Notes: Amazon's Google Motion Nixed; Cyber Monday Sales
U.S. District Judge Denny Chin rejected a motion by Amazon.com asking him to reconsider his preliminary approval of a revised Google settlement with publisher and author groups over digital copies of books. The Wall Street Journal reported that Chin ruled "the 'many nuances' of the revised settlement will be considered at a fairness hearing February 18. The judge granted preliminary approval last month."
Amazon's contention was that the judge should not have done so because the settlement "purports to release Google and others from liability for actions they may take in the future." The Journal added that the Justice Department has until February 4 to weigh in the proposed settlement.
---
Cyber Monday's e-commerce sales increased 5% compared to 2008 and matched a single-day online shopping record of $887 million that was set December 9, 2008, according to comScore Inc. The Wall Street Journal reported that the total number of online shoppers was up 6% from last year, though individual shoppers spent 2% less at $102.19.
"Consumers are still obviously cash-strapped," said comScore chairman Gian Fulgoni, but "every year there are more people that take to e-commerce."
The increase wasn't universal, however. Experian PLC's Hitwise reported that "traffic to the top 500 retail websites was down 9% on Nov. 30 compared with last year's Cyber Monday, as shoppers shifted their browsing to larger retailers. Traffic at the most visited site, Amazon.com Inc., increased 44%, and visits to Staples.com increased 61%."
---
The New York Times named its 10 best books of 2009, noting that "after so many years, and so many lists, you might think the task of choosing the 10 Best Books would get easier. If only. The sublime story collections alone created agonies of indecision. So did the superb literary biographies we read--and deeply admired. But in the end the decisions had to be made."
This year's top 10:
Fiction
- Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It by Maile Meloy (Riverhead)
- Chronic City by Jonathan Lethem (Doubleday)
- A Gate at the Stairs by Lorrie Moore (Knopf)
- Half Broke Horses: A True-Life Novel by Jeannette Walls (Scribner)
- A Short History of Women by Kate Walbert (Scribner)
Nonfiction
- The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science by Richard Holmes (Pantheon)
- The Good Soldiers by David Finkel (Sarah Crichton Books/FSG)
- Lit: A Memoir by Mary Karr (Harper)
- Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World by Liaquat Ahamed (Penguin)
- Raymond Carver: A Writer's Life by Carol Sklenicka (Scribner)
---
Appearing on the Colbert Report to promote his new book, War Dances, Sherman Alexie shared his views on e-books "and why he has refused to allow any of his books to be made available in this format. He talked about the value of authors being 'old fashioned storytellers' and the danger of moving too far away from the old models," the Huffington Post reported.
"The localized appreciation of books is gone," he said.
---
Phillips Academy instructor Thomas Hodgson called Andover Bookstore, Andover, Mass., "a farmer's market of the mind" in a Boston Globe profile of the shop, which celebrated its 200th birthday recently.
"We're in a modern Gutenberg," said owner Robert Hugo of the bookstore's efforts to flourish in a rapidly changing book world and a challenging business climate for indies. "We all have to scramble and see how we will survive."
---
Prairie Lights Bookstore, Iowa City, Iowa, made news in India for its new wine bar (Shelf Awareness, November 17, 2009). According to Indian Wine Academy, "While the Delhi government is dithering about making its decision to allow wine sales in department stores for religious and other bookish reasons official, comes interesting news about a church in U.K. bringing out its wine labels and a U.S. bookstore selling wine at its cafe.... Prairie Lights, an independent book store in Iowa City, came up with many people's dream combination of a wine bar within a bookshop. It transformed its second floor café earlier last month to accommodate wine sales."
---
Cool blog idea of the day: Today at MobyLives, Melville House Publishing launches "What Bolaño Read," a series of posts charting the reading habits of Chilean novelist, poet and short story writer Roberto Bolaño.
The series, written by Tom McCartan, the former manager of Shaman Drum Bookshop who annotated Roberto Bolano: The Last Interview, is also being syndicated by other bookstore and publishing blogs, including Skylight Books blog, the NBCC's Critical Mass and Three Percent.
---
With choices ranging from Carl Hiaasen's Florida to Sara Paretsky's Chicago to Michael Connelly's L.A., author C.J. Box's selected his "top 10 U.S. crime novelists who 'own' their territory" for the Guardian.
---
On NPR's website, Glen Weldon selected "The Best Five Books To Share With Your Friends," observing: "We inveterate book-lenders are not collectors. And while we value the solitary experience of reading, we relish the act of passing a book along, of becoming a vector for the author's language, characters, imagery and arguments."
---
Perseus Group has added two e-book retailers--Barnes & Noble and Indigo's Shortcovers--to its Constellation digital services program. The company also announced some enhancements to its digital short-run print service, adding the ability to strip and rebind hardcovers and printing in the U.K.
---
Bonnie Ammer resigned from her position as executive v-p, international sales, at Random House and will leave the company effective December 31. Ammer spent 15 years with Random House as a senior sales executive, publishing strategist and publisher, including an earlier stint as president and publisher of Fodor's.
---
Paul Kozlowski has joined Other Press as director of marketing & sales, effective January 1. Most recently the director of sales marketing at Random House, Kozlowski's 30-year career in the book trade includes an early stint as a bookseller in New York City, followed by positions as a retail manager, a sales rep and a marketing director. Congratulations to "P.K.," who can be reached at pkozlowski@otherpress.com.
---
Jennifer Ramos has been named promotional director for both Vroman's Bookstore and Book Soup. She has been promotional director of Vroman's since 2004 and was promotional director of Book Soup from 1999 to 2002.
Any bookings or event-related questions for either store should be directed to Ramos. She can be reached at 626-449-5320 or via email at jramos@vromansbookstore.com.
Julia Callahan remains assistant promotional director for Book Soup, and Alison Keyes is assistant promotional director for Vroman's. Vroman's is in the process of buying Book Soup.
BINC.1118.T2.2024YEARENDCAMPAIGN.jpg)
Over a period of eight years, Williams photographed women bathers in the historic baths of Istanbul and Budapest. Her platinum prints are both sensual and ethereal, and if some of the scenes look familiar, it's because she alludes to classic images of women in paintings. Williams hopes to present a different way of viewing the female form, "women unabashedly at ease in displaying their bodies transformed by age, circumstance and gravity."
Calton says, "Derby is really about empowered women breaking barriers and creating new boundaries." Yes, indeed, with their elbows and knees and sharp hips. These women rock 'n' roll, with names like Vanna Whitetrash, Flame & Rage and Hardcora. Women putting on lipstick, hooking stockings to garter belts, skating, falling, screaming and, finally, celebrating--the black-and-white photographs seem to come with a soundtrack, they are so immediate and real.
Goldstein spent two years photographing and interviewing more than 59 members of an armored battalion. The photographs are stunning and spare, as are the interviews. Lt. Col. Kathy Platoni, combat psychologist: "You just can't keep the multiple ways people died over here straight... PTSD is rampant. Soldiers who have horrific and death-defying injuries are being billed by the Pentagon." Capt. Tracy Kerr, chaplain: "I don't get paid to cry. I get paid to perform. Not being able to cry is what I do here." Capt. Joseph Peppers: "This is my thirty-fourth month in Iraq... I'm really tired... drained... you can't fight a war forever. It will ruin you inside. It will ruin you. There is no glory in any of this." Staff Sgt. Thomas Taylor: "There is no other place I would rather be than right here... it is still a brotherhood in every sense of the word."
The barbershop at St. Lawrence State Hospital, with sea-green walls and white trim, looks innocuous; the autopsy theater at St. Elizabeth's Hospital looks ominous. Unused grave markers and cemeteries are unbearably sad, witness to the horror and neglect that was inevitable in most places. "If my heart could speak, I'm sure it would say, I wish I were someplace else today," reads a patient's poem written on a basement wall. The "grandiose but melancholy architecture" is stately yet horrifying--the Buffalo State Hospital, photographed at night, looks like a movie set for an old-fashioned vampire story. Asylum is a "heart-breaking testimony both to the pain of those with severe mental illness and to the once-heroic structures we built to try to assuage that pain."
This absolutely gorgeous book belongs in every book lover's library. Beginning with Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper, ending with E. Annie Proulx and Richard Ford, Thomas Hummel examines the relationship between place and an author's identity, writing about 26 authors, with brief biographies and excerpts of their prose. Tamra Dempsey's photographs are the perfect enhancement to Hummel's essays. Willa Cather is evoked with golden prairies and a farmhouse in a sunset-red sky; Langston Hughes with brownstones and Bailey's Funeral Home in Harlem; Raymond Carver with the site of his childhood home in Yakima ("living on a staple of bitterness") and the Cornerhouse Restaurant and the marina in Port Angeles.
The Great Plains region is the most endangered and least protected ecosystem in North America, although these haunting, beautiful, majestic photographs seem to belie that statement; nevertheless, it's true, and if this magnificent book inspires people to do their best to save it, all the better. In the meantime, the book is a feast. Fox kits play, backlit by the sun; a cougar slinks away in the night; in the Nebraska Sandhills a wall cloud highlights a windmill against a peach sky; bison leave tracks in the snow; the highly social black-tailed prairie dogs greet the morning, and each other, with kisses and grooming. Fabulous.
Michael Benson has collected images of space from world observatories and from space ("from space"--that still is so incredible), some of them well-known, many that have never been published. Even with familiarity, they still have the ability to astonish and astound. How could one ever get tired of the Carina Nebula? Or the Pillars of Creation in the Eagle Nebula, or the Pelican Nebula? Truly, it seems as if we are witnessing our very creation. Not just for astronomy aficionados, this is a book for dreamers and poets.
Nick Brandt continues his project to photograph the landscape and animals of East Africa with this magnificent volume. The photos are lush, elegant and often noble. Some are so intimate they appear to be studio shots but are not. Two entwined giraffes, a zebra perfectly reflected in water, a lion with a wind-blown mane, regal elephants--all are captured in masterful images.
McCracken has been collecting bear images since childhood, and this almost-200 page coffee-table book is the result. More carved bears than you'd think would be possible, and that's not all--a North Borneo baby carrier with sun bear teeth, a wine bottle stopper and a fine collection of book covers, illustrations and postcards. He writes about tourism and bear images, bears in different cultures, bear worship and, sadly, bear genocide. In this slightly off-beat book for bear lovers and collectors, it's easy to get caught up in McCracken's "never ending passion for Bear."
First published in England, this book's original subtitle was "A Memoir of Sexual Disappointment" and due to its indelicate subject matter, the author, "a successful publishing executive," writes under the pseudonym Carrie Jones in order to protect her anonymity. Yet, in an age of porn star, fetish and sex-worker memoirs, Jones's tale of sexual misadventure (beginning with a mundanely detailed list of the 23 men she's slept with) seems puzzlingly un-shocking. Jones herself seems to understand that her sexual confessions are neither salacious nor extraordinary. Why then, one wonders, does she go to the trouble at all? Jones answers this question almost despite herself; for in endlessly speculating on the psychological underpinnings of her own frustration and disappointment, she describes a state of mind that many women will find all too familiar.