At Books-A-Million, during the fourth quarter ended January 30, net sales fell 4.6%, to $157.2 million, and net income rose 6.3%, to $11.9 million. Sales at stores open at least a year fell 6%.

During the full year ended January 30, net sales fell 1.3%, to $508.7 million, and net income rose 30.2%, to $13.8 million. Sales at stores open at least a year fell 3.8%.

Chairman, president and CEO Clyde B. Anderson commented: "Despite the challenging sales environment throughout the past year, we are pleased with our ability to grow earnings for the quarter and the year. We remain focused on maintaining fiscal discipline as we look forward to an improving economic climate in the year ahead."

The board has authorized a new stock repurchase program to replace a similar program that ends April 30. The new program allows purchases of up to $5 million of BAM shares. Under the current program, the company was authorized to buy up to $5 million in BAM stock over the past two years and wound up buying $1.7 million of stock. BAM has 15.6 million shares that closed yesterday at $7.27 a share. At current prices, the $5 million could buy back 4.4% of the company's outstanding stock.

The company also approved a quarterly cash dividend of five cents a share as well as an additional dividend of 10 cents a share.

 

Amazon is still dealing with the aftereffects of its involuntary discounting glitch last weekend (Shelf Awareness, March 9, 2010). On Wednesday, buy buttons for all comics and graphic novels distributed by Diamond Comic Distributors were removed and have not yet been reinstated.

"The two companies are working as fast as we can to resolve the issues caused by our bad pricing feed, and we hope to have it fixed as soon as possible," said Kuo-Yu Liang, v-p, sales and marketing, Diamond Comic Distributors.

GalleyCat suggested that while the situation is being resolved, "this is the perfect time to visit your local brick and mortar comic bookstore."

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With the April 3 iPad launch date looming, Apple is making changes to its bookselling categories, according to Forbes magazine, which reported that mobile media research firm Busted Loop "uncovered the information as part of its new AppSlice project, which aims to help consumers locate the best iPhone, iPod and iPad applications amid the sea of current offerings."

The findings indicate "a highly organized approach to bookselling," with Apple designating "about 20 'top-level' categories for books, including 'Fiction & Literature,' 'Reference,' 'Romance,' Cookbooks' and 'Comics & Graphic Novels.' Below those categories lie more than 150 sub-categories, including some very specific genres, such as 'Manga' under 'Comics & Graphic Novels,' 'Special Ingredients' under 'Cookbooks' and 'Etiquette' under 'Reference.' Some sub-categories, such as 'Fantasy' and 'Science Fiction & Literature,' even have sub-sub-categories ('Historical' and Paranormal,' for example.) There are also two sections for 'Erotica' books; one under 'Fiction & Literature' and one under 'Romance.'"

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Barnes & Noble plans to release its bookstore and e-reading software for the iPad with an application that would compete with Apple's iBookstore, but AppleInsider reported "it is unknown whether the Cupertino, Calif., company would actually allow the bookseller's new third-party application to be released on the App Store."

Fast Company suggested Apple might let it through because B&N's app "appearing in the app store would just further serve to place the iPad head and shoulders above the Nook and Kindle in capability. Both B&N and Amazon have huge, rich ebook stores--likely bigger than iBooks will be at launch--and if the iPad has access to them, it takes away one more reason to go with a competitor. It's not the only reason; the Nook's and Kindle's e-ink screen is still easier on the eyes than the iPad's LCD, but it's still one step toward making other ebook readers obsolete. Either way, Apple wins."

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Bookselling This Week showcased Bookshop Santa Cruz's Trusted Source Program. Each month, the bookstore partners with a local business, nonprofit organization or "maven" and they choose five books that are labeled "Trusted Source Community Picks."

The books are then featured on store displays with shelf-takers written by the partners; promoted on Bookshop Santa Cruz's website and in its e-newsletter. Partners also share the picks with their mailing lists.

"It's really important for us to choose who the trusted source is," said owner Casey Coonerty Protti. "It's been fun to figure out who the next community partner will be."

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NACS Media Solutions--a subsidiary of the National Association of College Stores--will market the Espresso Book Machine to the collegiate marketplace and permission academic content for distribution throughout the worldwide network of EBM--thanks to a joint agreement between NMS and On Demand Books.

"Our EBM, EspressNet, and SelfEspress technology allows students and professors to produce customized textbooks and anthologies, course packs, dissertations, trade books, rare works, public-domain titles--anything that can be printed and bound with a paperback cover," said Dane Neller, CEO of On Demand Books.

"ODB's technology is uniquely suited to be part of the foundation of technology and content solutions that are an integral part of the NMS mission," said Ed Schlichenmayer, NMS president and COO. "We see ODB as a strategic partner that can help us further enable collegiate retailers to be effective and value-adding channels for digital content, products, and services."

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Indie bookstore television commercial of the day: As they promised last week (Shelf Awareness, March 5, 2010), Skylight Books, Los Angeles, Calif., offered a peek at the TV spot it's currently running locally.

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Have you checked your favorite bookstore's Twitter ranking lately. NFI Research charts the top indies on Twitter that "1) regularly update their page and communicate with their followers 2) use Twitter to advance/promote communication with their community 3) have a proportionate number of followers to following and 4) are currently active on Twitter."

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Happy Read an E-Book Week. The Huffington Post featured an interview with Rita Toews, who founded the annual celebration of digital reading six years ago and showcases it on her website, ebookweek.com.

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Why are Nordic mysteries so popular? The Economist explored the recent phenomenon that has vaulted authors like the late Stieg Larsson and Henning Mankell to the top of the bestseller lists, noting that Larsson's Millennium trilogy "has sold 27 million copies, its publishers' latest figures show, in over 40 countries."

The list continues to grow with the rise writers like K.O. Dahl and Karin Fossum from Norway; Ake Edwardson and Hakan Nesser of Sweden; Arnaldur Indridason of Iceland and Norwegian Jo Nesbo.

Three factors--language, heroes and setting--contribute to the success of Nordic crime fiction, according to agent Niclas Salomonsson, who represents many of these writers. Salomonsson also credited the style of the books, which he decribed as "realistic, simple and precise... and stripped of unnecessary words." 

 

Responding to Amazon's decision earlier this week to drop its Colorado affiliates after the state passed an online sales tax bill (Shelf Awareness, March 10, 2010), 19 Colorado booksellers--along with the ABA and MPIBA--wrote to Governor Bill Ritter to thank him for publicly criticizing Amazon's decision and urge his continued support of HB10-1193 as pressure from Republican legislators grows.

The letter to the governor argued that Amazon's actions "are nothing short of outrageous coming after the state's good faith efforts to fashion a compromise that sought to take into account the affiliates' concerns." You can read the full text and see the list of signatories at Bookselling This Week.

BTW noted that Colorado's sales tax bill is unlike e-fairness laws passed in other states because it "only asks out-of-state retailers that do not collect and remit sales tax to inform residents of the amount of use tax that they owe for online purchases and to provide year-end statements to the Colorado Revenue Department."

"The fact that Amazon refuses to comply with this law is a clear indication that the retailing giant is only interested in maintaining its significant competitive advantage over the bricks-and-mortar retailers in the state--and that it is more than willing to use its online affiliates as pawns to do so," said ABA CEO Oren Teicher.

"We weren't completely happy with the amendments made by the Senate Finance Committee," Teicher added. "We believe that shifting the responsibility for tax collection away from the retailers makes it much more difficult to enforce the law. That said, we understand that legislators and Governor Ritter are faced with difficult decisions in these tough economic times, and it is disappointing that their efforts to craft a compromise solution are being opposed by an intransient, out-of-state corporation that puts its own interests above all others."

 

Today on Fresh Air: Bart Ehrman, author of Jesus Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible (And Why We Don't Know About Them) (HarperOne, $15.99, 9780061173943/0061173940).

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Today on Fox & Friends: 15-year-old Jonathan Krohn, author of Defining Conservatism: The Principles That Will Bring Our Country Back (Vanguard Press, $19.95, 9781593156015/1593156014). He also appears on CNN Sunday Morning this weekend.

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Tomorrow morning on Good Morning America: Emily Giffin, author of Heart of the Matter (St. Martin's, $26.99, 9780312554163/0312554168).

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Sunday on Meet the Press: Karl Rove, author of Courage and Consequence (Threshold Editions, $30, 9781439191057/1439191050). He will also appear on Fox News Sunday.

Also on Meet the Press: David Kirby, author of Animal Factory: The Looming Threat of Industrial Pig, Dairy, and Poultry Farms to Humans and the Environment (St. Martin's, $26.99, 9780312380588/0312380585).

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Sunday night on Dateline: Todd Bridges and Sarah Tomlinson, authors of Killing Willis: From Diff'rent Strokes to the Mean Streets to the Life I Always Wanted (Touchstone, $26, 9781439148983/1439148988).

Also on Dateline: Craig Robinson, author of A Game of Character: A Family Journey from Chicago's Southside to the Ivy League and Beyond (Gotham, $26, 9781592405480/1592405487).

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Sunday night on 60 Minutes: Michael Lewis, author of The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine (Norton, $27.95, 9780393072235/0393072231).

Also on 60 Minutes: Craig M. Mullaney, author of The Unforgiving Minute: A Soldier's Education (Penguin Press, $28.95, 1594202028).

 

Director Guy Ritchie (Sherlock Holmes) and screenwriter John Hodge (Trainspotting) are teaming up for a Warner Bros. project that "aims to be a re-imagining of the legend of Arthur, believed to have been a 6th-century king who defended Britain against Saxon invaders. Key source material will be Thomas Mallory's Le Morte d'Arthur, published in 1485 as a compilation of French and English tales," Variety reported.

 

ABC Family, which picked up the network rights to Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland earlier this week, has also acquired the rights to The Blind Side, the film adapted from Michael Lewis's bestseller, Variety reported. The Blind Side will make its network premiere in 2012.

"Feature films are an integral part of the formula for a successful cable service, and ABC Family has created a terrific destination where Warner Bros. movies have thrived," said Warner Bros. Domestic TV Distribution president Ken Werner.

 

The winners of the National Book Critics Circle Awards, presented Thursday evening:

• Fiction: Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel (Henry Holt)
• General Nonfiction: The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science by Richard Holmes (Pantheon)
• Biography: Cheever: A Life by Blake Bailey (Knopf)
• Autobiography: Somewhere Towards the End by Diana Athill (Norton)
• Poetry: Versed by Rae Armantrout (Wesleyan University Press)
• Criticism: Notes from No Man's Land: American Essays by Eula Bliss (Graywolf)

Shilpi Somaya Gowda was born and raised in Toronto; her parents had migrated there from Mumbai. She holds an MBA from Stanford University, and a BA from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. In 1991, she spent a summer as a volunteer in an Indian orphanage, which seeded the idea for her first novel, Secret Daughter (Morrow, March 9, 2010). She lives in Texas with her husband and children.

On your nightstand now:

I usually have a stack of books I intend to read. Currently, they include A History of Love by Nicole Krauss, Four Spirits by Sena Jeter Naslund, Sacred Games by Vikram Chandra, Shantaram by Gregory David and Bloodletting & Other Miraculous Cures by Victor Lam.

Favorite book when you were a child:

A Separate Peace by John Knowles. I must have read it a couple times every year all throughout my adolescence, and always found a new layer of meaning.

Your top five authors:

I admire those authors who write beautifully while still creating a compelling story, and those who can be versatile. Some of my favorites are Margaret Atwood, Rohinton Mistry, Jhumpa Lahiri, Ann Patchett and Ian McEwan.

Book you've faked reading:

Well, not faked, but I have intended to read Ayn Rand for close to two decades. Atlas Shrugged was the first book I ever ordered when I joined the Book-of-the-Month club (and it even counted as two books), but there it still sits on my bookshelf.

Book you're an evangelist for:

Gift from the Sea by Anne Morrow Lindbergh. I continue to be awed by how deeply relevant Lindbergh's reflections from the 1950s are to modern life. I have given copies to many friends.

Book you've bought for the cover:

I am not often swayed by covers, except when it comes to cookbooks. I bought one called Indian Cuisine because the photos were so beautiful, even though I already knew most of the recipes inside. That's good marketing.

Book that changed your life:

That's a tall order. Though I prefer to read fiction, I would say certain nonfiction books have affected me the most. I read Freedom at Midnight by Dominique Lapierre in my early teens and understood, for the first time, the history and heritage I was connected to in India. And as an economics major, Small Is Beautiful by E.F. Schumacher had a big impact on how I see the world.

Favorite line from a book:

"Beyond a wholesome discipline, be gentle with yourself." --"Desiderata" by Max Ehrmann

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

Crossing to Safety by Wallace Stegner. I was absolutely riveted the first time I read this book, with how masterfully Stegner could write about the small things in life and also create such a compelling read. I would love to experience the wonder of that again.

Next Wednesday, I'll not be wearing the green. My heritage is a bit too mongrelized--equal thirds English, Irish and Scottish. Still, I've read the requisite Irish literature and more than a few nonrequisite titles. I've eaten my share of soda bread, and even downed a few pints of green beer against my better judgment.

So what's a not-Irish-enough bookseller-turned-editor do for St. Patrick's Day when he can no longer build Irish-themed book displays? What I found myself doing this week was reading the Irish Times, beginning with an article Monday about the "doomsday book scenario" booksellers there currently face.

"When the news that Hughes & Hughes was going into receivership broke, the sense of dismay among book people was palpable," Conor Pope wrote. "Countless other businesses have gone under during the course of this recession but the closure of a bookshop appeared to elicit an emotional response which was lacking when other retailers shut up shop."

Alan Hayes, president of Publishing Ireland, observed, "Books are in our blood, and this closure will, I fear, have a knock-on effect on our whole industry" and noted that "fewer Irish-owned bookshops will mean less shelf space for locally produced books which may see indigenous publishers driven out of business."

Okay, maybe this is not turning out to be a Happy St. Patrick's Day column, but it will have its moments, I promise. Beginning now:

A little sun broke through the clouds when Pope suggested, "Given this tough environment, only a brave man or a fool would be willing to enter the book trade. Step up to the plate, then, Bob Johnston. A former Hughes & Hughes buyer, Johnston opened his Gutter Bookshop in Dublin's Temple Bar last November and he is the first to admit it was a 'mad and crazy' move."

And author Charlie Connelly added, "It is always sad to see bookshops go and always sad to see them taken over by bigger chains. It is very easy to buy stuff on Amazon--you just push a button and it arrives at your door--but I think that people who hold the independent bookshops dear are going to have to come up with the readies. The reading public are going to have to do more if they want independent bookshops to survive. I wonder how many of these people who expressed sadness about Hughes & Hughes closing have actually spent any money there in recent years?"

He also suggested that writers "are going to have to start supporting our local bookshops by doing more events and holding more readings. Depending on book reviews and promotions to sell books is not going to be enough."

Last Saturday in the Irish Times, Shane Hegarty asked the unsettling question: "Is closing a bookshop akin to knocking down a unicorn?" Acknowledging that times are tough all over, Hegarty wrote, "Why should Ireland be so special that it can afford several book chains when the U.K. now has only one? Is it enough that we still buy a lot of books (15 million last year) and that we consider ourselves to be pretty decent at writing them too?... But the unthinkable is already happening--in how books are bought, published and read. Ten years ago, few would have guessed how much music would soon be bought without there being a physical purchase involved. But people still love music. Ten years from now, the books trade will have changed, perhaps as radically. But it will not be the end of reading. That is the only truly unimaginable thing."

All, however, is never--or seldom--lost. In an Irish Times interview, Paul Murray, author of Skippy Dies, talked about the book trade from a writer's perspective: "Jay-Z was talking about music downloading, and is music downloading killing the industry, and he said one effect of the music downloading boom is that only people who are really, really committed to music will actually stay in it. People who aren't in it to make money will be the folks who stick it out and find some way to make it work. So maybe it's not entirely a bad thing that there's so little money in writing because it means that the folks who do it are the folks who are committed to it."

Sounds like a lot of booksellers I know. Happy Indie St. Patrick's Day--Robert Gray (column archives available at Fresh Eyes Now)