditional ways or via more modern methods. Roxburgh said he thinks the ascendancy of the e-book is "the single most exciting thing that I see going on these days, and I'm an old bookish kind of guy." The Internet allows every author to find his or her audience, so the trick is to make the work the best it can be and then get the word out about how to find it (namelos also employs marketing and sales expertise). Roxburgh jokes that Roger Straus taught him early on that, for instance, if you print 800 copies of a Serbo-Croatian novel because you believe that's what you'll sell and you price it at $32 and sell your 800 copies, you've published a book successfully. "Can you run a publishing house on that?" Roxburgh asked, then answered: "No, but you can publish well. I want to be the first digital micropublisher."
 
The challenge with digital publishing, Roxburgh stated, as do many others, is figuring out how to get paid. But can an iTunes equivalent, where readers purchase a short story or a chapter for 99 cents be far away, he speculated? Today's authors have the ability to make the best project they can and then think about how best to get that to their audience. "We can deliver one copy to one person digitally--the system is already in place," Roxburgh said. "We can print [books] on demand; when you need 1,000 copies, use a Web press. Don't let the form dictate the content; let the audience dictate the form."
 
LaReau, who will have two picture books due out in 2011 with previous collaborator Scott Magoon (Ugly Fish), is not sure where the industry is going, but she is certain of one thing: "People are always going to want good stories, in whatever form they take," she said. "That's all I can do, is to continue to provide that."--Jennifer M. Brown

The following were the bestselling books at independent bookstores in the Chicago area during the week ended Sunday, March 15:

Hardcover Fiction
 
1. Galway Bay by Mary Pat Kelly
2. Handle with Care by Jodi Picoult
3. Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese
4. The Help by Kathryn Stockett
5. The Piano Teacher by Janice Lee
 
Hardcover Nonfiction
 
1. Act Like a Lady, Think Like a Man by Steve Harvey
2. House of Cards by William D. Cohan
3. Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell
4. The Lost City of Z by David Grann
5. Food Matters by Mark Bittman
 
Paperback Fiction
 
1. American Wife by Curtis Sittenfeld
2. The Commoner by Jonathan Burnham Schwartz
3. Loving Frank by Nancy Horan
4. The Ten-Year Nap by Meg Wolitzer
5. The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery
 
Paperback Nonfiction
 
1. Three Cups of Tea by Greg Mortenson
2. The Middle Place by Kelly Corrigan
3. The Will to Whatevs by Eugene Mirman
4. Soil Not Oil by Vendana Shiva
5. Eat Pray Love by Elizabeth Gilbert
 
Children's
 
1. Eclipse by Stephenie Meyer
2. Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Do-It-Yourself by Jeff Kinney
3. Scat by Carl Hiaasen
4. Breaking Dawn by Stephenie Meyer
5. Diary of a Wimpy Kid: The Last Straw by Jeff Kinney

Reporting stores: Anderson's, Naperville and Downers Grove; Read Between the Lynes, Woodstock; Book Table, Oak Park; the Book Cellar, Lincoln Square; Lake Forest Books, Lake Forest; the Bookstall at Chestnut Court, Winnetka; and 57th St. Books; Seminary Co-op; Unabridged Books; Women and Children First, Chicago

[Many thanks to the booksellers and Carl Lennertz!]