In what might be a riposte to the decision by at least three publishers to delay the release of e-book versions of major titles, Amazon is lowering the price of e-book editions of some titles whose printed versions are out already but whose e-versions haven't appeared yet, the New York Times reported.

Amazon customers who order e-copies of Under the Dome by Stephen King and Going Rogue by Sarah Palin before e-pub date pay $7.99, rather than the usual $9.99.

In addition, Amazon has begun dropping the e-prices on some other bestsellers, including The Help by Kathryn Stockett ($7.60); The Girl Who Played with Fire by Stieg Larsson ($7.99) and the first two Twilight series books by Stephenie Meyer ($4.25 each).

B&N.com has matched Amazon's $7.99 advance order price for the e-book version of Going Rogue.

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Yesterday on his blog, Mike Shatzkin speculated that the publishers' decision to delay the e-book versions of some major upcoming titles isn't "a battle to rescue hardcover books from price perception issues caused by inexpensive ebooks" so much as it is about "wresting control of their ebook destinies back from Amazon."

He noted that "Amazon pays (approximately, I am not privy to the actual deals) half of the publisher's suggested retail for these ebooks and then is selling the $9.99 or cheaper ones at a loss on every unit. From Amazon's perspective, that makes complete sense. They build market share for the Kindle and they build a lot of customer loyalty."

While publishers benefit from the situation in the short run through higher sales, they "don't trust Amazon to keep things that way. From their perspective, Amazon is building a consumer expectation of an under-$10 price point while they are building up their audience of captive Kindle consumers. How long can it be, publishers figure, before Amazon says 'sorry, now you have to sell me these for under ten dollars?' "

Shatzkin also sketched out a possible war over the issue, including publishers not selling e-books to Amazon, Amazon suppressing the sale of their printed books, and more.

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A moment of silence.

Kirkus Reviews and Editor & Publisher are being shut down by owner Nielsen Business Media, according to the New York Times.

Kirkus was founded in 1933 by Virginia Kirkus, who had headed the children's book department at Harper & Co. For many years, Kirkus offered often hard-hitting, prepublication book reviews and was read by many booksellers and librarians.

Editor & Publisher was the main newspaper industry trade magazine for the past 108 years.

Nielsen is selling the Hollywood Reporter, Billboard, Adweek, Mediaweek and other units to e5 Global Media Holdings, a new joint venture of Pluribus Capital Management and Guggenheim Partners. Nielsen is keeping some print properties, including Contract magazine and Progressive Grocer.

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Northwestern University Press has acquired the publishing assets of Curbstone Press, the Willimantic, Conn., nonprofit publisher with a "focus on creative literature that invites readers to examine social issues, encourages a deeper understanding between cultures, and reflects a commitment to promoting human rights."

As of January 1, Northwestern will sell all Curbstone titles, which have been distributed by Consortium. In addition, the press will publish new titles under the Curbstone imprint. Henry Carrigan, Northwestern's assistant director and senior editor who will direct Curbstone, said, "Curbstone fits perfectly into our publishing program. The new imprint further solidifies our traditional strengths in literature in translation and literature from underrepresented communities."

Curbstone was founded in 1975 and headed by Sandy Taylor, who died two years ago, and Judy Doyle, who retired last year.

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Goodbye, Brooklyn!

The official Hotel ABA during next year's BookExpo America in New York will be at the Park Central Hotel on Seventh Avenue and 55th St. in Midtown Manhattan. The last two times BEA was in New York, the Hotel ABA was in Brooklyn. BEA takes place Tuesday-Thursday, May 25-27.

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Bookselling This Week highlighted the 60th anniversary of Lake Forest Book Store, Lake Forest, Ill., which was founded by 12 women and has always been run by women. The store had a birthday party last Sunday.

Owned now by Sue Boucher, Lake Forest Book Store has been in its current 2,000-sq.-ft. site--a former B. Dalton--for six years and offers about 30,000 titles. The store focuses on children's books and caters to many local book clubs, a few of which are among the longest running in the country.

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Congratulations to the Rainbow Bookstore Cooperative, Madison, Wis., which celebrates its 20th anniversary this Sunday at 5:30 p.m., with a party at the Harmony Bar & Grill, according to the Isthmus Daily Page. The store was founded by "a core of young activists committed to providing Madison's progressive community with the best in reading material and other radical resources."

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A new building that will house Indiana State University's Barnes & Noble and the ISU Foundation has been delayed "following Barnes and Noble's decision to merge its retail and collegiate bookstore operations into one company," according to a University spokesperson quoted by the Indiana Statesman. The project was supposed to be open now. Ground breaking is scheduled for early next year.

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David Shelton, who retired in 2006 from Lowe's Companies after a 36-year career, has joined Borders Group as a member of the board of directors. His last position at Lowe's, the hardware retailer, was as senior v-p, real estate, engineering and construction.

Borders CEO Ron Marshall said that Shelton "brings valuable experience and insights to Borders from nearly four decades with one of the nation's leading retailers. We look forward to benefiting from his guidance."

Borders has also made a change to its by-laws that allows holders of more than 10% of the company's stock to call a special shareholders meeting.

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Book trailer of the day: The Christmas Pearl by Dorothea Benton Frank.

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Next Monday, December 14, at 1 p.m. Eastern time, the Independent Book Publishers Association and Mark Coker, CEO of Smashwords, the e-book publisher and distribution company, are holding a free conference call on "How to Develop and Implement an Ebook Strategy," during which callers can ask Coker questions.

In addition, IBPA and Coker are giving one caller the prize of a Sony Reader Pocket Edition. Visit ibpa-online.org/conferencecall.aspx and register.

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Congratulations to Ron Hogan, who is joining Houghton Mifflin Harcourt's Trade & Reference Division as director of e-marketing strategy in January. He blogs about books and authors at beatrice.com and has been a senior editor at GalleyCat for many years.

 

Wednesday night some 230 people came to Coco66, a restaurant in Brooklyn, N.Y., for a screening of Isabella Rossellini's Green Porno films--shorts about the sex lives of insects--and an appearance and discussion by Rossellini herself. WORD hosted the event and sold 145 copies of Green Porno, the $24.95 book with DVD, published by HarperStudio in September. The event has Twitter roots that could lead to a new adage along the lines of "it never hurts to sort of ask": after a customer suggested that the store screen the Green Porno films in its basement event space, WORD manager Stephanie Anderson tweeted @harperstudio for permission. Soon afterward, she received an e-mail from HarperStudio's director of marketing Jessica Wiener saying, "We hear you'd like to do a Green Porno event! How would you like it if Isabella Rossellini came?" As Anderson put it, "After I woke up from my dead faint, I e-mailed back and said, 'Of course.' " In the photo (from l.): Kelly Amabile, WORD's event coordinator; Anna Perleberg, a new WORD bookseller; Anderson; Rossellini; WORD owner Christine Onorati; Vincent Onorati.

 

 

Today on Fresh Air: Alice Sebold talks about The Lovely Bones (Back Bay, $14.99, 9780316044936/0316044938), which has been adapted into a film that will be released next month.

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Tomorrow on ABC's World News: Max Cleland, author of Heart of a Patriot: How I Found the Courage to Survive Vietnam, Walter Reed and Karl Rove (Simon & Schuster, $26, 9781439126059/1439126054).

 

On Sunday, the History Channel airs the documentary The People Speak, inspired by Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States: 1492 to the Present (Harper Perennial, $18.95, 9780060838652/0060838655) and by the book he co-wrote with Anthony Arnove, Voices of a People's History (Seven Stories, $21.95, 9781583226285/1583226281).

In the film, Matt Damon, Don Cheadle, Marisa Tomei, Josh Brolin, Danny Glover and others recreate the emotional impact of moments and voices in history that are excluded and underrepresented in traditional history teachings. The film includes historical footage, music and narrations by Ben Affleck and Howard Zinn.

Loren D. Estleman has written more than 60 novels and 200 stories in a range of genres: mystery, western and general. Next year Forge Books will commemorate the 30th anniversary of his creation of Detroit private eye Amos Walker with The Left-Handed Dollar, the 20th book in the series. Alone, the second novel in his series about Valentino, a film archivist and detective, was published this week by Forge.

Estleman has received 18 writing awards, including five Spurs and two Stirrups from the Western Writers of America, four Shamuses from the Private Eye Writers of America and the Elmer Kelton Award from the German Society for the Appreciation of the Western. He lives in Michigan with his wife, author Deborah Morgan.

On your nightstand now:

The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Vol. I by Edward Gibbon. It's been there for 20 years. Joined more recently by Sara Paretsky's Bleeding Kansas. She's been a close friend for years, but I never realized we both grew up on farms until I started this really fine book.

Favorite book when you were a child:

Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson. This is a book you can enjoy at six or 60. Don't let anyone ever tell you writing for children is easier than writing for adults. You can pull the wool over a grownup's eyes, but kids are harder to con.

Your top five authors:

Robertson Davies, who wrote so well you don't care it's always about Canada. W. Somerset Maugham, for his ability to present horrible people doing unspeakable things without passing judgment on them. Edith Wharton, for the beauty and brevity of her prose. Raymond Chandler, who brought poetry to a genre once known as escape literature and elevated both it and America into world-class culture. Sax Rohmer, who doesn't make many best lists, but I keep coming back to him for the smell of mariposa, opium and the alleys of Limehouse. (I had to trim a lot of people, including Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Willa Cather, Edgar Allan Poe, Arthur Conan Doyle and Jack London from this list. Five is difficult.)

Book you've faked reading:

Algebra 101, but then so did everybody else. No one uses this stuff.

Book you're an evangelist for:

Fifth Business by Robertson Davies. The first fix is free....

Book you've bought for the cover:

Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café by Fanny Flagg. The roadside attraction-type illustration appealed to me, and so did the book, years before it was filmed.

Book that changed your life:

All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren. A beautiful piece of pure Americana, so heavy with imagery it scans as free verse. It's also a prime example of self-indulgence on Warren's part. The recent "restoration" of the original MS is no improvement, despite the claims of those who restored it; and the film starring Sean Penn is the definitive adaptation. The Oscar-winning 1949 version starring Broderick Crawford missed everything important, presenting it as a mildly scathing exposé of the corrupting influence of power, which is not at all what the story's about, any more than it's about Huey Long. This book taught me it's okay to lay it on thick.

Favorite line from a book:

"Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! Four shots ripped into my groin, and I was off on the biggest adventure of my life.... But first let me tell you a little about myself."
--Sleep Till Noon by Max Shulman

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

The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler. This may be the only benefit of Alzheimer's, allowing one to rediscover every lovely, brutal phrase.

The third installment of Leighton Gage's acclaimed series finds Chief Inspector Mario Silva of the Federal Police in Brasilia summoned by a high-ranking politician. "Deputado Malan's inner office was decorated partly in nineteenth-century French colonial and partly in twenty-first-century Brazilian egomaniac," writes Gage before he goes on to reveal the piece of business that Malan wants done--and quickly. His teenaged granddaughter, Marta, has disappeared and he has reason to believe she may have fallen into the hands of a ring of sex-traffickers specializing in underage trade.

All roads and waterways lead to Manaus, a thousand miles up the Amazon River in the middle of the impenetrable rain forest. Once in Manaus, Chief Inspector Silva and his federal police cohorts receive the kind of help from local Manaus police that can be summarized simply as uncooperative, obstructionist and murderous. The federal police would expect nothing less from a group of bribe-driven thugs about whom they say, "The cops are worse than the town itself." Silva's own low opinion of Manaus, expressed in the vivid lingo of a cop who has seen everything nasty at least twice, will not induce travelers who stumble on this compulsively readable procedural thriller to visit.

At the center of the web of underage prostitution, sex tourism and snuff video production into which Silva's men wade in search of Malan's granddaughter stands Claudia Andrade. Make no mistake, Claudia is happy to be there. Pure evil, she saw her life's work laid out for her at an early age when she realized "she was going to preside over deaths." Hot on Claudia's trail, along with the federal police, is a Jesuit priest. "Father Vitorio is confident of God's protection. It's a question of faith," a young informant tells Silva. The good Father's faith proves fatal when it comes up against Claudia's rapacious career drive.

Silva and his men, however, have methods more appropriate to this fight than faith, and they are just as ruthless in applying them as Claudia and killer pimps are. "Arnaldo's response involved his right foot and elicited a howl of pain from the punk," Gage writes of one step in the right direction as Evil Armed Might meets civil servants who must prevail. After all, when Silva's workday ends in the wilds of the Amazon, he has to answer to politicians as corrupt, amoral and sleazy as any producers of snuff videos.--John McFarland

Shelf Talker: A police procedural featuring nonstop action, exotic locales, unparalleled lowlifes and a set of witty and wily raconteurs fighting on the side of good.

 

At Books & Company in Oconomowoc, Wisc., "customers seem really upbeat," said co-owner Lisa Baudoin. "They've been going out of their way to tell us we're doing a good job and that they're glad we're here." The store is located about 35 miles northwest of Milwaukee, which was home to Harry W. Schwartz Bookshops until the retailer shut down in early 2009 after more than 80 years in business. "There was a lot of coverage about it," Baudoin said. "When Schwartz closed, I think people really began to understand what it means to have something and then to not have it. And that if you want to have it, you've got to support it."

Books & Company is giving shoppers plenty of reasons to come into the store--offering discounts, staging events and undertaking new initiatives--and sales are up over last year. A three-day open house following Thanksgiving included a 15% off sale, while a "Winter Treat" coupon rewards big buyers. Those who spend a minimum of $50 between December 1 and 15 will receive 15% off purchases in January; $100 or more earns the discount plus IndieBound's Eat. Sleep. Read Calendar or the Book Lover's Page-A-Day Calendar.

In November, an elementary school held a music and choir recital at Books & Company. Students signed up to perform in various time slots, and friends and family turned out to see them. "Our sales were great that night," noted Baudoin. The kids will be invited back next year, as will other area schools.

This year, for the first time, Books & Company used the Midwest Booksellers Association holiday catalogue as a school fund-raiser. A couple of thousand catalogues, along with a special coupon, were distributed to parents. The coupon could be used toward the purchase of titles in the catalogue, with Books & Company donating a portion of those sales (10% in cash or 15% in credit) to the school.

Another first-time endeavor: the inside front cover of the MBA catalogues was imprinted with six titles designated Books & Company's Timeless Classics for Gift Giving: Crossing to Safety by Wallace Stegner, Bel Canto by Ann Patchett, Time and Again by Jack Finney, In the Bleak Midwinter by Julia Spencer-Fleming and the children's books Harris and Me by Gary Paulsen and To Market, To Market by Anne Miranda. The promotion "has made an impact," said Baudoin, who worked with staffers to come up with the list.

Another backlist hand-sell at Books & Company is So Long, See You Tomorrow by William Maxwell. Buzz for the novel began after David Wroblewski mentioned it during an appearance at the store in October. It has become an employee favorite and one the staff is avidly recommending it to customers--both on its own and for people purchasing Wroblewski's The Story of Edgar Sawtelle.

An author event with Kate Jacobs in early November led to one of Books & Company's charitable initiatives: collecting hand-knit caps to donate to a food pantry and a clinic. During her tour, Jacobs partnered with Lands' End and the organization Warming Families to rally crafters across the country to make hats and distribute them in local communities. Books & Company promoted the hat drive along with Jacobs's signing for her latest novel, Knit the Season, and plans to keep it going until the end of the month.

Another way the store is giving back is by carrying "swittens"--mittens made from wool sweaters by members of the Oconomowoc chapter of the Friendship Bridge, which offers small business loans to women in Guatemala. "The swittens sell like crazy," said Baudoin, "and all the money goes directly to the Friendship Bridge." Another popular sideline is Magnet House "interchangeable" jewelry made by Minnesota artist Marianne Richmond. Each pendant necklace comes with a trio of decorative magnets that can be swapped out for different looks.

A display garnering attention at Books & Company is a wallet-friendly selection of "under $20" items, such as Under the Covers and Between the Sheets: Facts and Trivia about the World's Greatest Books by C. Alan Joyce and Sarah Janssen and the recipe collection Hot Toddies Deck by Christopher O'Hara. "They're great hostess gifts or a present for a girlfriend--when you don't want to spend too much but want something interesting and quirky," Baudoin said.

Baudoin's favorite gift recommendation this season is the "gorgeous" Bright Wings: An Illustrated Anthology of Poems About Birds, edited by Billy Collins and illustrated by David Allen Sibley. Other staff gift picks range from Stephen King's Under the Dome to Michael Spradlin's It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Zombies: A Book of Zombie Christmas Carols. Cookbook choices include My Bread by Jim Lahey and Jennifer Linder McGlinn's Gingerbread, which Baudoin has used to make treats like gingerbread pound cake for store events. (She has another talent besides baking--she plays with a ukulele group that meets at the store twice a month.)

"We are feeling more joyful this year, and it has been really busy so far," said Baudoin. "The publishers delivered a whole bunch of really good books--good paperbacks and good hardcovers. It's easy to buy a book this year, and it coincides with people wanting to buy something with value, something meaningful and personal."--Shannon McKenna Schmidt

 

The following were the bestselling titles at independent bookstores in and around Chicago during the week ended Sunday, December 6:

Hardcover Fiction

1. Too Much Happiness by Alice Munro
2. The Help by Kathryn Stockett
3. The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver
4. Her Fearful Symmetry by Audrey Niffenegger
5. A Gate at the Stairs by Lorrie Moore

Hardcover Nonfiction

1. Mennonite in a Little Black Dress by Rhoda Janzen
2. Superfreakonomics by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner
3. Half the Sky by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn
4. Open by Andre Agassi
5. Have a Little Faith by Mitch Albom

Paperback Fiction

1. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson
2. Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout
3. The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows
4. Push by Sapphire
5. The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger

Paperback Nonfiction

1. The Best American Non-required Reading by Dave Eggers
2. Logicomix by Apostolos Doxiadis
3. Freakonomics by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner
4. American Lion by Jon Meacham
5. The Blind Side by Michael Lewis

Children's

1. The Guinness Book of World Records 2010
2. The Lightning Thief by Rick Riordan
3. Fancy Nancy's Splendiferous Christmas by Jane O'Connor and Robin Preiss Glasser
4. Sugar Cookies by Amy Krouse Rosenthal
5. The Mysterious Benedict Society by Trenton Lee Stewart

Reporting bookstores: Anderson's, Naperville and Downers Grove; Read Between the Lynes, Woodstock; the 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; Women and Children First, Chicago.

[Many thanks to the booksellers and Carl Lennertz!]