"Millions of people now own Kindles."--Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon.com, in the company's release about fourth-quarter results. During the period net sales rose 42%, to $9.52 billion, and net income rose 71%, to $384 million.
A long moment of silence.
J.D. Salinger, who had lived in famous isolation for the last half century, died Wednesday at his home in Cornish, N.H. He was 91.
He is best known for The Catcher in the Rye as well as the story collections Franny and Zooey and Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction. Our particular favorite was Nine Stories, which contained "For Esme--With Love and Squalor" and "The Laughing Man," two of our favorite stories of all time.
The New York Times has a long obituary.
For an unusual appreciative point of view, check out Larry Hughes' Classics Rock! for a discussion of songs based on The Catcher in the Rye and songs that reference the late Howard Zinn.
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In a story about Amazon's fourth-quarter results, the Wall Street Journal quoted Sandeep Aggarwal, an analyst at Collins Stewart, who estimated that the Kindle will "likely contribute $980 million in revenue and $250 million in gross profit in 2010."Just a day after CEO Ron Marshall left to become CEO of the Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company (Shelf Awareness, January 27, 2010), Borders Group has laid off 124 corporate employees, about 10% of corporate staff. Some 88 were in the company's Ann Arbor, Mich., headquarters, many of them from technology and finance departments. In addition, another 40 employees at two warehouses, in Nashville, Tenn., and Mira Loma, Calif., were laid off.
Borders spokesperson Anne Roman told the Wall Street Journal that there were some redundancies in technology and finance in recent months because various computers systems had been combined into one. But the key reasons for the layoffs were to "manage the payroll in a way that is responsive to its level of sales. Also, the company is dedicated to increasing cash flow and reducing debt, which means it must keep its expenses in line."
Sales at Borders have dropped substantially in the last three quarters, and holiday sales were particularly disappointing, falling 13.7%, nearly three times that of bricks-and-mortar rivals Barnes & Noble and Books-A-Million.
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The troubles for Borders Group may be national in scope, but they're also having a significant impact on Ann Arbor, Mich. AnnArbor.com reported that "the community remains a stakeholder as the bookseller sorts out its future amid industry turmoil, leadership changes and falling investor confidence."
In addition to property taxes, the "company employs nearly 900 in Washtenaw County, with about 800 of those people at the headquarters at 100 Phoenix Dr. and the rest spread among the three retail locations," AnnArbor.com wrote.
"One of the things getting tangled up in all of this is the faces. The employees," said Ed Shaffran, a downtown Ann Arbor developer and landlord.
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The Motley Fool recommended "5 Non-Investing Books Every Investor Should Read" on MSNBC.com: The Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande, The Drunkard's Walk by Leonard Mlodinow, Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers by Robert Sapolsky, Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order by Niall Ferguson and Simplexity by Jeffrey Kluger.
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The Ohio Supreme Court has ruled that booksellers and other owners of "generally-accessible" websites cannot be prosecuted under a 2002 Ohio law that makes it a crime electronically to disseminate to minors material that is "obscene or harmful."
Plaintiffs in the case include the American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression, the Association of American Publishers, the Freedom to Read Foundation and other members of Media Coalition. ABFEE president Chris Finan called the decision "an important step toward narrowing the law in a way that protects free speech, but we still have concerns."
An Ohio appeals court will now try to decide if the law is constitutional and whether newspapers and other sites that charge for content or otherwise limit access might be subject to prosecution.
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Congratulations to Daedalus Books, Columbia, Md., which has turned 30. The company began in 1980 in a small warehouse with a staff of eight. It now has more than 150 employees who sell remainder books, CDs and DVDs on a wholesale basis as well as to consumers online, in two stores and through nine million catalogues.
"We've never lost our focus on the kinds of books that drew us into this business 30 years ago," president Robin Moody said. "We still care about reading and selling good books, as well as quality CDs and DVDs."
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This spring the Clinton Book Shop, Clinton, N.J., is moving to a new location, a building built in 1898 with a cast iron facade and once the home of the first library in Clinton. In an e-mail to customers, owner Harvey Finkel said that the new location, one block from the store's current site, will make the store "accessible from both East Main Street and Rt. 173." The store will also have its own parking spaces.
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Powell's Books, Portland, Ore., has launched a new inventory management system in its six stores, the company's "biggest technological upgrade" in 15 years, Powell's said. The new system replaces one not designed to handle Powell's current inventory of more than two million books. Among other things, the new system simplifies used book buying.
More than 100 employees were involved in designing, developing and testing the system. Its launch required the conversion of more than 30 million product and purchasing records.
To test the system, president Michael Powell, accompanied by his daughter, president-elect Emily, bought The Most Beautiful Book in the World: Eight Novellas by Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt and Books Are Not Life, but Then What Is? by Marvin Mudrick. Nicely the first new book received into inventory was Oh the Places You'll Go by Dr. Seuss.
At the 800-CEO-READ Book Awards party earlier this week in New York
City, 800-CEO-READ founder and president Jack Covert (r.) and
general manager Jon Mueller celebrated the winners. Overall Business Book of the Year winner
was Too Big to Fail by Andrew Ross Sorkin.
DreamWorks has acquired the rights to Scott W. Cohen's Eat, Sleep, Poop: A Common Sense Guide to Your Baby's First Year--which will be published in March--and "plans to turn it into a feature comedy," Reuters reported. Matt Allen and Caleb Wilson (Four Christmases) will write the script.
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New Line's attempt to bring J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit to the big screen has run into trouble again. The Wrap reported that the movie, "which had been slated to premiere in December 2011, won't hit theaters until the end of 2012 at the earliest. The two-part prequel to New Line’s mega-successful Lord of the Rings franchise has Peter Jackson signed on to produce and Guillermo del Toro enlisted to direct."
While previous delays were due to "haggling between author J.R.R. Tolkien's estate and New Line over Lord of the Rings profits," the latest glitch involves financing, the Wrap added.
Dr. Edith Grossman has won the inaugural Queen Sofia Spanish Institute Translation Prize for her translation of A Manuscript of Ashes by Antonio Muñoz Molina, published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in 2008. The award will be presented next Tuesday, February 2, at a ceremony presided over by Institute chairman Oscar de la Renta that will include a dialogue between the author and translator.
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Nominees for this year's British Science Fiction Association awards have been named. The winners will be honored during Eastercon, Odyssey 2010 in April. Up for best novel are The City and the City by China Mieville, Ark by Stephen Baxter, Yellow Blue Tibia by Adam Roberts and Lavinia by Ursula Le Guin. The complete shortlist is available here.
Tim Dorsey was born in Indiana and moved to Florida at the age of 1. He joined the Tampa Tribune in 1987 as a general assignment reporter and later worked as a political reporter in Tallahassee, often covering crime. From 1994 to 1999, he was the Tribune's night metro editor until he impulsively left to write books full time. Dorsey has since published 11 novels; his latest, Gator A-Go-Go, was released last Tuesday by Morrow. He lives in Tampa with his family. And despite his quasi-success, he keeps it real by continuing to drive a rusty 1996 Cadillac DeVille that is a crowd favorite at book events, where readers regularly request to have their photos taken in the trunk.
On your nightstand now:
A wad of chewing gum, Jack Daniels, a clock, a lava lamp, pepper spray, scattered M&Ms, a bounced check, stains, burn marks and a couple Tom Robbins books.
Favorite book when you were a child:
The Sea and Its Wonderful Creatures. Moray eels, predator starfish, hammerhead sharks, barracuda, fish eaten alive, a giant squid attacking a sperm whale. I patterned my life after it.
Your top five authors:
Kurt Vonnegut, Joseph Heller, J.D. Salinger, Hunter Thompson, Thomas McGuane. Also must mention William Burroughs. My strict folks weren't big readers and always confiscated my Mad magazines, but Naked Lunch was off their radar and I'd sit reading it with eyes bugging out, and they're like, "Oh, he's doing something constructive.' "
Book you've faked reading:
The Bible. Hear it's a big seller. I quote it often, but sometimes get the lines mixed up with Naked Lunch. For some reason, my conversations tend to be brief at cocktail parties.
Book you're an evangelist for:
McGuane's 92 in the Shade. One of the best and most-often overlooked Florida novels, mainly because Thomas left the state for Montana. But he married Jimmy Buffett's sister, which counts for something, although I'm not sure what.
Book you've bought for the cover:
Playboy. I mean, not Playboy. I was thinking of the Bible.
Book that changed your life:
Catch-22. You know how you sometimes stare oddly at society's incongruities like Yossarian, and it seems as if life keeps raising the number of missions? That's me all the time.
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
Breakfast of Champions. Vonnegut blew away The Sea and Its Wonderful Creatures.
Favorite line from a book:
"That's some catch, that Catch-22."--The Bible
In his new book, 59 Seconds: Think a Little, Change a Lot (Knopf), professor Richard Wiseman examines the science of self-help, presenting a series of fast-acting techniques on how to improve your life. In one part of the book, he examines the impact of people's names on their career choice, success and happiness. In this item written exclusively for Shelf Awareness, he has turned the scientific spotlight on how budding thriller writers can quickly choose a pen name that will help guarantee a place on the bestseller list.
In the Douglas Adams novel The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul, the success of fictitious bestselling thriller writer Howard Bell was attributed to his name fitting the "short surname and slightly longer first name" formula that apparently makes for the maximally visual book cover. It is a fun idea, but is there really anything to the theory? And, if so, what is the perfect pen name for a thriller writer? To find out, I counted the number of letters in the first and second names of more than 100 well-known writers.
A pattern quickly emerged. Many of the bestselling thriller writers are likely to adhere to a "three-letter first name and slightly longer surname" rule, among them Dan Brown, Ian Rankin, Sam Bourne, Ian Fleming and Lee Child. So is it as simple as that? No. There also appears to be a second effect at work.
Linguists classify vowels according to where in the mouth they are pronounced. Some are produced at the front of the mouth, such as the i in bit, whilst other are produced towards the back, such as the o sound in home. Names can also be classified in the same way, with front vowel names including Craig and Ben, and back sounding names such as John and George. Research conducted at MIT found that names with front vowels are seen as more attractive and masculine sounding than those with back vowels. Interestingly, a disproportionate number of bestselling thriller writers have names with front stressed vowels, including Lee Child, Dick Francis and Iain Banks, suggesting that buyers may be attracted to them, in part, because they subconsciously perceive these authors' masculine sounding-names to be in keeping with the genre.
The implication is clear. If you want to create the perfect pen name for a thriller writer, think of the "three-letter-first-name, five-letter-last-name" rule and a front stressed vowel. Howard Bell need not apply.
During an intensely digitized week--as I monitored the iPad's debut, last-minute objections to the Google Book Settlement and the Digital Book World Conference--I also found myself thinking, for some reason, about Richard Brautigan.
I read "All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace" for the first time in decades. And as I was considering and reconsidering that word "quirky" and its relationship to indie bookstores (for the record, I never used the term to describe Brautigan when I read him in the 1970s), I recalled some lines from his novel, The Abortion: "The library came into being because of an overwhelming need and desire for such a place. There simply had to be a library like this." If you don't know about the library, you should. Now more than ever, perhaps, quirky may be a business model.
I mentioned last week that Kathy Patrick's Beauty & the Book, Jefferson, Tex., was high on my list of pilgrimage-worthy shrines to bookseller quirkiness. Subsequently, Kathy put the question to her fans on Facebook: "Is Beauty and the Book a quirky bookstore?" Among the responses:
Besse Lynch, events and marketing coordinator at the Bookworm of Edwards, Edwards, Colo., responded to the column by recalling her affection for the Bookmill, Montague, Mass., because "browsing the shelves felt like exploring in some long forgotten attic. There was nothing cookie cutter about the space or selection, yet it was somehow familiar and comfortable."
I asked her how that might translate into success for indie bookstores. "Quirky can be so different for different people," she replied. "I think of it as a feeling you can't find anywhere else, something unusual yet familiar, maybe nostalgic at the same time. In defining quirky in terms of a bookstore, it can mean at once being a place where a person feels like a unique individual, and a place where those individualities come together to form a cohesive community. When a person shops at an indie bookstore this is what they are looking for. Not a place where they buy a book and walk out, but a place where they buy a book and belong to community."
Can the "quirky" factor drive people away? "The trick is to define yourself as an individual while being careful not to exclude other individuals," she added. "The beauty of a truly quirky bookstore is that it must be accepting of the quirks of others." At the Bookworm, "We just try to do things that we are passionate about, and that have meaning within our community. We take our customer's needs and suggestions to heart and try to create an atmosphere that reflects the diversity of ideas that come into our store."
And, finally, is quirky something that can be planned?
Janet Geddis, who hopes to open Avid Bookshop in Athens, Ga., sometime later this year, observed that she wants her shop "to be well-organized, friendly and cozy, but I'd also like something funky or quirky that instantly sets it apart from other bookstores (and other businesses, for that matter). But I believe there's a problem with setting out to do something deliberately quirky: I don't want my design decisions to appear contrived or manipulative. When I think about quirky places I like to visit, the thing that has drawn my attention is almost always something that evolved organically."
She noted that genuine quirkiness seems "born out of true individuality. People haven't made calculated decisions to be strange in order to stand out. Instead, their oddities come straight from the heart. I'd venture to guess that the proprietors of Wild Rumpus [Minneapolis, Minn.] genuinely love animals and children--they didn't make a choice to sell kids' books in a store full of animals purely because it was a good business plan. Their quirkiness arises from their passions."
As Janet plans her bookstore, she already knows it will include "some surprising and intriguing elements in the design, but I can't yet know what I'll say, do, or create that will give Avid that quirkiness many of my future customers crave. I suppose this strange and appealing element will evolve naturally as my staff and I settle in and share what we love with our customers."
To paraphrase Mr. Brautigan, there simply have to be bookstores like these.--Robert Gray (column archives available at Fresh Eyes Now)
