"It's important to understand what's driving the rise of e-books in the first place: the strong-as-ever desire of consumers to read books, in one form or another. After all, what's a device without content? As e-books, readers, e-bookstores, and specialized apps make it easier for consumers to enjoy books, they'll buy more titles, and read them more quickly. This expandable consumption drives growth across the category while increasing reading in general--a true win-win for booksellers of all kinds as well as our customers.

"Ultimately, there's no reason traditional bookstores and digital booksellers can't co-exist; for all their common ground, each offers a substantially different value proposition. Of course, the onus is on booksellers to prove their continued relevance in the digital age. If they continue to innovate in the services and experiences they offer and the ways they engage the community, consumers will continue to make bookstores a vital part of their lives. If they fail to adapt to changing market conditions and consumer needs, they'll deserve the empty aisles--and cash registers--that result. The next chapter is up to them."

A different kind of book giant price war: yesterday after Barnes & Noble reduced the price of its 3G Nook to $199 from $259, Amazon.com dropped the price of the Kindle to $189, also from $259. B&N also said it will sell a wifi-only version of the Nook for $149 and is upgrading software on existing Nooks.

Amazon has lowered the price of the Kindle several times since it made its debut in 2007 at $399. Amazon's Kindle DX continues to sell for $489.

Competition has become heated since Apple came out with the iPad this spring--it's already has sold more than two million units. In addition, Borders is introducing the Kobo e-reader for $150, and Sony will soon introduce a new Reader.

One analyst called the new Kindle and Nook prices a "sweet spot" for e-readers. Rob Enderle of Enderle Group told AFP: "You drop the price under $200, you open up your market tenfold. It will put more pressure on publishers to get books into that digital market, absolutely."

James McQuivey, an analyst at Forrester Research, noted that Amazon's pricing approach of selling a high-priced e-reader and inexpensive e-books has been turned on its head. He told the Wall Street Journal: "They can go to the old razor-world model of giving away the razor for free and selling the blades. [With these price cuts] they are starting to give away the e-reader."

McQuivey predicted further price reductions and estimated that they will push the total number of e-readers sold in the U.S. to 6.6 million this year for a total of 10.4 million sold in the past three years.

Written Words Bookstore, Shelton, Conn., becomes a movie set tomorrow when a scene for a film with the working title The Greatest Movie Ever--featuring actor Bill Pullman (Spaceballs, Independence Day)--will be shot. Pullman plays a author signing his children's book at an  event.

"It's quite interesting," owner Dorothy Sim-Broder told the Valley Independent Sentinel about working with a crew from Worldwide Pants Inc., David Letterman's production company. "We never get to see what goes on behind the scenes. With this, you get a taste of it."

The staff will stay late Tuesday night to rearrange the store and move the children's section toward the front. "The camera angle has to be right," Sim-Broder noted. "The existing children's section is too far back. We need to transform another area into the children's section."

"I think it's a win-win situation," she added. "We're coming into the summer season, which tends to slow down anyway. I think it's exciting. Hopefully it will help with advertising the store as well. Hopefully people who have never heard of us will hear of us now."

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Toronto booksellers are preparing for the unexpected this weekend with the G20 summit coming to their city. Quill & Quire reported that the summit "is prompting extreme security measures in the downtown core. However, city centre booksellers are considerably more relaxed when it comes to their plans and, for the most part, are employing a wait-and-see attitude."

"I may end up having to close on short notice any time between Monday and Friday. I'm not going to put my people in danger," said Ben McNally, owner of Ben McNally Books. He doesn't anticipate trouble from protesters, however: "It's not like the book business is a contributor to anything that's remotely associated to anything you'd be protesting about."

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Eleven "Bestselling Book Apps for Adults And Kids" were showcased in the Huffington Post, which explained that book apps "usually have multimedia features, frequent--sometimes daily--updates and all kinds of web and social media functionality you wouldn't find in a straight up e-book. They live on your mobile device and are becoming more popular every day." 

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John Updike's Olympia "electric 65c" typewriter--with cart--will be sold at auction today by Christie's for an estimated value of $4,000-$6,000. The New York Times reported that the "serial number indicates that Updike probably purchased the typewriter while his family lived in London, from 1968 to 1969, shortly after he wrote Couples. He gave it to one of his daughters about 15 years before his death in 2009. A member of the writer's family is selling the typewriter now and will donate half the proceeds from the sale to the New York Public Library."

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A nook is a NOOK is a Nook. In the Atlantic magazine, James Fallows offered "Six Ways of Looking at the Nook." Among his observations: "B&N was originally pushing an all lower-case spelling of the name, as nook, which just looks odd. It now seems to be getting around the problem by switching to all upper-case, NOOK. I'm sticking to conventional orthography and calling it Nook."

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Huffington Post's Penny C. Sansevieri offered writers a dozen secrets to selling more books at events, including "Make friends: Get to know the bookstore people, but not just on the day of the event. Go in prior and make friends, tell them who you are and maybe even hand them your flier or bookmark (or a stack if you can)."

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GraphicNovelReporter.com lists its second annual Hottest Graphic Novels of Summer list, which is divided into adult fiction, adult nonfiction, teens, tweens and kids.

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Book trailer of the day: Hidden Wives by Claire Avery (Forge Books). Avery is a pseudonym for sisters Mari Hilburn, an attorney, and Michelle Poche, a journalist and screenwriter.

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Publisher trailer of the day: the Medallion Mondays series, whose cast are staff members of Medallion Press, St. Charles, Ill. The videos have 20 episodes that parody life at the press.

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At Algonquin Books:

Effective October 1, Michael Taeckens will be promoted to director of online and paperback marketing. He has been with the company for 10 years and is director of publicity.

Kelly Bowen is being promoted to publicity manager. She joined the company earlier this year after working in Simon & Schuster's publicity department.

On July 15, Megan Fishmann joins the publicity department. She has worked at the Virginia Quarterly Review and in the Random House publicity department.

BookExpo America was a little different this year for us and for many other fans of Art Carson: for the first time in many years, the always-cheerful figure at Ingram was not in the house.

Before his retirment, Carson attended 39 consecutive ABA and BEAs and was mostly recently a sales rep for higher education as well as a liaison between Ingram's IT people and the sales force. May 28 was his last day at Ingram, after what he called "a 46-year career serving booksellers."

In 1963, he began work at Raymar Book Corp., the Southern California wholesaler that was bought by Ingram in 1976. His first task in the warehouse was repricing Random House Modern Library titles to $3.95 to $3.45.

"It's been interesting going from the days when it was great if you could get books in three to four days to now when people call to complain that the next-day delivery is coming in the afternoon rather than the morning," Carson said.

"Now it's no question we're at a crossroads," he continued. "I love booksellers and I believe that those who are connected with local and national and global communities will continue to do well in whatever form the book takes."

Carson has one more major honor coming from Ingram, which does a huge business in shipping all kinds of products via barges across the country. In the fall, the company will christen an Ingram towboat the Arthur J. Carson. Only three other Ingram book people have received this honor: former CEOs Phil Pfeffer, Steve Mason and Lee Synnott. The boat has an owner's stateroom and will feature a picture of Carson. "It'll cruise the upper Mississippi, the Ohio and Illinois rivers," Carson noted. "I'll be able to track it via the Internet."

Speaking of shipping, Carson said he has "one tip for people retiring: if you own a pickup truck, announce you sold it. If you have one, everyone assumes you have the time and means to move their stuff. I've already moved a washer, dryer and refrigerator."

Besides, Carson would rather spend his new free time differently. Like so many officially retired book people, he plans to stay active and will do some projects for Ingram and others under his new shingle, AC Connections.

He may be reached at acarson9@gmail.com or 707-319-1269.--John Mutter

 

Michael Perry, author of Coop, reports from his road trip:

This update is being written Monday noonish from a subterranean coffee shop in Brattleboro, Vt. Coffee shops are my home away from home when I am on the road. Given the right mix of vibe, scruff and--above all--good coffee, I can type merrily, merrily for days and days. Due to the heat of the backroom roaster, this shop is currently equipped with a barn fan, a homey touch that reminds me of my father's milkhouse on a summer's day and furthermore supplies a soothing white noise upon which to float my head. Plus, the coffee here hums the way it should.

I have spent most of my tenure here on a chair in the corner working on the next two books (another memoir and a Young Adult novel) (details not forthcoming) (not because I am coquettish but because I am tangled in a thicket of tangents). I am in the Heavy Lifting stage, an unpretty struggle in which I attempt to conjure interconnections and establish Forward Progress. I have made above average progress in part because this coffee shop does not offer wi-fi access, and as far as I am concerned they would be justified in surcharging for this privilege.

My keyboard victories tend to be teensy, and today's came in the form of a song lyric. I have been working on a duet to be sung with my longtime friend and recent co-worker Molly Otis (she scorches a red-hot violin on behalf of the Long Beds) (back when we first met she was doing this). Between stretches of working on the books today, I took brief breaks to chisel at the final line of "Long Road to You" and eventually arrived at the following decision:

Our scrapbook hearts
Are all faded and pressed
We got an old gray love
That beats in our chests
Beating bright in our chests

Someone please alert ASCAP.

Songwriting is a means of relief when I'm on an extended prose-writing jag. Moving across the room to pick up the guitar allows me to break things up without shutting down the relevant brain patches.

What has this to do with bookselling?  Although the connections are rarely overt, I've written here about how the books and music intertwine. I also frequently perform at venues in which I come out and perform a book-based humorous monologue for an hour and then the band comes out to join me for an hour. We've even played several literary festivals--I appear as Author by Day and Bandleader by Night. Demonstrating that they, too, understand handselling, my record label--Amble Down Records--has done a great job of promoting the books and music in combination by arranging distribution terms with independent booksellers and even having us play a showcase at the Midwest Booksellers Association. Last but not least, HarperPerennial allowed us a Tiny Pilot page in the back of the Coop paperback.

I hoped a long time ago I might one day support myself as a writer. Happily the job description has grown to include D chords, an impressive accretion of Super 8 TripRewards points and Monday mornings spent typing in far-flung coffee shops. It also includes a clear-eyed approach to sales and marketing, no matter how humbly executed. And unless poor health or Oprah intervenes, I shall continue on this trail, happy to shake hands, sign books and tote a box of CDs in my rental car from one little bookstore to the next.

See you there.

Tomorrow on Ellen: Tori Spelling, author of Uncharted Territori (Gallery, $25, 9781439187715/1439187711).

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Tomorrow night on the Daily Show: Connie Mariano, author of The White House Doctor: My Patients Were Presidents--A Memoir (Thomas Dunne, $25.99, 9780312534837/0312534833).

Deadline.com featured "some early photos of the 600 fans starting to line up today for Thursday's Eclipse premiere at the Nokia Theater for a glimpse of the cast of this 3rd pic in the Twilight Saga.... About 350 Twi-Hards already were cleared through security to camp out at 6 a.m. PT Thursday in the L.A. Live plaza located outside the Staples Center until the premiere."

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Warner Bros. is developing Glen David Gold's novel Carter Beats the Devil, with Jon Shestack (Ghosts of Girlfriends Past) producing. Variety reported that the project "had previously been in development at Paramount, which had optioned the property in 2002 for Tom Cruise and Paula Wagner to produce. Warners has tapped Michael Gilio to adapt the novel with an eye toward focusing on the magician's skills and abilities to deceive."

 

Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall won the inaugural £25,000 (US$37,037) Walter Scott Prize for historical fiction. BBC News reported that the book was praised by the judging panel as "compulsively readable" during a ceremony at Sir Walter Scott's home in Abbotsford, Scottish Borders. The Duke and Duchess of Buccleuch, descendants of Scott, sponsored the prize.

"This is as good as the historical novel gets--immersive, constantly engaging, beautifully crafted, and compulsively readable," the judges added. "Mantel's empathy for, and assimilation of, her world is so seamless and effortless as to be almost disturbing."

The 2010 Summer Okra Picks--"great Southern books, fresh off the vine," sponsored by the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance--are:

Fiction

Backseat Saints by Joshilyn Jackson (Grand Central Publishing)
By Accident by Susan Kelly (Pegasus Books)
Countdown by Deborah Wiles (Scholastic Press)
The Eternal Ones by Kirsten Miller (Razorbill)
The Improper Life of Bezellia Grove by Susan Gregg Gilmore (Shaye Areheart Books)
On Folly Beach by Karen White (NAL)
The Secret Child by Marti Healy (Design Group Press)

Nonfiction

Big Appetite: My Southern-Fried Search for the Meaning of Life by Sam McLeod (Touchstone)
The Blueberry Years: A Memoir of Farm and Family by Jim Minick (Thomas Dunne Books)
The Food, Folklore, and Art of Lowcountry Cooking: A Celebration of the Foods, History, and Romance Handed Down from England, Africa, the Caribbean, France by Joseph Earl Dabney (Cumberland House)
Freedom Summer: The Savage Season That Made Mississippi Burn and Made America a Democracy by Bruce Watson (Viking Books)
Oraien Catledge: Photographs by Oraien E. Catledge (University Press of Mississippi)

Selected new titles appearing next week:

Private by James Patterson and Maxine Paetro (Little, Brown, $27.99, 9780316096157/0316096156) follows an investigation firm run by a former CIA agent.

Ice Cold: A Rizzoli & Isles Novel by Tess Gerritsen (Ballantine, $26, 9780345515483/034551548X) brings a medical examiner and a homicide detective together to solve a grisly murder and several disappearances.

In the Name of Honor by Richard North Patterson (Holt, $26, 9780805087741/0805087745) is a military courtroom drama involving a lieutenant accused of murdering his commanding officer.


Now in paperback:

Conquest of the Useless: Reflections on the Making of Fitzcarraldo by Werner Herzog (Ecco, $24.99, 9780061575532/0061575534).

Her Fearful Symmetry by Audrey Niffenegger (Scribner, $15, 9781439169018/1439169012).

Resilience: Reflections on the Burdens and Gifts of Facing Life's Adversities by Elizabeth Edwards (Broadway, $15, 9780767931564/0767931564).

 

Virtuoso writing is the goal of every serious writer, and Priscilla Long proposes that attaining such a goal (or, at the very least, lifting work to a higher level) requires one thing: commitment. "Writing every day is the key to becoming a writer," she advises. Becoming a virtuoso writer, she assures us, is a simple matter of practice, practice and more practice. "Neuroscience and cognitive psychology have landed with both feet in the practice-makes-perfect school," she notes as she sets out an array of methods to improve our writing and productivity.

Excuses about lack of time, failure of inspiration and bad moods cut no ice with Long. Just jump in and try a few of these exercises for a mere 15 minutes, she recommends, to see that the process can be a pleasure; inspiration arrives in unexpected ways; and bad moods can be put to good use. Well-organized, clearly written and jargon-free chapters ("Writing with Language" and "Writing to See" are two examples) are bursting with helpful ideas for both new and more experienced writers; each ends with a section of "Hands-on Tips" designed to put those ideas to work.

Scattered throughout are nuggets of wisdom gathered from Long's years of studying and teaching as well as from her own writing. Setting those nuggets in the context of really good examples makes "Form exists to intensify meaning," and "Concrete diction makes writing more visual" viscerally memorable. Although the primary focus of this guide remains the writers Long aims to help, she does include enough examples of what she considers good writing to show excellent taste across a wide spectrum and to inspire respect and confidence in readers.

The proof is in the pudding for any guide purporting to help us, though, and I took the plunge to try a few of the many exercises Long provides. I unearthed an old short story and tested some of the tips offered in "How to Open," about the critical importance of the first-read part of a story. I can report that the exercises worked beautifully. Long's sly warning that in her book I wouldn't find "a rant against the punctuation errors proliferating like rats in the attic as we speak," nonetheless did alert me to pay special attention to that issue in my long-neglected story. As Long wisely counsels, "Do not accept advice if it doesn't feel right." Her advice here--smart, sensible and supportive--felt very right to me.--John McFarland

Shelf Talker: A well-organized and immensely helpful guide for writers at all levels to jump-start their creativity, refine their work and approach the realm of virtuosos.