For her WOR show, Joan Hamburg last week traveled down the Shore to McCloone's Pier House in Long Branch, N.J., where she spent an hour interviewing authors Mary Higgins Clark and daughter Carol Higgins Clark. Then she spoke with some local business owners--including Rita Maggio of BookTowne, Manasquan, flanked by the Clarks--who talked about what customers are looking for and how to make small businesses work.
Amazon is introducing audio and video elements for its Kindle apps for the iPad and iPhone. So far, the Bookseller reported, the Kindle has some 10 titles that can be read or heard. Bill Newlin, publisher at Avalon Travel, told the magazine, "In the new Kindle Edition with audio/video of Rick Steves' London, the embedded walking tours allow customers to listen to Rick as they explore the sites of London. Rick's narration adds depth to the reader's experience, while listeners can follow the routes more easily with the text."
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One of the attractions of being a bookseller, according to Roger Page, who owns Island Books on Mercer Island, Wash., with his wife, Nancy Page, is hearing stories of customers and how they relate to stories in books. "When you sit in a bookstore, that's what you hear all day long," he told the Seattle Times. "The variety you experience is unlike any other place on Earth. You can be talking to a man about trains, and the next second you're talking to a teenager about vampires."
Island Books recently won the annual Mercer Island Rotary Citizen Achievement award for the store's contribution to the community and was cited for creating an "oasis of reading," which includes having "book nights for groups, donations to many causes (especially schools and literacy), book clubs, writing contests and one of the biggest Harry Potter parties west of the Mississippi," the paper added.
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In an impassioned celebration of libraries in the Huffington Post, Carol Fitzgerald of Bookreporter.com gave advice on what to do to fight the proposals by many local governments to cut library services--or in the case of her hometown, Cedar Grove, N.J., to cut the library system entirely.
"Write your Senators impassioned letters on what libraries have meant and mean to you today. Talk about how important all libraries--school, public and college--are to this country and how awful it will be when they start closing or experience devastating reductions in services. The more personal the note, the more effective.... Also, consider writing an Op-Ed piece or other article for your local paper."
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In a related sad vein, LosingLibraries.org has a map of the "big (awful) picture" showing libraries that have had layoffs, branch closures, multiple types of cuts and more.
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The challenge faced by independent businesses, which must
compete with online retailers who do not have to collect sales tax, was
explored by the Milwaukee, Wis., Journal Sentinel.
Lanora Hurley, owner of the Next
Chapter Bookshop, Mequon, "has mixed feelings about a law enabling
states to collect from out-of-state retailers. 'I'm not one for a lot of
government regulation,' Hurley said. But at the same time, she's not
happy that book buyers can shop with online retailers such as Amazon and
not pay sales tax," the Journal Sentinel wrote.
Book trailer of the day: The Ghost of Milagro Creek by Melanie Sumner (Algonquin).
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Intrepid Group, the Fort Collins, Colo., publishing fulfillment center, has added Springflex Shoes, a specialty footwear company, to diversify its client base. The company works with 30 publishers and has a combined 3,500 titles. This month it upgraded its order fulfillment software.
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Stuart Brent, legendary bookseller in Chicago, died last week at the age of 98. He founded his first bookstore in 1946 "with the help of a $300 GI loan," the Chicago Tribune noted. A few years later, he opened Stuart Brent Books, which became a Chicago institution and closed in 1996.
The Chicago blog of the University of Chicago Press called Brent "a bookseller of the most independent sort: well-read, opinionated, and willing (or more) to shape his customers' reading habits. Over the course of his fifty years in the business, bookselling became ever more concentrated in the mall stores, superstores, and virtual stores of billion dollar corporations. The books stocked in Stuart Brent Books were chosen by a personality, not an algorithm."
"He was proud of his roots on the city's old West Side, where his Ukrainian parents taught Mr. Brent--then called Samuel Brodsky--folk tales, stories of shtetl life, and intellectual debate," the Chicago Sun-Times wrote. "Mr. Brent's love of reading came from his father, who devoured Joseph Conrad, Mark Twain and Yiddish authors."
In 1974, Sun-Times writer Tom Fitzpatrick wrote that entering Stuart Brent Books was "like walking into a whirlwind. Brent is a man of moods, of violent enthusiasms and equally violent aversions. He is a man who will not keep his opinions to himself.... a gadfly who demands the best from himself and everyone around him."
Brent had a TV show and also wrote a memoir, Seven Stairs, named after his first bookstore. In a foreword for Seven Stairs, Saul Bellow wrote: "Stuart Brent is the Orpheus of Chicago booksellers, ready to challenge hell itself to bring a beautiful book back to Chicago and the light of its reading lamps."
Today on NPR's Fresh Air: Linda Greenhouse, co-author of Before Roe v. Wade: Voices that Shaped the Abortion Debate Before the Supreme Court's Ruling (Kaplan Publishing, $26, 9781607146711/1607146711).
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Today on NPR's Talk of the Nation: Jonathan Weiner, author of Long for This World: The Strange Science of Immortality (Ecco, $27.99, 9780060765361/0060765364).
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Tonight on the Colbert Report: John Waters, author of Role Models (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $25, 9780374251475/0374251479).
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Tomorrow on a repeat of 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 Tavis Smiley: Bret Easton Ellis, author of Imperial Bedrooms (Knopf, $24.95, 9780307266101/0307266109).
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Tomorrow on the Glenn Beck Show: Brad Thor, author of Foreign Influence (Atria, $26.99, 9781416586593/1416586598).
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Tomorrow night on the Late Show with David Letterman: Jonathan Alter, author of The Promise: President Obama, Year One (Simon & Schuster, $28, 9781439101193/1439101191).
An ongoing saga surrounding the troubled film version of J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit has taken yet another dramatic plot turn. Deadline.com reported that producer Peter Jackson, who said a month ago that he would not step in to replace Guillermo del Toro as director (Shelf Awareness, June 1, 2010), has apparently decided to direct two installments of The Hobbit.
"His deal is being negotiated right now with Warner Bros., New Line, and MGM," Deadline.com wrote. "He will shortly take the reins over from Guillermo del Toro, after Jackson extricates himself from other project obligations that caused Jackson and manager Ken Kamins to initially deny he would direct. While Jackson’s camp has been tight-lipped, I’m told that the case is being made to MGM's owners to loosen the purse strings and make the movies happen. The impetus for these talks is that Jackson will be the director of both of The Hobbit films, which will be shot back-to-back in his New Zealand backyard."
Ian Brown won the Ontario government's $20,000 (US$19,307) Trillium Book Award for his memoir, The Boy in the Moon. The National Post reported this is "the third major prize the book has scooped up since it was published by Random House Canada last year. Already this year it has won the $40,000 B.C. National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction and the $25,000 Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction." In the French-language category, Ryad Assani-Razaki was honored for his
short story collection Deux Cercles
Karen Solie won the $10,000 Trillium poetry prize for her third
collection, Pigeon, and Michèle Matteau took the French-language poetry award for Passerelles.
From last week's Indie bestseller lists, available at IndieBound.org, here are the recommended titles, which are also Indie Next Great Reads:
Hardcover
Captivity by Deborah Noyes (Unbridled Books, $25.95, 9781936071630/1936071630). "Beautifully written, with frequent surprises in plot and character, this novel tells the story of two women meeting at the crux of their untenable, yet inescapable, paths. Noyes reminds us of the importance of pure feelings, regardless of their soiled context, and the reader becomes grateful for the reminder."--Jenn Northington, breathe books, Baltimore, Md.
Bonobo Handshake: A Memoir of Love and Adventure in the Congo by Vanessa Woods (Gotham, $26, 9781592405466/1592405460). "This memoir left me wanting to donate all my money to Friends of Bonobos. The author has captured the spirit of an animal that so many of us knew nothing about. Her writing and research about the civil war in the Congo helps the reader to understand the impact that it has had on the bonobos. I can't wait for this to come out and for people to be made aware of her cause."--Sarah Galvin, The Bookstore Plus, Lake Placid, N.Y.
Paperback
Brains: A Zombie Memoir by Robin Becker (Eos, $13.99, 9780061974052/0061974056). "This is a thinking man's zombie novel, filled with more literary and pop culture allusions than you can shake a dismembered arm at. All the zombie fun and only half the guilt, but plenty of guilty pleasure!"--Bob Brill, Horizon Books, Petoskey, Mich.
For Ages 4 to 8
Barry: The Fish with Fingers by Sue Hendra (Knopf Books for Young Readers, $15.99, 9780375858949/0375858946). "This is an exercise in silliness and laughter! Barry shows all the bored fish of the ocean how many things they could do if they just had fingers! This will be a fun circle time book to play with fingers, thinking of all their uses, and practicing wiggling and tickling!"--Katherine Fergason, Bunch of Grapes Bookstore, Vineyard Haven, Mass.
[Many thanks to IndieBound and the ABA!]
Think of a Number by John Verdon (Crown, $25, 9780307588920/0307588920, July 6, 2010)
Opening lines of a book we want to read:
Jason Strunk was by all accounts an inconsequential fellow, a bland thirty-something, nearly invisible to his neighbors--and apparently inaudible as well, since none could recall a single specific thing he'd ever said. They couldn’t even be certain that he'd ever spoken. Perhaps he'd nodded, perhaps said hello, perhaps muttered a word or two. It was hard to say.
All expressed a conventional initial amazement, even a temporary disbelief, at the revelation of Mr. Strunk's obsessive devotion to killing middle-aged men with mustaches and his uniquely disturbing way of disposing the bodies: cutting them into manageable segments, wrapping them colorfully, and mailing them to local police officers as Christmas presents.--Selected by Marilyn Dahl
The following is a guest column by Emily Pullen, who slings books for Skylight Books in Los Angeles. She has worked
for independent bookstores since finishing college in 2004 and runs the
blog Corpus Libris. She is on the Emerging Leaders Council and the
Bookseller Advisory Council for the ABA. She believes that now is an
absolutely fascinating time to be alive and she is unequivocally
confident that indies will evolve, survive and thrive.
About a year ago, I won a Sony PRS-505 eReader in a contest sponsored by Unbridled Books and NetGalley. I was gung-ho at first, but realized quickly that my Mac-exclusive home presented a challenge. I needed to delve into software and hardware and compatibility before I could read any books. I discovered an open source software called Calibre, which helped a little bit. Or I could use a PC at work. But I still had to try pretty hard to get content I wanted onto my eReader.
My enthusiasm waned, and I haven't read a lot on it since. But I obtained content other ways. I've checked out e-books from the library, downloaded galleys from NetGalley and HarperCollins, received PDFs via e-mail, downloaded free titles from the public domain and purchased a literary magazine from its website.
I have noticed that when I read on the device, my attention span is somewhat short. I rarely read for more than an hour--usually about 20 minutes. It's not because it is uncomfortable for my eyes or my hands. Instead I just don't get as immersed. For that reason, I've had more success reading short stories than I've had reading longer works.
Recently I downloaded a galley of Orion You Came and You Took All My Marbles from NetGalley. It is the first full-length book on my eReader that I genuinely wanted to read (rather than something I was willing to read in order to try out the reader). For the most part, it was a good reading experience, and it resulted in a shelf talker in the store (the ultimate measure of the success of a galley!). However, a few interesting things happened while I was reading.
First, as I was getting more and more absorbed in the book and returning to it day after day, it started to feel strange that I didn't have a distinct visual image to go with the book when I picked it up. Somehow I didn't feel the usual emotional connection to the text. I was tempted to print out an image of the cover and tape it to my eReader. Did that need arise because I like to glean information about others from what they read, and I was giving off no visible indicators? Or perhaps because my memory is mostly a visual beast? I'm the one my coworkers come to when a customer says, "I saw it in your window a week ago, the cover was blue with an orange flower on it...." Ask me where in the store I saw a book two weeks ago, and I can tell you. Often I can even remember which section I saw a book incorrectly shelved in months ago. But ask me about content that I read online yesterday, and I have difficulty telling you where I read it. Google Reader, a website, Twitter, an e-mail, a Facebook link--the content comes from so many places that it tends to blur together. I don't know if that's an effect of it being digital (and hence less tangible) or if it's just a personal tic. I'm leaning towards the former, especially after reading Nicholas Carr's excerpt from Wired magazine that I'm sure many of you have already encountered ("The Web Shatters Focus, Rewires Brain").
The other odd thing happened as I was nearing the end of the book. Rather than having a physical (and tangible) measure of being near the end that one has with a printed book, I had only "Page 260 of 270." Ten pages left, I thought. But it turned out that there were a couple of blanks, an acknowledgement page, an author bio and info on the publisher and the book design. I breezed through the final page/paragraph not knowing that it was the last page! And somehow, it deflated the feeling you get when you finish a book. It's not that the ending was unsatisfying--it's that I didn't realize it was coming until it was past. I don't think that's ever happened to me with a physical book.
For now, I'm more inclined to use my reader for shorter works and for gleaning. Reading in paper (book) form still has a greater impact on me--I'm likely to retain more of what I read on it. I doubt I will ever be completely converted to digital content, even though I believe in its potential, and I think the place where I work will always be a book store first, and a "content provider" second.
But the book world is changing! Already some people read books exclusively on their iPhones. Others are curious but want to wait until the devices are better. Still others may think, "I'm on a computer all day at work--why would I want to read books on one as well?" Finally, there are undoubtedly diehards out there who will never in a million years consider reading a book that doesn't have paper pages you can turn.
Change will continue, and I want to consider long and hard where my place in it will be. Let's keep this conversation going.
