The following is an editorial by James McGrath Morris in this month's edition of the Biographer's Craft. McGrath's Pulitzer: A Life in Politics, Print, & Power will be published early next year.

You will have a choice when it comes to buying my new book when it comes out in February. Amazon will sell it to you for $19.79, or you can wander down to your local bookstore and pay $29.99. That 34% price difference is on my mind every time I visit Collected Works, Santa Fe's oldest locally owned independent bookstore and one of the nation's finest bookstores, along with Elliott Bay, Tattered Cover, and Politics & Prose, among others.
   
What is it we get when we pay full price at an independent bookstore? In the case of Collected Works, the answer is simple: You get Phil.
   
I'm a nonfiction guy. I spend my days reading and writing the stuff. So when I wander into the fiction section of the store, I'm as lost as a Thunderbird drinker looking at a rack of chardonnays. This is where Phil comes in.
   
Like a wine steward, he learns of my tastes and guides me to a selection. So far, he is batting 98%. (I wasn't wild about Olive Kitteridge.) When I take into account his services, I think paying full retail price is worth it. Apparently there is a sport profession where batting 30% will earn you millions. Phil's salary seems a small price to pay for what he does. In the scheme of things, it's seems far more socially valuable than hitting a leather-bound ball with a wooden stick.
   
Paying full price also keeps one of my town's important cultural centers alive. On almost any night, one can find a crowd gathered at Collected Works for an author's reading, a fundraiser, or a community gathering of some sort. Readers meet writers. Writers meet writers. Poets find readers. Readers find poetry. Without such a place, our community would be impoverished.
  
Yes, I get a little preachy when it comes to the topic of independent bookstores. But, as a friend of mine who recently heard my tirade said to me, "Zealotry in defense of independent bookstores is no sin."

Wal-Mart declared a price war Thursday with its plan to sell "10 hotly anticipated new books for just $10 apiece through its online site, Walmart.com," the Wall Street Journal reported. "Hours later, Amazon matched the $10 price, squaring off in a battle for low-price and e-commerce leadership heading into the crucial holiday shopping season. Wal-Mart soon fired back with a promise to drop its prices to $9 by Friday morning--and made good on that vow by early evening Thursday."

"If there is going to be a 'Wal-Mart of the Web,' it is going to be Walmart.com," said Walmart.com CEO Raul Vazquez. "Our goal is to be the biggest and most visited retail Web site." The Journal wrote that "Wal-Mart's $10 promotion applies to the top 10 books coming out in November but the company is also selling 200 best-sellers for 50% of their list price."

"We've been fighting deep discounting for a long time, although $10 is obviously an extreme," said Diana Abbott, manager of the Bookworm, Omaha, Neb. "But there is a strong element of loyalty to independents. . . . We'll survive this."

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The recent tendency of the Nobel jury to bestow its literature award upon authors not particularly well known in the U.S. has made "newspaper columnists grumble while small and university presses bask in a moment of publishing glory," the Millions reported.

For example, Herta Mueller's prize means that the University of Nebraska Press "has now struck Nobel gold two years in a row," since it had two books in print by last year's Nobel laureate J.M.G. Le Clézio when he won. Cara Pesek, publicity manager at Nebraska, said that "since the prize was announced last year, those two titles have accounted for more than $100,000 in incremental sales." Last week, the day after the Nobel was announced, Pesek said the press had 3,000 backorders for Mueller's Nadirs.

"We expect our book prizes to confirm that a book or author's commercial success and positive reviews are well-deserved," the Millions wrote. "Sometimes the Nobel plays this role--a validator of critical opinion--but, for the American audience, it often does something different. And this is where the grumbling comes in. We don't like to be told that an author we've never heard of is one of the greatest ever. But in cases like Mueller and Kertész and Le Clézio, the Nobel serves as a reminder that in certain corners of the publishing industry, there are presses shepherding the work of these writers into print and keeping it available until such time as the rest of us are able to take notice."

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The American Booksellers Association has "joined with its partners in the Campaign for Reader Privacy in urging Congress to expand proposed protections for library records in a Patriot Act reauthorization bill to encompass all books--whether borrowed or purchased," Bookselling This Week reported. "Calling draft revisions to the Patriot Act 'positive but inadequate,' the groups called on Congress to address the root causes of public concerns about Patriot Act powers that enable the government easy access to information about what people are reading."

"We are very encouraged that the Senate Judiciary Committee has recognized the importance of protecting reader privacy, but they have missed a critical step," said Chris Finan, president of the American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression. "We are going to keep fighting until both bookstore and library records are protected."

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Google Editions, a new platform to be launched by Google next year, "will let readers buy books and read them anywhere on gadgets ranging from cell phones to possibly e-book devices," the Associated Press reported.

"It will be a browser-based access," said Tom Turvey, head of Google Book Search's publisher partnership program. "The way the e-book market will evolve is by accessing the book from anywhere, from an access point of view and also from a geographical point of view. . . . Google Editions allows retail partners to sell their books, especially those who haven't invested in a digital platform. We expect the majority (of customers) will go to retail partners not to Google. We are a wholesaler, a book distributor."

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Responding to growing interest in e-books and e-readers, public libraries across the U.S. are "expanding collections of books that reside on servers rather than shelves," the New York Times reported, noting that "about 5,400 public libraries now offer e-books, as well as digitally downloadable audio books."

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Jack McKeown--former CEO of Perseus Books Group and now director of business development for Verso Digital and president of Conemarra Partners--examined "Why E-Reader Adoption Will Be Slower Than People Think" on paidContent.org.

"No one doubts that we have entered a critical phase in the publishing industry’s embrace of its most promising new technological innovation since audiobooks," he wrote. "But if anyone out there assumes that the outcome is a slam dunk, guess again."

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Did you know that Maria's Bookshop, Durango, Colo., "bought over $5,000 worth of parking tokens last year" or that the staff "goes through about 6 lbs. of chocolate a week?"

As part its 25th anniversary celebration, Maria's bookstore blog offered a list of "25 Things You May Not Have Known About Maria's Bookshop," including the fact that the "staff sports a total of 50 years of bookselling experience."

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Bookselling This Week recommended that sidelines buyers looking for great holiday gift ideas check out SIBA executive director Wanda Jewell's "Gifts Galore for Bookstores" on her Wanda's Wonderful Book Blog. BTW also highlighted treasures recommended by Christine Onorati of WORD bookstore, Brooklyn, N.Y., and Aeri Swendson of Green Apple Books, San Francisco, Calif.

As Green Apple's blog put it, "We're a bookstore. A real bookstore: cramped aisles, creaky stairs, oddball sections. We use just about every available square inch to offer the widest and most carefully chosen selection of books. . . . But we like some other stuff, too. Like movies and music, canvas bags, and magazines."

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Book Trailer of the Day (featuring Jon Stewart): I am a Genius of Unspeakable Evil and I Want to be Your Class President by Josh Lieb (Razorbill)

Sunday on NPR's Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me: Susie Essman, author of What Would Susie Say?: Bullsh*t Wisdom About Love, Life and Comedy (Simon & Schuster, $25, 9781439150177/1439150176).

Roman Polanski is continuing to work on his film version of Robert Harris's novel The Ghost "from his jail cell in Switzerland and expects to deliver it on time before the end of the year," according to the Hollywood Reporter.

"The film will be finished," said Henning Molfenter, head of production at Studio Babelsberg and a co-producer. "We will meet all our deadlines and all of our obligations with distributors."

"He can make his wishes known from his cell," Harris told the Times of London. "I don't think he can make phone calls, but he can communicate. What people think of the film is another matter. Whether the film can rise above the circumstances in which the director now finds himself I don't know. We will test to the upper limits the notion that there's no such thing as bad publicity."

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Columbia Pictures "has acquired rights to remake the U.K. miniseries Red Riding, and is negotiating with Steve Zaillian to write the script and Ridley Scott to direct," Variety reported. "The project, based on four David Peace novels, will be distributed in the U.S. this fall by IFC. Studio bought rights to the mini and the novel series."

Mal Peet has won the 2009 Guardian children's fiction prize for Exposure, a "version of Othello which casts the Moor of Venice as a South American football star."

"It feels absolutely great--I've always had my eye on the Guardian prize but it's always evaded me," said Peet. "My books have never even made the shortlist before, and I'd always sit at home gnashing my teeth and tearing my hair."

Julia Eccleshar, chair of judges and the Guardian's children's books editor, said Peet "handles big themes with supreme confidence. He is a very good storyteller who can create a rich and ambitious novel."

Alice Randall is the author of The Wind Done Gone and Pushkin and the Queen of Spades and is a frequent contributor to Elle magazine. Also an accomplished songwriter, she is the only African-American woman to write a number-one country song. Randall was awarded the Free Spirit Award in 2001 and was a finalist for the NAACP Image Award in 2002. A writer in residence at Vanderbilt University, she lives in Nashville, Tenn. Her latest novel is Rebel Yell, published last month by Bloomsbury.

On my nightstand now:

Eat My Words: Reading Women's Lives through the Cookbooks They Wrote by Janet Theaphano and Spoonbread & Strawberry Wine by Norma Jean and Carole Darden. I'm teaching a seminar on Soul Food in text and as text. An example of soul food in text would be both the mention of chitterlings in Gone with the Wind and the meaning of ice cream in Ernest Gaines's A Lesson Before Dying. Soul food as text would include the literal analysis of a plate of food or a meal to discern if it has expressive content beyond simple taste--an assertion of competence in precisely fried chicken or masculinity in the barbecue ritual. I keep the novels by the bathtub. I prefer to read fiction up to my shoulders in warm water.

What's by your tub now:

Clea by Lawrence Durrell and Delta Wedding by Eudora Welty, but I really meant to grab Carson McCullers's Member of the Wedding, Epitaph of a Small Winner by Machado de Assis, The Conjure Woman and Other Conjure Tales by Charles Chesnutt, A Great Improvisation, Stacy Schiff's Franklin in Paris biography and a few murder mysteries: two Carola Dunns--Damsel in Distress and Murder on the Flying Scotsman--a Carolyn Haines--Ham Bones--and a strange yoga mystery called Corpse Pose by Diana Killlian.

Favorite book when you were a child:

Wuthering Heights.

Your top five authors:

I turned 50 this year. I will give you my five favorite novels that have gone the distance with me, novels that I read as a very young woman and I have re-read at least once every decade since:

• Zora Neale Hurston: Their Eyes Are Watching God
• Jean Rhys: Wide Sargasso Sea
• Jane Austen: Emma, Mansfield Park
• Edith Wharton: House of Mirth and Age of Innocence
• F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Great Gatsby

Book you've bought for the cover:

Haven't.

Book you've faked reading:

The English Patient. I just couldn't really get through it. But I wanted to go to the movie. I love so much Ondaatje--Coming Through Slaughter is one of my very favorite novels. But I did not love The English Patient. Coming through Slaughter is visceral, compressed, American, African-American, Southern. For me The English Patient is too cerebrally international. I get lost.

Book you're an evangelist for:

Coming Through Slaughter. For all the reasons above and because it's a visit to the inside of the South for the non-Southerner.

Book that changed your life:

Two. Wharton's Age of Innocence read in tandem with Kate Chopin's The Awakening. I decided to get a divorce.

The problem with doing your duty is it unfits you for doing anything else. At least that how I remember the Wharton line from Age of Innocence.

Book you most want to read again for the first time:

A Hundred Years of Solitude. Marquez is escapist literature of the most profound sort. My first read of A Hundred Years of Solitude at 17 was a dash back to sanity, a dash into a place where all that mattered was engagement and language--and reading Marquez I was in full possession of both. I turned the pages in a cold shared room in London with gloves on my fingers when I was supposed to be writing my college essays. It was January of 1977. I started the book at the end of a flight from Dulles to Heathrow, and a day later I was literally in London, about to settle into a semester as a visiting student at the Institute of Archaelogy, but I was truly someplace else. The book had transported me beyond childhood and misery and America into curiosity, adventure and the world.

Larry Bird and Magic Johnson made their professional basketball debuts on October 12, 1979. Bird was playing for the Boston Celtics; Johnson was a rookie with the Los Angeles Lakers. From that day until the 1991-1992 season, Bird and Johnson would be NBA marquee names, basketball superstars and fierce competitors whose deepest desire was to beat the other one. Here in their own distinctively different voices, they revisit the high points of their remarkable rivalry and evolving friendship.

Bird is a man of few words, and those words tend to be salty, memorable and biting; Johnson is gregarious, chatty and compulsively upbeat. Different as they are, they were each outstanding players early on who received the same advice from high school coaches: never get complacent because there is always someone out there who is just as good or better as you are. Super-confident, neither one of them believed what the coaches told them.

In April 1978, the NCAA College All Stars played a World International Tournament against a Russian team. Bird and Johnson, who were All Stars but didn't get much playing time, were on the court a short time (one estimate was three seconds) but their play together electrified everyone. That moment marked their arrival on each other's radar: they had met the player their high school coaches warned them about.

They were on opposing sides in spring 1979 when Magic Johnson and Michigan State beat Larry Bird and Indiana State for the NCAA championship. Even though his team won the title, Johnson at the time remembered, "The problem with Larry was he could score from anywhere. It was the first time in my life I was scared of another player." Bird would have to wait until 1984 to be able to say, "I finally got Magic," when the Celtics won the NBA title over the Lakers. Their contest would continue until they retired from the game.

Of the slew of stories in this highly entertaining book, one of my personal favorites is the moment when Magic (who had gone public with his diagnosis of HIV infection in November 1991) lobbies Bird (who was having serious back problems) to agree to play on the United States Dream Team at the 1992 Barcelona Olympics. Harking back to the first time they passed the ball in 1978, Magic says, " I've been waiting my whole career to play with you one more time." Larry had to say yes, and what a show that was from these phenomenal athletes. As former Celtics player Kevin McHale comments, "Larry and Magic are still the only two guys I know who could take ten or eleven shots and still dominate the game."--John McFarland

Shelf Talker: A thrill-packed, lively and moving dual memoir of the years when Magic Johnson of the Los Angeles Lakers competed with Larry Bird and the Boston Celtics for basketball dominance and the awe of fans everywhere.

Picture a bookseller with a light bulb over his or her head--the universal symbol for having an idea. Now picture a banquet room full of booksellers with light bulbs over their heads. O.K., O.K., if you insist, you can picture energy-efficient light bulbs.

How many booksellers does it take to change a light bulb? Maybe the better question would be: How many ideas can a room full of indie booksellers share in less than an hour? At the "Ideas That Work" session during the Great Lakes Independent Booksellers Association trade show in Cleveland recently, symbolic light bulbs were ubiquitous, as were great ideas.

The Learned Owl Book Shop, Hudson, Ohio, puts its name "on everything"--T-shirts, mugs, etc.--and recently held a haiku contest where the winner's entry was printed on the front of a T-shirt, with other poems in smaller print on the back.

CoffeeTree Books, Morehead, Ky., creates gift baskets featuring regional books and products and has handled businesses orders for as many as 50 at a time.
 
At Forever Books, St. Joseph, Mich, about 100 people attended a book club symposium featuring sales reps presenting new titles. In addition, one of the bookshop's key staff members is Trevor, a golden retriever who oversees the animal book section where his recommend tags are posted. Last year, for Trevor's birthday party, guests were asked to bring donations for the Humane Society.

Jill Miner of Saturn Booksellers, Gaylord, Mich., asked her staff to pay close attention to the reasons people said they were drawn to the store, so she could react accordingly in terms of inventory range and display focus. "The idea is to make it a one-stop shop."

Holding a Chamber of Commerce "after hours" event was suggested by a bookseller who noted that "even though our store is in a small town, there are people who have never been in it."

Bill Cusumano of Nicola's Books, Ann Arbor, Mich., said his shop displays faced-out books at the same level, so when customers move from section to section, their eyes are drawn to the titles displayed in a line "at a reasonable height. No matter what alcove, it stands out."

Bookstores are constantly being asked for donations. McLean & Eakin Booksellers, Petoskey, Mich., generates sales and good will by offering specific days on which customers can request that 10% of their purchases be contributed to a designated nonprofit.

Dealing with the ongoing flood of advance reader copies is a common challenge for booksellers, and some creative solutions were offered.

"This summer, we made them part of our summer reading club," said Sally Bulthuis of Pooh's Corner, Grand Rapids, Mich. And Becky Anderson Wilkins of Anderson's Bookshops, Naperville and Downers Grove, Ill., said the stores use old ARCs, especially children's books, as part of a donation program connected with asking kids to also bring in their old books. "To this day, we've probably distributed over 400,000 books."

Other great suggestions:

• One bookstore holds what amounts to a community Secret Santa promotion each year. Customers pick a name from a hat and purchase a book for that person. Only the bookstore knows the names and chooses appropriate titles for participants, then hosts a holiday party at which people open their gifts together (with 10% of the proceeds donated to a local charity).
• Another bookseller has the store's logo on her car, though she cautioned: "You do have to be a nicer driver."
• Distributing free bumper stickers with your bookstore's name and/or logo was recommended.
• Another bookstore sometimes pays staff members ($20 gift certificate, $10 for children's books) to read and review certain ARCs they might not otherwise be inclined to read, but which are going to be of interest to customers when published.
• In anticipation of the release of the film version of Where the Wild Things Are, a bookstore purchased advertising space on the local movie theater's screen saying that it was the place "where the wild books are." Also suggested was putting up book-themed movie posters in bookstores and displaying books at theaters.
• Co-sponsor a community promotion where, if children get their "passports" stamped at the library and bookstore they get into the movie for half price.
• Where the Wild Things Are has also inspired costume parties, where individual photos are taken and posted on the bookshop's website.

How many booksellers does it take to change a light bulb? If those light bulbs are ideas, then a room full of booksellers seems to do the job quite well.--Robert Gray (column archives available at Fresh Eyes Now)