"And special thanks and a show of support to the Macmillan companies in the face of bullying tactics by one of our largest competitors."--Michael Tucker, head of Books Inc. and president of the American Booksellers Association, speaking yesterday at the opening of the Winter Institute in San Jose, Calif. His comment was interrupted by a standing ovation from the 500 independent booksellers in attendance.

E-book pricing issues are not the only factor making headlines in the nascent competition between Amazon's Kindle and Apple's iPad. The New York Times reported that Amazon "has acquired Touchco, a start-up based in New York that specializes in touch-screen technology," which could be a sign it is considering a Kindle upgrade.

Colin Sebastian, an analyst at Lazard Capital, observed that the acquisition "would suggest Amazon is looking to expand its platform perhaps beyond e-readers to encompass more functionality and more content. It also could help them address some of the form-factor issues with the Kindle.... If touch screens were added to the Kindle or other Amazon devices, it would bring them up to date with the plethora of other screens consumers are becoming used to. Any device is at a disadvantage if it doesn't offer it."

The Times noted that Touchco's website now features only this message: "Thank you for your interest in Touchco. As of January 2010, the company is no longer doing business."

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The "other winner" in the Macmillan v. Amazon confrontation is Barnes & Noble, TechCrunch reported, citing as evidence the fact that Andrew Young's The Politician, which has been unavailable on Amazon, "is actually the number one best seller on Barnes & Noble's entire site. On another rival's site, Borders, it’s the number five best seller."

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Amazon links are being removed from the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America website in response to the removal of many of their authors’ books from Amazon's ordering system. "Our authors depend on people buying their books and since a significant percentage of them publish through Macmillan or its subsidiaries, we would prefer to send traffic to stores where the books can actually be purchased," SFWA said, adding that volunteers are "redirecting book links to Indiebound.org, Powell’s, Barnes & Noble and Borders."

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Are you satisfied with your e-reader? A November survey by NPD Group found that 93% of the 1,000 respondents indicated they were "very satisfied" or "somewhat satisfied" with their devices, and just 2% expressed dissatisfaction.

PC Magazine reported that about 2% of those surveyed said they would like more books available; 39% had found every title for which they searched; 39% requested longer battery life; and 34% wanted color screens.

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John Scalzi's Whatever blog takes the book trade for a theatrical spin with his "Why In Fact Publishing Will Not Go Away Anytime Soon: A Deeply Slanted Play in Three Acts."

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The historic downtown district of Mansfield, Tex., may be getting some literary urban renewal. The News-Mirror reported that the owners of Books by the Dozen are "working on plans to move their shop" downtown, to play a larger role in the community.

"We want to make it a place to hang out, buy books and hopefully to bring some more people downtown," said co-owner Darin Wilbur. "We wanted some place with character, and that building is 100 years old. It's perfect for a bookstore."

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In the U.K., the Big Green Bookshop has enlisted book bloggers to recommend great reads to its customers. There are no guidelines beyond choosing a book they love, and those reviews will be featured on the bookshop's website "as well as on a bookcase in the shop dedicated to this new initiative," the Bookseller reported.

"We've had a fantastic response from the bloggers and we really appreciate the time they've taken in agreeing to do this," said co-owner Simon Key. "We're delighted to be introducing this exciting new initiative, which no doubt will be stolen within six months."

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What not to read... in prison. The Austin Statesman reported that the Texas Department of Criminal Justice has reviewed 89,795 book and magazine titles by 40,285 writers "over the years to determine if the reading material is suitable for its inmates," but will not say how many were rejected by prison reviewers for "inappropriate content."

The Statesman said it had "reviewed five years' worth of publications--about 5,000 titles--whose rejections were appealed by inmates to the agency's headquarters in Huntsville and obtained through open records requests." The list of authors banned is a distinguished one, including Pete Dexter, Joyce Carol Oates, Annie Proulx, Alice Walker, Robert Penn Warren and John Updike.

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Novelist Sam Baker, author of The Stepmothers' Support Group, picked her top 10 literary stepmothers for the Guardian.

"Stepmothers get what can only be called a 'bum rap' in literature," Baker observed. "From Snow White and Cinderella to Tolstoy to Judy Blume, whenever fiction needs a character to pin it on a stepmother comes in handy. Euripedes didn't help our cause when he wrote, 'Better a serpent than a stepmother/' And it's pretty much been that way since, with stepmothers pitted, in the main, against their stepdaughters, to create stories of two women battling for one man's attention."

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NPR's What We're Reading this week includes Shadow Tag by Louise Erdrich, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot, The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050 by Joel Kotkin and The Girl Who Fell from the Sky by Heidi W. Durrow.

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Book trailer of the day: Monday Hearts for Madalene by Page Hodel (Stewart, Tabori & Chang).

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Fifteen years after Bill Watterson said goodbye to his bestselling creation, Calvin and Hobbes (or at least to any new C&H comic strips), he expressed no regrets about his decision in a rare interview with the Cleveland Plain Dealer.

"By the end of 10 years, I'd said pretty much everything I had come there to say," Watterson recalled. "It's always better to leave the party early. If I had rolled along with the strip's popularity and repeated myself for another five, 10 or 20 years, the people now 'grieving' for Calvin and Hobbes would be wishing me dead and cursing newspapers for running tedious, ancient strips like mine instead of acquiring fresher, livelier talent. And I'd be agreeing with them. I think some of the reason Calvin and Hobbes still finds an audience today is because I chose not to run the wheels off it."

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The press release announcing finalists for Barnes & Noble's Discover Great Writers Awards (Shelf Awareness, February 3, 2010) contained an error regarding the publisher of one of the books shortlisted.
 
Toby Lester’s The Fourth Part of the World:The Race to the Ends of the Earth, and the Epic Story of the Map that Gave America Its Name is published by Free Press.

The first day of the ABA's Winter Institute, devoted to technology, featured wide-ranging talks by representatives from Google, Ingram Digital, several major publishers and others, and led to much discussion by the 500 independent booksellers in attendance, who seemed to have at least 500 varying opinions on the issue of e-books and the effect of digital change on their businesses. These ranged from a feeling expressed by one bookseller--"I don't see how we can sell e-books in our stores--let's continue just selling traditional books"--to ideas for joining the e-bandwagon, including promoting e-books on store websites and in stores, offering add-on benefits for readers of e-books in the same way that indies try to differentiate themselves from competitors in the realm of traditional books, and emphasizing bundled traditional and e-book versions of the same titles. Several people predicted that e-books will take a sizable chunk of the market--perhaps 20% or 25%, enough to cause severe disruption in the book trade--but that traditional books will remain key for many years to come. An e-book world dominated by the Kindle seems already to be an old idea, and the outlines of what will come to pass are even more unclear than several weeks ago. In the realm of the digital transformation of the business, the main conclusion appeared to be that nothing can yet be concluded.

Below is a report on one panel. More will follow in upcoming issues.

Any time publishers address booksellers about the state of the industry and what digitization means to its future would be noteworthy, but on the heels of Apple's iPad unveiling and the Amazon/Macmillan battle that burst into the open last weekend, such a session on the opening day of the Winter Institute took on an even greater significance.

"My goodness, was it interesting?" joked panelist Drake McFeely, president of Norton, who said he had been traveling since last Friday. But he hoped the recent events were "sobering" to those who watch the book-retailing market and wonder about the power of Amazon. "We need all of you to be partners with us," he told booksellers.

David Young, CEO of Hachette, reiterated what he told the New Yorker's Ken Auletta, who is working on an article about publishing, when asked about what keeps him awake at night. "Bookstores closing" was his answer.

"There's a lot of drama right now," said Madeline McIntosh, Random House's president of sales operations and digital publishing. "But I'd hate to see the great minds in this room worried about a digital future that takes away from the focus of what goes on in your stores."

Moderator Barry Lynn, author of Cornered: The New Monopoly Capitalism and the Economics of Destruction (Wiley), asked the three publisher panelists if we were "overblowing the threat" of e-books.

"I see the e-book as another format," said Young. "It's not one that is going to bring enormous joy to people in this room." He suggested that it would work out to be a playing field for them. "The whole point about great bookselling is that I go into my bookstore to buy books I didn't know I was going to buy." Online shoppers, he said, know what they are going to buy. "It's why I'm so keen on booksellers," he said.

With that kind of lead-in, it was no surprise that the first question in the q&a was how publishers might improve their relationships with indies. McIntosh said Random House had invested millions in its distribution system so that all booksellers could get physical books as quickly as consumers have come to expect them.

When Hachette's Young said, "We will continue to have our sales team call on you," at first booksellers applauded, but a heckler interrupted to ask how many booksellers in the room still had sales reps calling on them. A quick poll showed that shrinking field sales reps is still an issue.

Richard Howorth, owner of Square Books in Oxford, Miss., asked booksellers not to "beat up" on the publishers in the room, who "we see increasingly getting into the troubled state we've seen ourselves in for the last 20 years."

In one of the final questions, a bookseller suggested that bundling print and e-books might be a way for retailers to get in the game. McIntosh responded, "We're wrestling with what is the value of that digital file"; publishers are considering making e-books free as a bundled item. (No surprise: the consensus in the room was that no one likes the idea of $9.99 e-books or a single retailer dominating the market.)

The final question addressed the idea of releasing hardcover, paperback and e-book editions simultaneously. McFeely said it's "hard to run all the math on that" in a way that encompasses all the costs associated with publishing, such as marketing and author advances.

Right now the fact that most readers still want printed books provides some solace, but clearly the questions raised in this session are not likely to go away any time soon, and the task of educating consumers about the value of books and booksellers in the digital age has only just begun.--Bridget Kinsella

Tomorrow morning on the Today Show: Bethenny Frankel, author of The Skinnygirl Dish: Easy Recipes for Your Naturally Thin Life (Fireside, $16, 9781416597995/1416597999).

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Tomorrow on NPR's On Point: Philip Hoare, author of The Whale: In Search of the Giants of the Sea (Ecco, $27.99, 9780061976216/0061976210).

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Tomorrow night on Jimmy Kimmel Live: Ozzy Osbourne, author of I Am Ozzy (Grand Central, $26.99, 9780446569897/0446569895).

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On Sunday on NPR's Weekend Edition: Shoshana Johnson, author of I'm Still Standing: From Captive U.S. Soldier to Free Citizen--My Journey Home (Touchstone, $23.99, 9781416567486/1416567488).

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.

Saturday, February 6

12:30 p.m. Glen Browder, author of Stealth Reconstruction: An Untold Story of Racial Politics in Recent Southern History (NewSouth Books, $24.95, 9781588382399/1588382397), presents a history of biracial cooperation in the efforts to advance civil rights. (Re-airs Saturday at 11 p.m. and Monday at 6:30 a.m.)

6 p.m. Encore Booknotes. For a segment that first aired in 1999, Virginia Postrel, author of The Future and Its Enemies: The Growing Conflict over Creativity, Enterprise, and Progress, contended that we should rely on creativity instead of conforming to one central vision as we deal with the issues of the 21st century.

7 p.m. Mika Brzezinski, co-host of MSNBC's Morning Joe, discusses her new memoir, All Things at Once (Weinstein Books, $24.95, 9781602861114/1602861110). (Re-airs Sunday at 9:45 a.m.)

10 p.m. After Words. Lori Wallach, director of Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch, interviews Joseph Stiglitz, author of Freefall: America, Free Markets, and the Sinking of the World Economy (Norton, $27.95, 9780393075960/0393075966). (Re-airs Sunday at 6 p.m. and 9 p.m. and Monday at 3 a.m.)

Sunday, February 7

6 a.m. Steve Forbes talks about his book, How Capitalism Will Save Us: Why Free People and Free Markets Are the Best Answer in Today's Economy (Crown Business, $25, 9780307463098/0307463095). (Re-airs Sunday at 8 p.m.)

7 a.m. David Walker, author of Comeback America: Turning the Country Around and Restoring Fiscal Responsibility (Random House, $26, 9781400068609/1400068606), argues that controls must be put on government spending and the national debt lowered. (Re-airs Sunday at 10:45 p.m.)

12 p.m. In Depth. British historian Paul Johnson, author most recently of Churchill (Viking, $24.95, 9780670021055/0670021059), joins Book TV for a live interview. Viewers can participate in the discussion by calling in during the program or e-mailing questions to booktv@c-span.org or via Twitter (@BookTV). (Re-airs Monday at 12 a.m.)

3 p.m. Amy Goodman talks with Raj Patel, author of The Value of Nothing (Picador, $14, 9780312429249/031242924X) and Naomi Klein, author of The Shock Doctrine (Picador, $16, 9780312427993/0312427999). (Re-airs Monday at 5 a.m.)

Paramount Pictures preemptively acquired The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine, the next work from Michael Lewis (The Blind Side, Moneyball), and Brad Pitt will produce, Variety reported. The book, which is scheduled for a March 15 release from Norton, "chronicles the recent free fall of the American economy."

Now that Electronic Arts has adapted Dante’s The Divine Comedy as a video game that "recasts the moody, reflective poet as a buff, sword-swinging Crusader out to save his beloved's soul from the fiery clutches of Lucifer," Entertainment Weekly's Shelf Life blog wondered: "What other classics would we like to see coming to a console near us?" Among the suggestions:

• Don Quixote: A lot like the old arcade game Joust, except your enemy is a windmill.
• Hamlet: Polonius' Revenge: This re-imagining is a stealth game in the mode of Metal Gear Solid that has you sneaking throughout Elsinore, hiding behind curtains and listening to other people's conversations. But don’t get caught, or it's curtains for you!

D.A. Powell won Claremont Graduate University's $100,000 Kingsley Tufts Award for his collection Chronic, and Beth Bachmann's Temper won the $10,000 Kate Tufts Discovery Award for a first book by a poet. They will be honored during an awards ceremony April 22 at the Pasadena Museum of California Art, the New York Times reported.

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If Not Now, When?: Duty and Sacrifice in America's Time of Need by Jack Jacobs won the $5,000 Colby Award. Named after the late ambassador and former CIA Director William E. Colby, the prize recognizes a first work of fiction or nonfiction that has made a significant contribution to the public's understanding of intelligence operations, military history or international affairs.

The Colbys will be presented by the Tawani Foundation on October 22 at the Palmer House Hotel in Chicago in conjunction with the Pritzker Military Library's Liberty Gala. At the same time, the $100,000 Pritzker Military Library Literature Award for Lifetime Achievement in Military Writing will be presented. That winner will be announced via live webcast on June 21.

These are the bares bones of the story: in the fall of 2004, Stephanie Saldaña moved to Damascus on a Fulbright Scholarship to study Jesus in the Quran, not the most obvious pursuit for a Catholic from Texas. But after studying Arabic, Eastern Christianity and Islam at Harvard Divinity School, she was ready, and she wanted to go back to the Middle East. "Something in the Middle East awakened the deepest core of me. It made me a better person. It made me the best person I have ever been." But she was also running away from a broken heart. "I left for Damascus like a prisoner exiled to Siberia. By the time I arrived, it had become the last place in earth that I wanted to be."

She finds a charming room in Bab Touma, the Christian section of Damascus--arched windows, spearmint-colored beams, courtyard citrus trees and a pair of love-birds. She makes friends with her landlord and shopkeepers, she studies Arabic and she spends a lot of time in a desert monastery. After many months, she realizes she has fallen in live with Frédéric, a novice monk. This is usually the stuff of melodrama, but in Saldaña's hand, it transcends. It's a story told in exquisite prose, a story of a journey that saves her life.

This is how she describes learning Arabic that year:

"I learn that there will be no poetry, and that our classes will be an occasion to learn the language of Baathism, the story of class struggles and the cold and dry vocabulary of war. Though I still don't know how to order in a restaurant, in the next week I'll learn the words unemployment, depression, suicide, famine, and starvation. Instead or memorizing Arabic poetry... I'll memorize the words soldier and war, politics and explosion...."

Later, after her winter sojourn at the monastery and a long illness, she discovers that she is finally hearing Damascus--the way she listened in the desert to ghosts and angels--and she discovers a new vocabulary. The man who sells her mango juice tells her the word for straw, mussasa. "I love it. It is such a useless word, a luxury." And, "Today a woman ordering at a juice stall gave me carrot, a Greek Catholic priest gave me forgiveness, and a frustrated neighbor unwittingly taught me a handful of vulgar expletives, together with the rhetorical question, So, what do you expect me to do? I love them all. I feel like a lost wanderer scooped up from the side of the road, given directions and a glass of water to drink."

Stephanie Saldaña has created something of beauty out of her transformation from a life of chaos and her search for peace. The Bread of Angels is an absolutely compelling memoir, elegant and wise, written with dazzling detail and passion.--Marilyn Dahl

Shelf Talker: An elegant, dazzling memoir of a life lost and found in the ancient city of Damascus.