"The web offers a connection to niche readerships that can be spoken to directly, but only with great care. Publishers need to have direct conversations with readers through all available means, despite the fact that they won't shop with us. Shopping's not the point, connection to audience is the point."

 

 

The Texas attorney general has requested information from at least HarperCollins and Hachette Book Group about e-pricing policies and probably Apple, apparently about the agency model plan that five of the major six U.S. publishers have adopted in selling e-books, the Wall Street Journal reported.

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Borders will add Aluratek's Libre eBook Reader Pro to its line of e-book readers. Pre-orders are currently being accepted online for the device, which will retail for $119.99. Shipments are set to begin in early July. With the included link to the Borders eBook store, Libre users will be able to access the upcoming Borders branded e-book store powered by Kobo.

In Borders stores, the Libre will be available within special digital shops called "Area-e" by August. Borders also noted that it is maintaining what the company calls a "device neutral approach," which will make up to 10 devices available by the end of the year.

"By offering e-reading devices at price points in the neighborhood of $100, we can introduce a population of readers to the joy of e-reading who would not have considered buying devices at entry points of $250 to $500," said Borders Group interim president and CEO Mike Edwards.

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Swedish author Henning Mankell, who was held in Israel after Israeli forces attacked the "solidarity flotilla" trying to break the blockade of Gaza (Shelf Awareness, June 1, 2010), has been released. The Local reported that Mankell arrived in Sweden late Tuesday.

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The early response has been positive for Elliott Bay Book Company since its relocation to Seattle's Capitol Hill area (Shelf Awareness, April 15, 2010).

"We are thrilled to be here," said manager Tracy Taylor. "Business is great. Our sales are up. Reading attendance is up."

Capitol Hill Seattle Blog reported that "Michael Malone, the principal at property owner Hunters Capital who reached out to bookstore owner Peter Aaron to explore the feasibility of the move, reports that the store racks in about 800 individual transactions each day, and that sales are up about 40%." 

"The result of a good fit is success," Malone said, adding, "Elliott Bay is an ideal destination retailer because they contribute to social and economic diversity."

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"Everybody's got a talent. I can read fast," said Barbara Ann Radnofsky, co-owner of Brazos Bookstore, Houston, Tex., who "brings to reading the same quality she does to much of her life and work: intensity. The Democrat now has trained her vigorous mind on toppling incumbent Attorney General Greg Abbott," the Dallas Morning News reported. She was one of a group of partners who purchased Brazos in 2006 when it was in danger of closing.

Radnofsky "chatted up a book club recently, discussing both her campaign and good reads. Few major nonfiction works come out that she doesn't read--or at least know about. She often blows through two books a week. She focuses on nonfiction and, of course, politics. She can rattle off long quotes from Abraham Lincoln speeches."

Jonathan Marsh, her former colleague at the Houston law firm Vinson & Elkins, said, "Barbara is someone who feels strongly about her values and her vision for Texas. And the fact that she is willing to run speaks to her values."

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"I felt on the Westside there was an open space crying out to be filled. The situation with the economy has led people to search, to find other avenues," Jeffrey Segal--who opened Mystic Journey Bookstore, Venice, Calif., in 2008--told the Los Angeles Times, which profiled the bookshop and noted that Segal "is pondering whether to open another shop in Pasadena. He thinks he can handle it, even when doubts creep in."

"I'm such a big believer now that everything is a blessing," Segal said. "It really is about the experience--the joy and the journey."

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Too Many Books, Roanoke, Va., "wants to swap its storefront for a downtown Roanoke address," the Roanoke Times reported, adding that the store "may relocate to 420 Church Ave., in the fall, though those plans are not final. Owner Linda Steadman and two other business owners have a contract to purchase the 23,000-square-foot structure across the street from the former Roanoke Valley YMCA."

"I just like the growth in that direction," Steadman said. "There's residential and we hope that retail growth will come with it."

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Lost City reported that in New York City, the "second incarnation of Skyline Books--oddly housed inside a florist shop on W. 28th Street--now has a sign of its own. And it's not called Book Gallery, as owner Rob Warren told me. It's called, simply, Rob Warren Books.... Skyline was forced to give up its Flatiron District shop last winter, after 20 years in the business."

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Canadian bookseller Christopher Smith, owner of Collected Works Bookstore & Coffeebar, was profiled by the Ottawa Citizen, which noted that in an age when indie bookstores are threatened on all sides, this "cosy stand-alone bookshop on Wellington Street West, has found a way not only to survive, but to expand. A few weeks ago, the store took over adjacent space and has plans for a renovation this summer that will double its footprint by fall."

Smith told the Citizen that he and his business partner, Craig Poile, have always considered the bookshop a business first and opted for a conservative approach to planning.

"We've always had very modest expectations," he says. "Shoot for the moon on the vision side. But keep everything tightly reined on the expense side."

He also cited community support: "We have a really loyal core group of customers. We treat them as individuals, not as walking wallets. We take an interest in what they are interested in. We're sharing information with each other."

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Al Casperson, whose late father, Ralph, was a longtime bookseller in Niles, Mich., will open A. Casperson Books in the downtown area this month, featuring "many of the old, used and rare books from his father's collection, which he bought from his mother," the South Bend Tribune reported.           

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Bestselling historical novelist Robin Maxwell and her husband, Max Thomas, have begun "our new adventure, the opening of High Desert Eden, an eco-friendly retreat in Pipes Valley, one of California's last undiscovered treasures. At 4,400 feet elevation and known by many as 'the Bel Air of the High Desert,' the valley offers majestic vistas of the old west at its best, starry night skies as you've never seen them, lush vegetation, and wildlife in abundance."

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Obituary notes:

Poet Peter Orlovsky, who was Allen Ginsberg's partner for more than 30 years, died Saturday. He was 76. The Los Angeles Times Jacket Copy blog noted that Anne Waldman was at Orlovsky's bedside when he died and posted her own tribute to him at elephantjournal.com.

Andrei Voznesensky, "who as one of the Soviet Union’s boldest and most celebrated young poets of the 1950s and ’60s helped lift Russian literature out of its state of fear and virtual serfdom under Stalin," died Tuesday, the New York Times reported. He was 77.

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Larry McMurtry, who still writes on a Hermes 3000 manual typewriter, has agreed to join the digital world after having resisted electronic publication: Simon & Schuster will now publish his work in e-book format.

"I hope the public will welcome my books to e-books, fresh fields and pastures new," said McMurtry.
 
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Check this out. The name says it all: bookshelfporn.com, which includes photos of some beautiful, inviting bookstores as well as dream bookcases in homes.

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The Washington Post showcased the blog People Reading and observed: "In the age of the iPad, iPhone, twitter, tweets, Kindle and google books--I know, I know, it's all the new, unstoppable wave and it's slamming into my library--coming upon this little website of people simply reading books was somehow refreshing--and reassuring."

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Book trailer of the day: a TNT video for the new TV series Rizzoli & Isles, based on books by Tess Gerritsen, the latest of which is Ice Cold: A Rizzoli & Isles Novel (Ballantine).

 

Revenue at Indigo Books & Music in the fiscal year ended April 3 rose 3%, to C$969 million, while net earnings were $34.9 million, compared to $30.7 million in the previous year. (The Canadian dollar is nearly at par with the U.S. dollar.)

Sales at Indigo and Chapters superstores open at least a year rose 0.6% while comp-store sales at the Coles and Indigo small-format stores dropped 2.2%. Sales at Indigo's website, chapters.indigo.ca, fell 4.8%.

In a statement, CEO Heather Reisman commented: "We are pleased with our bottom line improvement, particularly since we invested significant capital and operating expense in Kobo, our digital reading initiative. [Kobo is launching now in the U.S. through Borders.] We are also very pleased with the growth in our lifestyle and toy business, which allowed us to report top line growth against a year which included phenomenal sales from Stephenie Meyer's Twilight series. This confirms that our strategy of enriching our assortment is being well accepted by our customers."

For the fourth quarter ended April 3, comp-store sales at Indigo and Chapters superstores were down 2.7%, while comp-store sales at small-format stores dropped 5.8%. In the quarter, online sales fell 3.3%.

Reisman said, "The last quarter was a challenging one for us, with no blockbuster hit to compete with last year's over-the-top success of Stephenie Meyer. Our store traffic was also down materially during the two weeks of the Olympics as Canadians stayed home to cheer on our athletes."

 

The Guardian is featuring ongoing coverage of this week's Hay Festival.

In his column "The Digested Hay Festival," John Crace noted that "the weekend's biggest eye-opener was Christopher Hitchens. On previous Hay form, he should have come on stage half-pissed and sneered at the idiots in the audience who disagreed with him. Instead, he seemed sober and eager to make friends. Though he was still right about everything. Obviously. Stranger still was his admission that he had been to evensong in Hereford Cathedral the previous evening and had met fellow atheist Christopher Grayling as he left. Truly, the first miracle of Hay."

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Decca Aitkenhead headed to her first Hay Festival armed with suspicion. In the Guardian, she wrote, "Everyone is scrupulously smiley and polite, in that way people only ever are when constructing a community around an idea of themselves. Even the stewards are extravagantly nice, and a notice in the festival bookshop reads more like an apology than a warning: 'We earnestly request you to pay before leaving.' "

She admits, however, that her prejudice was soon assuaged: "Yet within an hour, I find myself instead growing beguiled.... Strolling back into Hay that evening, we take shelter from a shower in a pub, and meet some local booksellers. Why don't we come and live here, I wonder? What an oasis of cultured intelligence in rural paradise. We bump into Jon Snow, and wander back to our cottage, bowled over by this fantasy version of how a perfect world would be."

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Twitter users who don't want to follow the festival at @guardianhay can create their own fantasy Hay Festival under the hashtag #FakeHay. Samples:

 

This morning on Good Morning America: Sam Kashner and Nancy Schoenberger, authors of Furious Love: Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, and the Marriage of the Century (Harper, $27.99, 9780061562846/006156284X).

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Tomorrow on KCRW's Bookworm: David Shields, author of Reality Hunger: A Manifesto (Knopf, $24.95, 9780307273536/0307273539), and Ander Monson, author of Vanishing Point: Not a Memoir (Graywolf Press, $16, 9781555975548/1555975542). As the show described it: "New web technologies (and the ever-increasing availability of information) have made possible a new kind of writing. This prose uses fact and randomness rather than story and structure. Two active practitioners wave the banner for the new."

Actress Renee Zellweger has acquired film rights to Brantly Martin's novel Pillage, which "centers on four best friends living in Manhattan who rebel against their dead-end lives by searching for the perfect party in the downtown nightlife scene," Variety reported.

Zellweger will produce the movie with PalmStar Entertainment's Kevin Frakes. John Krokidas (Slo-Mo), who wrote the screenplay, will direct, with shooting scheduled to begin in New York City early next year. 

 

The Bishop's Man by Linden MacIntyre (fiction) and The Wayfinders: Why Ancient Wisdom Matters in the Modern World by Wade Davis (nonfiction) were among the winners of this year's Libris Awards, presented last Saturday by the Canadian Booksellers Association as part of its three-day national conference in Toronto. Quill & Quire featured a complete list of honorees.

 

Selected new titles appearing next Tuesday, June 8:

Medium Raw: A Bloody Valentine to the World of Food and the People Who Cook by Anthony Bourdain (Ecco, $26.99, 9780061718946/0061718947) continues the dish that the chef began to dish out in his classic Kitchen Confidential.

The Lion by Nelson DeMille (Grand Central, $27.99, 9780446580830/044658083X) is a followup to The Lion's Game and stars John Corey, former NYPD homicide detective and special agent for the Anti-Terrorist Task Force.

Walks with Men by Ann Beattie (Scribner, $17, 9781439175767/1439175764) is set in vintage Beattie territory: New York in 1980.

Android Karenina by Leo Tolstoy and Ben H. Winters (Quirk Books, $12.95, 9781594744600/1594744602) is the latest in the Quirk Classics series.

The Only Game in Town: Sportswriting from the New Yorker edited by David Remnick (Random House, $30, 9781400068029/1400068029) collects pieces from the magazine's archives by such notables as Roger Angell, A.J. Liebling, John Updike, Don Delillo and others.

The Passage by Justin Cronin (Ballantine, $27, 9780345504968/0345504968) is the much-buzzed-about postapocalyptic thriller.

A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan (Knopf, $25.95, 9780307592835/0307592839) is the interlocking tale of an aging former punk rocker/record executive and his passionate, troubled employee.

 

Nnedi Okorafor is a novelist of Nigerian descent known for weaving African culture into evocative settings and memorable characters. Her novels include Zahrah the Windseeker (winner of the Wole Soyinka Prize for African Literature), The Shadow Speaker (winner of the CBS Parallax Award) and Long Juju Man (winner of the Macmillan Writer's Prize for Africa). Her first adult novel, Who Fears Death (DAW, June 1, 2010), is a magical realist narrative that combines African literature and fantasy/science fiction into a story of genocide and of a woman who reshapes her world. Okorafor is a professor of creative writing at Chicago State University. Visit Okorafor at nnedi.com.

On your nightstand now:

Wonder Woman: Mission's End (Infinite Crisis) by Greg Rucka; the four-volume set of Hayao Miyazaki's graphic novel Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind (which I love to read before going to bed--gives me good dreams); and a copy of Wole Soyinka's The Man Died (which he autographed for me when I met him in Nigeria).

Favorite book when you were a child:

Comet in Moominland by Tove Jansson. It was my first introduction to the possibility of the world ending, and the main characters were bipedal, polite, hippo-like creatures. I loved it!

Your top five authors:

Octavia Butler, Buchi Emecheta, Stephen King, Wole Soyinka, Ngugi wa Thing'o. This is in alphabetical order, not order of significance. They are all equally significant to me in different ways.

Book you've faked reading:

Ulysses by James Joyce... *Shudder*

Book you're an evangelist for:

Wizard of the Crow by Ngugi wa Thiong'o. It's dangerous to mix politics and sorcery; Ngugi does it with the skill of a literary juju man. Wizard of the Crow contains almost every essential element of superb storytelling.

Book you've bought for the cover:

A Girl Named Disaster by Nancy Farmer (the Orchard Classics Edition). The little girl on the cover looks like she carries a machete and isn't afraid to use it!
 
Book that changed your life:

Famished Road by Ben Okri. This novel taught me that indeed my suspicions were correct: There is no real line between the spirit world and the physical world, and one can render this fact in prose. This book was also the first and only book to show masquerades (a Nigerian tradition of manifesting the ancestors and spirits) the way I have always imagined them.

Favorite line from a book:

"Spiders, the wind, a leaf, a tree, the moon, silence, a glance, a mysterious old man, an owl at midnight, a sign, a white stone on a branch a single yellow bird of omen, an inexplicable death, an unprompted laughter, an egg by the river, are all impregnated with stories."--Ben Okri, Birds of Heaven
 
Book you most want to read again for the first time:

I, Phoolan: The Autobiography of India's Bandit Queen by Phoolan Devi. The sense of amazement, wonder, rage and horror that I felt when I first read this could have created its own alternate universe.

Book that made you cry, and then go write:

The Stoning of Soraya M. by Freidoune Sahebjam. I read this book last year. When I finished it, I sobbed terribly for an hour. I've never reacted that violently to a book before. It literally hurt to read it. When I got over my pain, I ran to my computer and poured out the result of that pain, fingertips to keyboard.

Book that cracks you up every time you read it:

Animal Treasures by Ivan T. Sanderson. I stumbled across this crusty old book from 1937 in the stacks of the Michigan State Library. It's the memoir of a Scottish naturalist exploring the Nigerian forests. His humorous descriptions of the creatures he encounters and his own difficulties are hilarious. I read it when I need to snicker.

Liz Rosenberg (Home Repair) creates a brilliant twist on the concept of an imaginary friend. She gives her young hero, George, a bosom buddy named Nobody, whom Julie Downing (The Firekeeper's Son) fashions as a curly-topped fellow rendered in charcoal and decked out in black-and-white polka-dots. Nobody is the perfect foil for George's electric socket-straight hair and boldly striped red-and-green pajamas. One Sunday morning while George's parents slumber, the boy and his pal take the kitchen by storm: "Let's make a feast!" Nobody suggests. Soon they're assembling "four-layer banana fudge sandwiches," ice cream sundaes and omelets ("Nobody helped [George] take everything out of the fridge"). After Flo, the family dog, joins them, George adds puppy treats to the mixing bowl. Rosenberg and Downing brilliantly navigate the play on words: "While he waited, George played Go Fish and Nobody won," reads the text, while the illustration depicts a frowning full-color George and the gleefully prancing black-and-white figure of Nobody. George gets his sweet revenge, however, when he invents the game "Jamaican Chee-Bop" (for which a ketchup-drawn boundary is key) and wins. "Nobody got mad." Downing uses every inch of a full spread to depict Nobody's fury as he stomps on the squeezable ketchup bottle and sends playing cards flying. Luckily, George's mother and father don't get mad at the mess. "Wow. You did all this by yourself?" his mother asks, giving George a kiss. But when her son takes solo credit, Nobody grows smaller and smaller ("small enough to get lost in George's pocket"), his face registering profound disappointment. George, however, finds a way to make it up to his pal. Even youngest children will appreciate the double entendres making full use of Nobody's name, and being in on the joke George plays on his parents. This tale of acceptance around imaginary friends and being considerate of others' feelings is sure to hit home.--Jennifer M. Brown