"Michael Powell's philosophy on bookselling is simple: He wants to provide people with books. He has no interest in telling people what to read. Nor would he ever judge a person by the type of books she purchases. New or used, dime-store paperback or first-edition hardcover, manga or metaphysics, all are equally at home on his shelves."--From a profile of Michael Powell, owner of Powell's, Portland, Ore., in the March/April issue of Poets & Writers.
At Barnes & Noble, total sales in the third quarter ended January 30 rose 33% to $2.2 billion, which included sales of $566 million at B&N College Bookstore, a division of the company added since the third quarter of last year.
Net income was $80.4 million, down less than 1% from the same period last year.
During the quarter, Barnes & Noble store sales fell 4.7% to $1.4 billion and sales at stores open at least a year fell 5.5%. Sales at B&N College stores open at least a year fell 1.3%.
B&N.com sales rose 32% to $210 million. B&N.com sales accelerated during the quarter and were up 67% in January compared to January 2009.
CEO Steve Riggio attributed much of the online sales gain to the launch of the nook e-reader, which began shipping in the middle of the quarter. He added that nook sales have been "strong at our bookstores since the product became available earlier this month."
B&N said that bestselling titles during the quarter included John Grisham's Ford Country, Greg Mortenson's Stones into School, Elizabeth Gilbert's Committed, Andre Agassi's Open and Nicholas Sparks's Last Song.
The company predicted that during the current quarter, which ends May 1, sales at stores open at least a year should fall 2%-4% and sales at B&N College stores open at least a year should be up between 1% and down 1%.
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Education Media said that "institutional investors will invest $650 million of new capital in Houghton," the paper said. "In turn, senior lenders have agreed to convert more than $2 billion of senior secured debt to equity. The publisher's approximately $2.1 billion in mezzanine-level secured debt is being exchanged for equity and warrants." Houghton Mifflin Harcourt's annual interest payments of about $450 million will be reduced to less than $200 million.
With the change, the largest investor will be the hedge fund Paulson & Co., Education Media's biggest lender. Paulson will have two of nine board seats.
Education Media bought Houghton Mifflin in 2006 for $1.75 billion and the following year bought Harcourt for $4 billion.
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Cool idea of the day: to help reduce inventory and raise funds for its move to new quarters, Dark Delicacies, the horror bookstore in Los Angeles, Calif., is holding a sale this Sunday in the store and an online auction with some unusual items. These include a copy of The Evil Dead Companion signed by Bruce Campbell and the rest of the film's cast; dinner with 30 Days of Night creator Steve Niles; and actor/director/comic book publisher Thomas Jane delivering a pizza to the winner's house in the Los Angeles area.
Thanks to Fearnet.com for highlighting the auction!
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Hobart, N.Y., "the book village
of the Catskills," has created a grassroots economic development
strategy "that will bring people back to work and infuse capital into
their communities," the Oneonta Daily Star reported.
There
are currently five bookstores in Hobart: Adams Antiquarian, Hobart
International Bookport, Blenheim Hill Book Shop, Liberty Rock Books and
the Bibliobarn. Local businessman Don Dales plans to open another,
Mysteries and More, on Main Street, and an old hobby shop is expected
to become a children's bookshop.
"Hay-on-Wye has been the
inspiration for it all," said Dales. "We are celebrating five years
this year and are experiencing slow but steady growth. Every year, we
have added more bookshops and are now attracting other businesses like
Hatherleigh Press."
"The book village is the reason we are
here.," observed Hatherleigh's owner Andrew Flach. "When I rode into
Hobart two years ago and discovered the book village, it was a
wonderful thing. The role of a book village in the world of books is
vital to preserve the collected works in original form. It's a
book-lovers' paradise."
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An anonymous buyer purchased
a 3,700-page uncensored, uncorrected manuscript of Giacomo Casanova's
diaries on behalf of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France for a price
believed to be in excess of €5million (US$6.8 million). The Guardian
reported that the papers were transferred to the library Monday, but
"they could soon be accessible to the general public. The BNF plans to
digitalize them as part of its online library, and to display them in
an exhibition next year."
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Barnes & Noble proudly noted that it was rated highest in the specialty retail category for customer satisfaction for the third year in a row, as measured by the American Customer Satisfaction Index, based on research conducted in the fourth quarter last year. With a score of 84, B&N was the top bookseller in the survey and ranked above the specialty retail category average of 77.
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Effective yesterday, Ralph Munsen has joined Hachette Book Group as senior v-p, chief information officer. He was most recently v-p, technology, at Clear Channel. Before that, he was director of new technology at EMI Music, where he oversaw global technology strategy, anti-piracy technologies and the creation of digital-only products.
Last Friday more than 2,500 fans descended on Warwick's, La Jolla,
Calif., for a signing featuring Ozzy Osbourne, whose new memoir is I Am
Ozzy (Grand Central Publishing). Here Osbourne places a magic slipper on the foot of Susan E.
McBeth, director of marketing and events, who had spent 13 hours
preparing for the signing. McBeth noted that even though Osbourne was
more Prince of Darkness than Prince Charming, it was an honor to have the superstar rocker put the slipper
on her foot.
Today on the Book Studio: Sarah Blake, author of The Postmistress (Amy Einhorn Books, $26, 9780399156199/0399156194).
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Tomorrow on Live with Regis and Kelly: Joan Rivers, author of Men Are Stupid... and They Like Big Boobs: A Woman's Guide to Beauty Through Plastic Surgery (Pocket, $15, 9781416599241/141659924X).
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Tomorrow on Oprah: Andrew Young, author of The Politician: An Insider's Account of John Edwards's Pursuit of the Presidency and the Scandal That Brought Him Down (Thomas Dunne, $24.99, 9780312640651/031264065X).
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Tomorrow on the View: Danielle Steel, author of Big Girl (Delacorte, $28, 9780385343183/0385343183).
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Tomorrow on the Joy Behar Show: Jeff Garlin, author of My Footprint: Carrying the Weight of the World (Simon Spotlight, $25, 9781439150108/1439150109).
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Tomorrow on the Wendy Williams Show: Bethenny Frankel, author of The Skinnygirl Dish: Easy Recipes for Your Naturally Thin Life (Fireside, $16, 9781416597995/1416597999).
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Tomorrow night on the Daily Show: Tracy Morgan, author of I Am the New Black (Spiegel & Grau, $25, 9780385527774/0385527772).
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Tomorrow night on the Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson: Jeannette Walls, author of Half Broke Horses: A True-Life Novel (Scribner, $26, 9781416586289/1416586288).
David Friendly, Mark Clayman and Michael Menchel will produce a film based based on Picking Cotton: Our Memoir of Injustice and Redemption by rape victim Jennifer Thompson-Cannino and Ronald Cotton, the man she mistakenly identified as her attacker, Variety reported.
Todd Komarnicki, who is writing the adaptation, said, "What they've done is incredibly inspirational in terms of showing how powerful forgiveness is. It makes me examine how I live my own life."
Friendly told Variety he decided to option the book after watching Cotton and Thompson-Cannino on CBS's 60 Minutes. "I burst into tears while watching it, which is usually a pretty good sign that something's a viable property," he said.
Finalists for the 2009 Los Angeles Times Book Prize include nominees in the first-ever graphic novel category. In addition, the first Innovator's Award is going to Dave Eggers. Evan S. Connell has won the Robert Kirsch Award. Winners will be announced on April 23, on the eve of the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books.
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Nominees for the 2009 Strand Magazine
Critics Awards, recognizing excellence in
mystery fiction, are:
Best Novel:
Nine Dragons by Michael Connelly (Little, Brown)
The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death by Charlie Huston (Ballantine)
Life Sentences by Laura Lippman (Morrow)
The Renegades by T. Jefferson Parker (Dutton)
The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters (Riverhead)
Best First Novel:
Beat the Reaper by Josh Bazell (Little, Brown)
The Manual of Detection by Jedediah Berry (Penguin Press)
A Reliable Wife by Robert Goolrick (Algonquin)
Starvation Lake by Bryan Gruley (Touchstone)
Black Water Rising by Attica Locke (Harper)
Also, the Strand gave its lifetime achievement award to Elmore Leonard "for his huge body of mystery and crime novels."
The winners of the Critics Awards will be announced on July 7.
The following are selected titles appearing next Tuesday, March 2:
House Rules: A Novel by Jodi Picoult (Atria, $28, 9780743296434/0743296435) is about a teen with Asperger's syndrome accused of murder.
No Apology: The Case for American Greatness by Mitt Romney (St. Martin's, $25.99, 9780312609801/0312609809) gives advice on how to renew America's domestic and international strength.
The Pacific by Hugh Ambrose (NAL, $26.95, 9780451230232/045123023X) is a companion book to the upcoming HBO miniseries about the Pacific theater of World War II.
The Cross Gardener by Jason F. Wright (Berkley, $22.95, 9780425233283/0425233286) follows a father who loses his wife and child in a car accident.
Fancy Nancy: Poet Extraordinaire! by Jane O'Connor and Robin Preiss Glasser (HarperCollins, $12.99, 9780061896439/0061896438) is a children's book about a little girl given a school assignment to write her own poem.
Payback Time: Making Big Money Is the Best Revenge! by Phil Town (Crown Business, $26.99, 9780307461865/0307461866) is a guide to stock trading for people fearful of investing.
Ship of Fools: How Stupidity and Corruption Sank the Celtic Tiger by Fintan O'Toole (PublicAffairs, $25.95 Hardcover, 9781586488819, March 2010)
Pour yourself a frosty mug of Guinness and settle in with journalist and critic Fintan O'Toole's tragicomic tale of the heady boom and colossal bust of Ireland's late economic miracle, the Celtic Tiger.
From the mid-1990s until late 2001, Ireland's rapid economic growth was the envy of its European neighbors and less developed nations around the world. Its low tax rates and gentle governmental regulation even inspired the vocal admiration of presidential candidate John McCain. But behind the glittering façade, Ireland's political and business leaders were busy erecting a house of cards that was blown away in the calamity that devastated the world's economies in 2008.
O'Toole's acerbic account directs most of its fire at the mischief wrought by the unholy tripartite alliance of venal politicians like Taoiseach (prime minister) Bertie Ahern and his Fianna Fáil cronies, rapacious property developers and complaisant bankers. Those compatriots conspired--through taxes that approached zero on many of the wealthiest Irish (and a system that encouraged evasion of even the minimal remaining levies) and a willingness to pander to the lust of real estate speculators for turning vacant land into housing developments ever more distant from Dublin's core and hotels with occupancy rates of 50%--to create a real estate boom of breathtaking proportions. In 1994, for example, the average new home price was the equivalent of €73,000. Had that average risen in keeping with average earnings, O'Toole reports, it would have stood at €124,000 in 2007. Instead, in those 13 years it soared to an absurd €323,000.
O'Toole also punctures the myth of the high-tech boom that brought companies like Dell and Microsoft to Ireland's shores while barely raising the computer literacy of the average resident. In swift strokes he dissects the machinations of Dublin's International Financial Services Centre, a "Potemkin village of global finance" that functioned more as a cover for every manner of financial manipulation than as a legitimate economic enterprise.
When the Irish bubble deflated, it did so with a resounding pop. GDP is expected to plummet 13.5% through 2010, and unemployment has increased by a staggering 85%. But after savaging his countrymen for the avarice and ignorance that delivered them to their current predicament, O'Toole sympathetically offers a handful of suggestions for crawling out of that pit: rebuild an economic system that embodies some semblance of morality, reform the rotten institutions of government and create a social vision. Accomplishing those changes will be a daunting task now that the raucous celebration of a decade and a half has left the Irish people with little to show for it save for a massive hangover of debt and morning-after regret.--Harvey Freedenberg
Shelf Talker: Fintan O'Toole's fast-moving account of the boom and bust that was Ireland's Celtic Tiger is a sobering trip through the wreckage of shattered dreams.
