The Justice Department dealt a blow to the Google settlement in a filing Thursday that could influence a federal judge’s ruling later this month. Although the department "did not explicitly urge the court to reject the deal" and conceded the new agreement was an improvement over the previous version, "it said the changes were not enough to placate concerns that the deal would grant Google a monopoly over millions of orphan works," the New York Times reported.

In addition, the department called the revised agreement still unsatisfactory regarding authors’ copyrights, too broad in scope and said it '"suffers from the same core problem as the original agreement: it is an attempt to use the class-action mechanism to implement forward-looking business arrangements that go far beyond the dispute before the court in this litigation." The parties were encouraged to continue their discussions. A hearing on the agreement is scheduled for February 18 with Judge Denny Chin of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York.

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David Young, Hachette Book Group USA's CEO, sent an e-mail to agents Thursday announcing the company's decision to "transition to selling our e-books through an agency model," giving Macmillan an ally in its confrontation with Amazon. GalleyCat posted a copy of the letter.

Young wrote that the agency model "allows Hachette to make pricing decisions that are rational and reflect the value of our authors' works. In the long run this will enable Hachette to continue to invest in and nurture authors' careers--from major blockbusters to new voices. Without this investment in our authors, the diversity of books available to consumers will contract, as will the diversity of retailers, and our literary culture will suffer."

He also noted that Hachette intends "to release HBG e-books simultaneously with the hardcover (or first format print edition)."

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Macmillan's CEO John Sargent praised bricks-and-mortar retailers in a new message to authors and illustrators that was posted Thursday on the publisher's website.

In addition to explaining Macmillan's position on digital book royalties, Sargent noted that many people "are wondering what has taken so long for Amazon and Macmillan to reach a conclusion. I want to assure you that Amazon has been working very, very hard and always in good faith to find a way forward with us. Though we do not always agree, I remain full of admiration and respect for them. Both of us look forward to being back in business as usual."

He also offered "a salute to the bricks and mortar retailers who sell your books in their stores and on their related websites. Their support for you, and us, has been remarkable over the last week. From large chains to small independents, they committed to working harder than ever to help your books find your readers."

In conclusion, Sargent said that he "cannot tell you when we will resume business as usual with Amazon, and needless to say I can promise nothing on the buy buttons. You can tell by the tone of this letter though that I feel the time is getting near to hand."

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Macmillan ran a full-page advertisement in New York Times Wednesday for Atul Gawande's The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right that included the line: "Available at booksellers everywhere except Amazon."

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Is niche the future of publishing? Digital Book World examined the business models of publishers Harlequin, Hay House, Osprey and Chelsea Green and concluded "these publishers show that being a hyper-targeted brand is incredibly powerful. And you can't really argue with the results."

"We had to become niche or else we wouldn’t have survived," said Margo Baldwin, co-founder, president and publisher of Chelsea Green. "To try to be a generalist as a small publisher is basically suicide."

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Now that several days have passed since Amazon "more or less 'de-friended'" Macmillan, the Guardian's Scott Westerfeld wrote that "some have likened this de-listing as a 'shock and awe' campaign, a stunning display of muscle power from an industry leader (or proto-monopoly). But I think it's a bit more pathetic than that. It reminds me more of an educational film from an old Simpsons episode, the one with the tagline, 'Sorry, Jimmy, but you said you wanted to live in a world without zinc!' "

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Lisa Somerville and Valerie Kirkland plan to open Apostrophe Books in its new Long Beach, Calif., location sometime around St. Patrick's Day. In her column on Gazettes.com, Wendy Hornsby celebrated the imminent opening by observing that she intends "to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day by shopping for a new book."

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Gottwals Books, which has used bookstores in Warner Robins and Byron, Ga., will open another shop in Macon this weekend. Co-owner Shane Gottwals told 13WMAZ that "we were looking for a kind of opportunity that really only came because of the recession; with rent rates and different opportunities that come up with a recession, we were able to fit into this Northside Drive location really well."

He added that "the goal for us is to be in an area where people are reading, and this is really--besides a couple other places--it's really a part of Macon that needs a used bookstore, so we just felt like it was a really good fit."

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Seattle's used bookstores "are confident they have a secure place in the community" despite the advent of e-reading devices, the Spectator reported

"One of the reasons you go into shops is so that you can get ideas about things you didn't know about," said Kris Minta, owner of Spine and Crown. "You can't do that very well online. That's the place of the shop, and that is the duty of a used bookstore owner: to present this panoply of ideas in an attempt to inspire people.

"There are thousands of life-changing doors in my shop and people could walk out with one of those doors," Minta added. "If you aren't always discovering, what is life worth living for? My shop is to make that philosophy concrete."

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Robert Warren, owner of Skyline Books--a used book mainstay in New York City for two decades--"bid the neighborhood farewell" last Saturday as his shop held a going out of business sale. Warren told the Daily News he couldn't afford to renew his lease, which had increased 50%, nor could he compete in a changing book trade. 

"The evils are three," he said: "The big book chains, Amazon.com and online auctions like eBay."

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Prime Crime Mystery Bookstore, Ottawa, will close March 13. Quill & Quire reported that owner Linda Wiken "told the Ottawa Citizen she had been trying to sell the store for over a year, and that it was 'just time to move on.'" Prime Crime won the 2001 Canadian Booksellers Association award as specialty bookseller of the year.

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USA Today paid a visit to the home of children's writer and illustrator Jerry Pinkney, who recently won the Caldecott Medal for The Lion & the Mouse. Calling himself "a storyteller at heart" he said he asks himself, "Will I, in the process of making pictures, learn something new?"

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Calling their list an "ideas factory for birthday, Christmas, Hanukkah for years to come" for the political junkies on your gift list, Washington Post's the Fix featured a list of favorite political fiction and nonfiction titles recommended by the "Fixistas." The top vote-getter for fiction was The Last Hurrah by Edwin O'Connor, while Robert Caro's The Power Broker topped the nonfiction list.

In January, general retail sales showed "the biggest increase in sales in nearly two years," rising 3.3% compared to the same month in 2009, according to Thomson Reuters. The Wall Street Journal cautioned, however, that "retailers' terrible showing in January 2009 was an easy one to beat, and shoppers still need to be lured in by bargains. But it does show retailers and consumers have a better handle on their circumstances, which bodes somewhat better for profits and sales."

The New York Times reported that "much of what shoppers bought was on sale, and many used gift cards to buy what they would not pay for out of their own pockets. Unemployment--which weighs heavily on consumer spending--remains high."

"At this point, everyone has a friend or family member who still does not have a job," said Jharonne Martis, director of consumer research for Thomson Reuters.

There was still cause for some optimism because January was the fifth straight month of positive sales results after months of declines. The International Council of Shopping Centers anticipates that "February same-store sales were likely to increase about 2% because they would be compared to the weak sales of February 2009 and because of an improving economy," the Times wrote.

In a well-received breakfast keynote yesterday, publishing veteran Jack McKeown, who is director of business development for Verso Advertising and president of Conemarra Partners, reprised a presentation from last week's Digital Book World, adding some data as well as observations on the Amazon-Macmillan battle, or as he called it, "the Friday night massacre." He focused on the results of a Verso survey of readers, which suggested that some of the more extreme predictions of an e-only book future are, well, extreme and which pointed to "all kinds of opportunities" for indies. Among the findings:

• Nearly half of avid readers prefer to shop in bookstores, even though their purchases don't reflect that.
• A hybrid market is developing, whereby many people will buy and read both e-books and printed books, not exclusively e-books.
• E-readers will likely represent 12%-15% of the market in the next two years and have not reached a near-term tipping point.
• Amazon's "hissy fit" of the past week settled some important pricing issues.
• Baby boomers and older Americans who are avid readers number 41 million, and, given the proper attention, these readers could buy more books.
• Because of demographic issues, the music industry's difficulties are not an accurate model for the book business.

The most striking data from the survey of 5,600 consumers (statistics can be found here), weighted to mirror the U.S. adult population and conducted late last year, involved "mindshare": book buyers' preferred shopping locations are local independents (21.5%) and chain bookstores (21.4%), followed by online retailers (20%), book clubs and others (10.7%), and big box retailers (10.5%).

"We were amazed by these statistics because obviously it doesn't reflect what happens at the cash register," McKeown said. "The challenge for indies is to close that gap."

Avid readers--people who read five or more hours a week--skew older: 35% of respondents 65 and older are avid readers while just 20% of respondents age 25-34 are avid readers. "There is more and more reading as people age," McKeown said, citing increasing leisure time and retirement. "Older Americans represent 41 million, or two-thirds, of the country's 62 million avid readers." Importantly, avid readers are even more likely than less-frequent readers to prefer shopping in an independent bookstore.

He said that while he is not sure whether this is a generational or chronological phenomenon--"will younger Americans read and buy more books as they age?"--the book industry can at least try to sell more books to older readers and seek to convert younger more casual readers.

If booksellers target avid reader baby boomers and convince them to buy two more books a year, "that would be $1 billion topline growth for the industry," McKeown said. And because baby boomers will be around for a while yet, "this could be a decades-long opportunity, not a near-term one."

The changes in the music world that led to huge drops in sales by music companies and bricks-and-mortar music retailers were driven by younger people--music's biggest consumers--but in the book business, it's older people who are the biggest customers. "It may not be sexy, particularly for publisher marketing department people in their 30s, but if they can get their heads around it, the older market could be the cash cow that drives the industry's efforts in digital marketing and digital publishing," McKeown said.

The most important marketing tools for selling books in bricks-and-mortar stores are author publicity and in-store events, staff recommendations and bestseller sections, while for online sales, search engine results are most important.

Online and in the "real world," the final purchase decision is driven by the author's reputation, personal recommendations and price. Indies do well in the first two categories. Noting that price is of such great sensitivity, McKeown said, "I challenge you to think about what it is that you can do to close the gap."

E-Reader Trends

Fully 49% of respondents said they will not buy an e-reader in the next year and only 25% said they are very likely or somewhat likely to buy one, and much of the resistance comes from older, avid readers. Approximately 3.5 million–4.5 million e-readers have been sold in the past few years, and "the data suggests that trajectory will flatten out," McKeown said. "E-reader penetration could be 12%–15% of the market over two years. There is no near-term tipping point for e-reader adoption."

Data also showed that "avid readers who own e-readers are splitting purchases between paper and e-books," McKeown continued. "They are not buying fewer books than other avid readers. This speaks to me about the evolving hybrid market. Avid readers have preferences about paper and e-books, but the two are not mutually exclusive. Readers will move between both realms at their own pace."

Many respondents, particularly men 55 and older, are likely to buy hardcover books with a digital version for a modest extra charge. Among all respondents, 42.9% would consider such a bundled purchase.

Data about where e-readers are used showed that reading at home for leisure is most popular (27%), followed by traveling or commuting (24%), reading in bed (14%), during breaks at work (9%), and studying or school reading (6%). The low figure for school "bears out the failure of eInk devices to win a beachhold with students," McKeown said. He noted the failure of Amazon's program that provided Kindles to college students at a select group of colleges.

There was a major split among respondents over appropriate pricing for e-books, McKeown said. Fully 28% favor prices under $10; 28% accept prices between $10 and $20; while 37% are undecided. Only 7.5% are open to paying "hardcover-like prices" of more than $20 for an e-book.

"Even before the Friday night massacre," McKeown said, "we sensed the pundits and $9.99 fanatics did not reflect the avid reader consumer mindset." He called the grades of price acceptance similar to traditional hardcover, trade paperback and mass market segmentation. "It seems that the $10 crowd is motivated by price," he continued, but others who truly want to read a book and are engaged with authors will accept somewhat higher prices.

Already 28% of e-reader owners have downloaded pirated editions of books, and 45% of males under 35 have done so. (Bad boys!) McKeown suggested that in response to piracy, the book business needs "to avoid the knee-jerk approach of the music industry, which made things only worse." A carrot approach that includes trying to encourage pirates to pay--as well as DRM controls--should be part of the equation.

At the end of his presentation, which many booksellers said gave them both hope and ideas for concrete action, McKeown offered to do a survey of consumers gratis in time for BEA that will consist of 12 questions chosen by booksellers.--John Mutter

Emily Rose (John from Cincinnati) will play the lead character in SyFy's Haven, based on Stephen King's novella The Colorado Kid, according to Variety, which added that production on the series is scheduled to begin this spring in Canada.

Columbia Pictures has chosen British writer Steven Knight to adapt Dan Brown's The Lost Symbol. Brian Grazer and John Calley will produce, though Tom Hanks hasn't committed to reprise his role as Robert Langdon yet.  Variety reported that the company was "eager to work with Knight again after acquiring the scribe's screenplay Pawn Sacrifice last year."

Knight's screen credits include Dirty Pretty Things, as well as drafts of two upcoming movies: Martin Scorsese's Shutter Island and The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader.

Two publishers shared this year's R.R. Hawkins Award, the top prize given by the Professional and Scholarly Publishing division of the Association of American Publishers. During an awards luncheon at the PSP Annual Conference, University of Chicago Press was honored for Plato's Philosophers: The Coherence of the Dialogues and John Wiley & Sons for Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews (WIREs). This isn't the first time the Hawkins has been awarded to two presses, but it is the first time an e-product has won the prize.

More than 40 American Publishers Awards for Professional and Scholarly Excellence (PROSE Awards) were given out at the luncheon. Other winners included included Elsevier, Modern Language Association, Oxford University Press, John Wiley & Sons, Louisiana State University Press and American Physiological Society.

"We're elated with the PSP industry’s enthusiastic response to the PROSE Awards, which has received a record-breaking number of entries for the second year running," said PROSE awards chairman John A. Jenkins, president and publisher of CQ Press. "The impact of electronic publishing was tangible from the many types of e-products that were submitted, and the decision to present the 2009 Hawkins Award to both a traditional print product and an electronic product indicates the exciting directions in which our industry is moving."

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A record number of submissions (up to 90 from 32 last year) for the Bookseller's Diagram Prize for the Oddest Book Title of the Year award has prompted the organizers to release a "Very Longlist" of 49 titles this time. The winner will be named March 26.

Highlights of the very longlist include 100 Girls on Cheap Paper, Budgeting for Infertility, Collectible Spoons of the Third Reich, Governing Lethal Behavior in Autonomous Robots and Many Other Idiotic Syndromes!. Without doubt, the bestselling book to make the list is Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.

Sara Miles is a former restaurant cook, political reporter and war correspondent. She is the author of Take This Bread: A Radical Conversion and the new Jesus Freak: Feeding, Healing, Raising the Dead, published last month by Jossey-Bass. She's the founder and director of the Food Pantry in San Francisco, a farmer's market run by poor people that gives away fresh produce and groceries to 600 hungry families a week.

 
On your nightstand now:
 
Bits and pieces of Panorama, the special-edition "newspaper" from McSweeney's; Methland by Nick Reding; The Case for God by Karen Armstrong; Learning to Drive by Katha Pollit; R. Crumb's illustrated Book of Genesis and far too many bulb catalogues.
 
Favorite book when you were a child:
 
Anything by my mother, Betty Miles, especially What Is the World.
 
Your top five authors:
 
Ryszard Kapuscinski, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Joan Didion, James Baldwin, Flannery O'Connor.
 
Book you've faked reading:
 
Leviticus.

Book you're an evangelist for:
 
Salvation on Sand Mountain by Denis Covington, about snakehandlers.
 
Book you've bought for the cover:
 
The Old World and its Gifts, a social studies textbook from the 1920s.
 
Book that changed your life:
 
Diving into the Wreck by Adrienne Rich.

Favorite line from a book:
 
"Yes, I do: I like that hat, I like your party hat!"--From Go, Dog, Go by P.D. Eastman.
 
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
 
Mating by Norman Rush. Unbelievably witty line by line, over its entire wild epic length. A novel with the smartest female narrator ever invented by a man (or, for that matter, by a woman.) Sharply political, deeply moving and utterly hilarious.
 

Author Peter Akinti, of Nigerian ancestry, was raised in east London's Forest Gate housing project, and it shows on every page. The brutality and poverty and casual racism that charge his debut novel, Forest Gate, feel disturbingly authentic.

His tight, grim tale opens with two black teenage boys who are best friends preparing to commit suicide. With ropes around their necks, communicating by walkie-talkie from the roofs of two facing 31-story high rises of council flats, at exactly midnight they both jump. Only one of the boys dies. The other accidentally survives and continues to live in a world where he's forced by other people's expectations into being someone he's not.

Most of the first half of the book is narrated by Meina, whose 16-year-old brother, Ash, is the boy who succeeds in killing himself. She and her brother are Somalian refugees brought to London by their murdered father's white friend. The second half of the book is primarily told by James Morrison, Ash's only friend, the other would-be suicide, whose mother is a crack addict and whose five brothers are the project's most notorious drug dealers. James doesn't want to be like them, wants something more out of life, but doesn't believe white society will let him have it.

Meina and James are both in desperate need of healing; the reader feels their pain, and watching them heal each other becomes the primary pleasure of the unfolding plot, which takes them to Cornwall and ultimately to Brazil, and comes loaded with an unexpected tragic turn that feels true and provides the road to redemption.

It's a novel about people in collision--race against race, gang against gang, brother against brother. From the opening moment, in which Meina identifies the body of her dead brother, the reader feels how racially and economically trapped these characters are. Meina wonders "if there was ever such a thing as escape. Since life is ultimately what you carry around in your heart." Fortunately for both her and James, not to mention the reader, their grief leads them through the fire toward a hopeful new life on the other side.--Nick DiMartino

Shelf Talker: Nigerian-English author Peter Akinti has written a grim, but ultimately hopeful, tale of life in the brutal council flats of England and the desperate measures people will take to flee it.

Colum McCann inscribed a copy of Songdogs, his first novel, to me in January, 1996, with the words: "Well-met in Chester on a winter evening, with great thanks for your supporting my work. Sláinte." Last fall, he won the National Book Award for Let the Great World Spin. I was thinking about that narrative arc last weekend when I attended the afternoon readings for New Voices 2010 in Chester, Vt.

Hosted by Bill and Lynne Reed of Misty Valley Books and celebrating its 16th anniversary, New Voices was started by the bookstore's original owners, Dwight Currie and Michael Kohlmann. After the Reeds purchased Misty Valley in 2001, they not only continued the tradition, but eventually added Vermont Voices and a Gourmet Mystery Series to their seasonal schedule, thanks in part to the success of this original event.

Guest authors for New Voices this time were Deborah Copaken Kogan (Between Here and April), Elena Gorokhova (A Mountain of Crumbs), James Landis (The Last Day), Heidi Durrow (The Girl Who Fell From the Sky) and Matthew Dicks (Something Missing).

"This year's New Voices, which you can imagine we spend some thought and effort on, coalesced early," Bill observed. "Lynne always scouts first timers in the catalogs and gets galleys. She keeps in touch with publishers, and we always go prospecting at BEA and NEIBA for possible New Voices, with documentation in hand of previous events. This year we had a credible roster early, and we had both read the books of the five authors we finally invited. Publishers were very helpful this year, too, pointing us in the right direction. We were pretty sure by the fall that we had a good group."

The day began with cross-country skiing in the morning, followed by the afternoon reading/signing at a beautiful stone church in the village. That evening, there was a wine and cheese cocktail hour and then dinner with the authors at the Fullerton Inn. This day-long interaction seems to gradually develop a comfort level between writers and readers, and the barrier of compressed arrival, performance and departure that bookends most author events dissipates in the welcoming, cozy Vermont winter atmosphere.

"The thing that makes the weekend so wonderful for us is the fact that it is more than a book reading," Lynne said. "We had the authors to our house Friday evening for dinner along with their introducers and a few friends. This group really, dare I say, bonded. We had such a good time. Then to wake up to go cross-country skiing in 5-degree weather at Grafton Ponds cemented their friendship. So, by the time they got to the church, they were old buddies, felt comfortable, knew people in the audience, and the day kept flowing. No one wanted to leave."

"Bill and I both agree that this was one of the very best New Voices ever," she added. "We always have interesting authors, but this year the mix worked. The books were all so different. I think what made the reading special was the introducers. The energy in the church was amazing." 

A few words about those introducers: Bill came up with the idea a couple of years ago to ask members of the community to read the selected books beforehand and make the introductions: "It helped increase attendance, too, I think, to involve community members early, inviting friends to read the books and introduce the authors. The friends were happy to be involved and, as you probably noticed, rose to the occasion. Somehow it also gives more credence to the event if more people are involved. Several attendees have remarked that it was nice to hear what the introducers had to say."

That direct and personal engagement by the introducers with their chosen books and authors ultimately added five additional "new voices" to the event. In fact, Deborah Copaken Kogan responded to Nancy Pennell's intro by saying, "That was the best introduction anyone in my decade of writing has ever done."

Jeremy Dworkin, who introduced Heidi Durrow, thanked Bill and Lynne for "an effort that's obviously become a community tradition."

This year, more than 130 people attended the readings, up significantly from 2009. Misty Valley sold out of all five books and took orders for more. I heard one woman standing in line enthusiastically ask a friend, "Who are you going to buy?"

"Well-met in Chester" indeed. A reading tradition still thrives in the Green Mountains and, as Elena Gorokhova said, "In an era when innovation and adaptation are watchwords, there is something to be said for tradition."--Robert Gray (column archives available at Fresh Eyes Now)