Net book sales fell 1.3% to $1.5 billion in July, as reported by 87 publishers to the Association of American Publishers. For the year to date, sales have risen 8.1% to $5.7 billion.

As usual each month this year, e-book sales have risen dramatically. For the year to date, e-book sales are up 191% to $219.5 million although the rate of increase slowed slightly in July.

 

Category	Sales in millions	% change
E-books	$40.8 million	150.2%
Downloaded audiobooks	$6.6 million	38.4%
University press hardcover	$6 million	20.9%
Professional books	$123.8 million	5%
K-12/El-Hi	$729.9 million	4.2%
Higher education	$926.4 million	0.2%
Children's/YA	$50 million	-1.7%
University press paperback	$7.8 million	-2%
Adult paperback	$111.1 million	-10.1%
Adult mass market	$60.6 million	-11%
Religious books	$37.4 million	-11.9%
Adult hardcover	$74.1 million	-15.2%
Hardcover children's/YA	$45.1 million	-19.1%
Physical audiobooks	$8.7 million	-35.6%

 

 

 

Congratulations to sweet pea Flaherty, who is buying King's Books, Tacoma, Wash. Flaherty, who has worked at the store for more than seven years, told the News Tribune that he would make only minor changes at the store, including increasing the stock of new books and instituting new outreach programs to schools. Resident cats Atticus (in photo with Flaherty) and Miko will remain! Current owners are Pat McDermott and John Schoppert.

The article includes a long q&a. Our favorite answer was a question about buying used books: Flaherty said, "You never know what's going to walk through the door. Last week, I got seven books on weaving. Our collection ebbs and flows. A year ago we had the best railroad section--it was a lucky buy. You just never know. We also get books on Inuit footwear."

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In Bookselling This Week, ABA chief operating officer Len Vlahos recounted his recent trip to New Zealand and Australia, where he spoke at two conferences and visited a range of bookstores. One of many interesting notes: new Australian Booksellers Association executive director Joel Becker is from Detroit and worked at Borders when it was an Ann Arbor indie.

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Book trailer of the day: Man in the Woods by Scott Spencer (Ecco).

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Cool idea of the day: Although reading contests for kids have been a longtime industry staple, Watchung Booksellers, Montclair, N.J., sponsored its first-ever adult reading contest. The Montclair Times reported that 27 "compulsive readers submitted lists of what they had read from July 1 to September 7 to be judged in six categories: most books read, most eclectic, most creative, most humorous, most international, and most useful. Thirteen people placed in the categories."

Dana Jennings, the overall winner, read 61 books and was crowned "King of the Readers." Jennings is a New York Times writer whose latest book, What a Difference a Dog Makes: Big Lessons on Life, Love and Healing from a Small Pooch, is coming out in November from Doubleday.

According to the bookstore's owner, Margot Sage-EL, Jennings's list was "very eclectic, including lots of poetry and graphic novels, and his presentation was creative, a paper-clipped set of index cards with books listed with reviews."

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Northeastern University's Huntington News profiled several of Boston's "small, unique bookstores that give their communities character, " including Trident Booksellers and Café, Commonwealth Books and Brattle Book Shop.

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"What will Amazon.com's bookstore of the future look like?" asked TechFlash, which examined a recently granted patent for clues and speculated that "people may have to pay if they want to preview excerpts of a book before deciding whether to buy it. The patent, which lists Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos among its inventors, envisions a system in which consumers 'pay different amounts to view portions of content from the electronic form of a work,' including individual chapters, pages, even words." The patent also outlines the option for "letting people apply the preview fee they paid to the purchase of a book."

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Amazon released an upgraded version of its Kindle app for Android, which allows readers "to search for words or phrases in the text of an e-book, the ability to add notes to an e-book and synchronize those notes between devices, and integration with third-party services to retrieve more information about whatever you're reading," PC World reported, adding that highlighting text "will bring up results in Wikipedia and Dictionary.com, all without leaving the app. The new Kindle for Android also features content from Shelfari."

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Bookeen has introduced the Cybook Orizon e-book reader, featuring "multi-touch display with improved contrast," Electronista, reported, noting that the company "claims its touchscreen implementation does not compromise the display readability, even in direct sunlight. Multi-touch gestures can be used to change pages, annotate, highlight text, or adjust the character size."

Customers in European markets are the focus of the Orizon and "French customers will have the widest range of content available immediately following the initial launch, with 25,000 titles from 185 publishers. The device will be released in many other European countries, such as Italy and Spain, by the end of the year," Electronista wrote.

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The Wall Street Journal surveyed book pricing in France, where a bill has been proposed to allow publishers to set the retail price of e-books. E-books are not covered by the French law that limits discounting of printed books to no more than 5%.

"France has long believed that a book is not just business," Hervé Gaymard, who has published research on France's fixed book prices, told the Journal. "It's a cultural identity."

France's competition authority has recommended a two-year wait before enacting any e-pricing laws to see how the e-market evolves. E-books currently represent less than 1% of book sales in France but are growing.

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The Portland, Ore., TriMet bus driver who was caught on video reading his Kindle while driving (Shelf Awareness, September 23, 2010) has been fired. Company spokeswoman Mary Fetsch said Lahcen Qouchbane was terminated for "posing an immediate threat to public safety and violation of district policy," according to Fox12-TV.

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Global design consultancy IDEO is asking a question for our times: "Is interactive fiction the future of books?" The Guardian's Keith Stuart noted that IDEO has produced a video "to show three possible book-reading applications for tablet computers and e-book readers: Nelson, Coupland and Alice. It's the third (from 3:03 onwards) that interests us. Alice, the narrative informs us, is 'an interactive reading experience that invites the reader to engage with the story-telling process.... Stories unfold and develop through the reader's active participation.' "

While he has some reservations, Stuart sees "definite possibilities, though, for a new breed of novels, and a coming generation of writers, to play with the e-book format and develop lots of new interactive ideas.... I'm not sure this concept should be applied to the canon of printed literature already available. I don't want to have to hang around in Clerkenwell to unlock some extra info on Bill Sykes, or play a balloon piloting game to ruin the beginning of Enduring Love. We all know that imagination is the ultimate form of narrative interactivity. But I quite like the idea of fresh novels that allow us to use the functionality of the technology to open up new elements. It's not sacrilege, is it? It's just... new."

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Danielle Steel does not write romance novels. The bestselling author of 113 books that have sold more than half a billion copies told CBS Early Show co-anchor Maggie Rodriguez that her books are "not really about romance. It's an element in life. But I think of romance novels as more of a category, and I write about the situations we all deal with. Loss and war and illness and jobs and careers, and good things, bad things, crimes, whatever. And I really write more about the human condition."

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At the end of the year, Sean Concannon is leaving the rep group Parson Weems to go back to school, where he will study computer science and "the technology that drives that publishing business." He aims to combine that with his 13 years of experience in publishing to make independent publishing and bookselling "more cost effective, profitable and innovative."

While at school, Concannon will provide consulting services on sales, digital marketing, remainders and more. He also plans to write book reviews and for book trade publications. He may be contacted at 917-284-8737 or at sean.concannon@gmail.com.

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Changes at Bellevue Literary Press:

Erika Goldman is now publisher and continues as editorial director.
Leslie Hodgkins is now associate editor. He was formerly assistant editor.
Caroline Marris has joined the press as editorial assistant.

 

Despite the many challenges to the book and booksellers, the New Atlantic Independent Booksellers Association fall conference held September 20-22 in Atlantic City, N.J., was a solid, enthusiastic event.

Tom Williams of Mendham Books, Mendham, N.J., spoke for many members when he called it a "wonderful show." NAIBA president Lucy Kogler of Talking Leaves bookstore, Buffalo, N.Y., said "the turnout was wonderful, the vibe exceptional." And Chris Kerr of Parson Weems also spoke positively of "a good vibe."

A highlight of the show was when Carla Cohen and Barbara Meade, owners of Politics and Prose, Washington, D.C., accepted their Legacy Award to sustained standing ovations. The range of authors at breakfast, lunch and the banquet was impressive and included Adam Gopnik, Patti Smith, T.J. English, James Howe and delightful first novelist Tea Obreht. The show was held midweek for the first time, which apparently was not an issue.

At the combination breakfast and annual meeting, Lucy Kogler promised to make NAIBA "a more nimble organization" during her term as president and said the board is working on some changes in bylaws.

Reflecting on the recent deaths of Joe Drabyak of Chester County Book & Music Company, West Chester, Pa., and the former NAIBA president, as well as rep Sam Herman, Kogler called this "a sorrowful late summer for our region." She said that "few if any other booksellers rival Joe's passion for books and his gift for handselling." Speaking of Sam and his wife, Adele, she said, "they were devoted to each other and their passions overflowed into passion for selling books to us."

She added that she had been "worried that the sorrow of the year might cast a pall on events," but found instead that Drabyak's and Herman's deaths "make us more dedicated to what it is we do and need to continue to do because if independent bookselling goes away, all we've done is for naught." Kogler also announced a new award in Drabyak's name that will recognize booksellers' "creative promotions."

Speaking to NAIBA members about bookselling issues, American Booksellers Association chief operating officer Len Vlahos, an ardent Mets fan, also offered an unusual tribute to Drabyak, who was a fervent Phillies fan. The two of them, along with Carl Lennertz of HarperCollins and Craig Popelars of Algonquin and Workman, regularly exchanged baseball haiku with each other. Vlahos remembered especially receiving taunting e-mails from Drabyak when the Mets collapsed at the end of the season in both 2007 and 2008. Despite all that, at the NAIBA annual meeting, he recited the following:

In Joe's memory,
I will steel my nerve and say, gasp,
Let's go, Phillies!

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At the Radical Bookselling panel, Rob Dougherty, manager of the Clinton Book Shop, Clinton, N.J., said that "not good things" are going on at Borders and Barnes & Noble, so that for independent booksellers, "now is the time to strike. We have an opportunity and we're not taking advantage of it and that kills me."

At the Writing Book Reviews session, Wendy Sheanin of Simon & Schuster emphasized repeatedly that bookseller reviews of books--including everything from several lines sent to her in e-mail to Indie Next reviews--"matter more" in-house than what editors and just about anyone else says.

Sheanin encouraged booksellers to write reviews immediately after reading the book, when their reactions were fresh, and not wait until pub date, months later. And she suggested booksellers not be too formal: "I prefer genuine gushing with shorter words if that's your natural cadence."

For her part, Margot Sage-EL, owner of Watchung Booksellers, Montclair, N.J., said customers want booksellers to recommend books. "We don't necessarily have to have read it ourselves, but it's good to know someone somewhere liked it." She said one of the store's best shelf talkers consists of one word: "Fabulous!" Put that sign on a pile of books, she said, "and it goes." She also said the staff cribs others' reviews, especially from Indie Next, because having "more voices" in the store is good.

She noted, too, that the point of a review is "not just to praise or lambaste a book but to help customers find the right book."

Sage-EL remembered Joe Drabyak's "ESPN" formulation of the ideal shelf talker, as noted in an article in Bookselling This Week earlier this year: in 50 words or less, a shelf talker should be erudite, succinct, personable and noteworthy.

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Among other highlights:

A roomful of booksellers and press standing and moving with toilet paper masks over their eyes, at the direction of Rob Dougherty, who claimed to have videotaped the embarrassing display.

Len Vlahos during a breakfast discussion of e-books and e-readers: "We're the one-click generation."--John Mutter

 

Today on Fresh Air: Nick Hornby, whose Juliet, Naked (Riverhead, $15, 9781594484773/1594484775), has just come out in paperback.

 

Kimberly Peirce (Boys Don't Cry, Stop-Loss) will direct Wicked Lovely for Universal Pictures and Vince Vaughn's Wild West Picture Show Productions. Caroline Thompson is writing the script, which is based on the first book in Melissa Marr's Wicked Lovely series, Deadline.com reported.

 

Chinua Achebe has won the 2010 Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize, the $300,000 award that recognizes cultural figures for having an "unprecedented impact in their chosen fields." Nigerian writer Achebe, best known for Things Fall Apart, was honored for his impact on "the international diaspora of African fiction and voices." He will receive the prize and a silver medallion on October 27 in New York City.

"When I was a boy, growing up in Nigeria, becoming a novelist was a far-away dream," Achebe said. "Now it is a reality for many African writers, not just myself. The Gish Prize recognizes the long journey my fellow colleagues and I have taken, and I am proud and grateful for that."

 

Dogfight, a Love Story by Matt Burgess (Doubleday, $24.95, 9780385532983/0385532989, September 21, 2010)

Opening lines from a book we want to read:

 

Little Round Pills

In the middle of Alfredo Batista's brain there is a tall gray filing cabinet, frequently opened. The drawers are deep, the folders fattened with a lifetime of regrettable moments. There is, tucked away toward the back, a list of women whose phone numbers he never asked for. There are the debts accrued. In the bottom drawer, in separate folders, there are the things he never learned to do.... What else? In the top drawer, there is a file recounting the evening he left the Mets game early, thinking the run deficit insurmountable. There is the why-didn't-I-use-a condom folder. There is--this one's surprisingly thin--the crimes-against-my-brother folder. Alfredo is only nineteen years old, and already his cabinet overflows with files, none of them collecting dust, each one routinely inspected. All it takes is a random word, a face in passing, and a memory blooms, a cabinet drawer slides open. An intracranial research librarian--Alfredo imagines him bespectacled, with frayed pant cuffs and dandruff on his shoulders--waddles over to the open drawer, plucks out the appropriate file, and passes it on to the brain's well-staffed and efficiently run Department of Regret.... --Selected by Marilyn Dahl

 

 

James Swanson is the Edgar Award-winning author of Manhunt: The 12-Day Chase for Lincoln's Killer, which HBO is making into a nine-part miniseries. His new book, Bloody Crimes: The Chase for Jefferson Davis and the Death Pageant for Lincoln's Corpse (Morrow, September 28, 2010), explores the final journeys of the two fallen presidents, and continues the saga he began in Manhunt about the history, consequences and myths of the momentous spring of 1865. Swanson lives in Washington, D.C.

 

On your nightstand now:

61 Hours by Lee Child, Tell No One by Harlan Coben, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, and Unknown Soldiers: The Story of the Missing Men of the First World War by Neil Hanson.

 

Favorite Book When You Were A Child:

The Hardy Boys mystery series. After I read their Detective Handbook, I wanted to be one, and when I was seven years old, I wrote to J. Edgar Hoover about joining the F.B.I. And he wrote back--I still have the letter. Also, Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak.

 

Your top five authors:

Edgar Allan Poe, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Winston Churchill, Truman Capote and Walt Whitman--no matter what the modernists and post-modernists say, "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd" is still the great American poem.

 

Book you've faked reading:

I don't think I've ever lied about reading a book.

 

Book you're an evangelist for:

Neil Hanson's Unknown Soldiers: The Story of the Missing Men of the First World War. This is an astonishing story of thousands of lost men and a heartbreaking history of how they have been remembered. World War I was the most important event of the 20th century, and Unknown Soldiers should be compulsory reading for all military policy makers in Washington. The lesson is not that wars should never be fought, but when we do fight them, our leaders owe it to our soldiers to name the enemy. It also shows how important it is not to waste lives with ill-defined or desultory missions.

 

Book you've bought for the cover:

The Alienist by Caleb Carr. Nothing conjures up old Gotham better than that elegant and mysterious cover photo.

 

Book that changed your life:

Abraham Lincoln's Collected Works. I began reading them as a teenager, and they've led me to write the kind of books I am doing now. The best way to understand Lincoln's political genius is to read his speeches and public documents; the best way to know the man is to read his letters. He was the best writer who ever occupied the White House. President Lincoln actually wrote all of his speeches and public statements. Today's political leaders write none of theirs.

 

Favorite line from a book:

I love first or last paragraphs, or opening or closing sentences, that express the whole feeling of a book. I have to cheat and quote more than one. Carl Sandburg's epic, six-volume biography of Abraham Lincoln concludes with a classic understatement. Sandburg ends the book in Lincoln's tomb: "The prairie years, the war years, were over."

Vincent Bugliosi's opening to Helter Skelter always gives me the chills: "It was so quiet, one of the killers would later say, you could almost hear the sound of ice rattling in cocktail shakers in the homes way down the canyon."

But my favorite is the last passage from Truman Capote's In Cold Blood. The place is the graveyard where the Clutter family lies buried. The scene is an encounter between the lead detective and a girlfriend of teenage victim Nancy Clutter: " 'Good luck,' he called after her as she disappeared down the path, a pretty girl in a hurry, her smooth hair swinging, shining--just such a young woman as Nancy might have been. Then, starting home, he walked toward the trees, and under them, leaving behind him the big sky, the whisper of wind voices in the wind-bent wheat." It's a sad, tender and haunting end to a terrifying book of horrors.

 

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

This is hard to answer. I have a library of more than 10,000 books, and there are a lot I'd like to read again. I suppose James Joyce's The Dead, the novella from Dubliners. At least once a year, I like to read it aloud or listen to it spoken. I love the way it sounds. It is like a poem, or a musical composition. Perfect writing.

 

 

City of Tranquil Light is an enthralling love story about two people, their adopted country and their God--a deceptively straightforward novel told in powerful, profound prose. It's based on the life of Bo Caldwell's maternal grandparents, who were missionaries in China and Taiwan from 1906 to 1961. In melding fiction and truth, we learn about remarkable lives, but also sense that we are discovering what Caldwell herself has learned of life and love and faith. 

In 1906, Will Kiehn feels called to leave his young life as an Oklahoma farmer to go to China, where he falls in love with a fellow missionary, Katherine. They marry and live an eventful life, as one would expect; we're drawn deeply into their lives, the townspeople's lives, the Chinese civil wars and a faith that grows deeper through both tragedies and miracles. 

The North China Plain city of Kuang P’ing Ch'eng, City of Tranquil Light--walled with four gates, in sharp silhouette against the horizon, the air smelling of smoke and the sweet clean scent of ripening winter wheat--is often in Will's mind as he thinks about his life; he's now widowed and living in a retirement home in California, where he reads the Bible in Chinese, more at home with it than English, just as his Chinese name, Kung P'ei Te, seems more a part of him than his legal name. 

On his dresser is a photograph of his Shanghai wedding day in 1908, and his wife's diary, whose pages he now knows as well as his beloved Scriptures. As Will thinks back on the years he spent in China, where he first envisioned himself preaching to huge crowds and baptizing eager converts, never imagining the hardships and sorrows that awaited him, the story unfolds through his reminiscences and Katherine's diary. And what a story it is. "Again and again we were saved by the people we had come to help and carried through by the Lord we had come to serve. I am amazed at His faithfulness; even now our lives there fill me with awe."

Will is a modest man, ordinary, "an unlikely missionary." Katherine is a nurse, and as they settle into the countryside, where the introduction to their new land is swift and brutal, Katherine begins to treat patients. Will, meanwhile, soon questions his calling, and falls ill from both homesickness and shock at witnessing the beheading of three men. He's not encouraged by his evangelistic efforts, but finally has a convert who comes to God by way of the buttons on Will's Chinese jacket. But after a few years, Will stops thinking of China as an interlude, and calls it home. 

In 1916, they have a daughter; a year later she is dead from dysentery; the shipments of medicine that could have saved her had been stolen. One hot day in July, Will is traveling between villages and finds himself at a drowning pool, a place where people dispose of unwanted infants. As he gazes at the bodies, he falls to the ground, overcome finally by exhaustion, grief at Lily's death and the horror of the small bodies. He wakes up in a cell, having been beaten by bandits. Held captive for more than a month, he converses with the bandit chief, Hsiao Lao, who wants Will to heal his son. Will treats the boy, and like the fable of the thorn pulled from the lion's paw (and "Hsiao Lao" means "Laughing Tiger"), his actions will rebound when the bandit chief reappears in most unexpected ways. 

Bandits who decimate villages, soldiers who do the same, famine, drought, floods, war, earthquakes, bloodshed, death, sickness--these lives are abundant in suffering, but short of funds and supplies. In 1928, the country is at war; when soldiers take over their town, Katherine, caring for the wounded, offers the blessings of opium and faith and thanks God for both. The takeover culminates in a heart-stopping scene in their compound, where belief, sacrifice and a surprising gift from God meet. 

Finally, Will and Katherine realize they have to leave China in order to protect the townspeople as the Communists take control. It breaks their hearts, because they are now leaving family. When Will pays one last visit to his daughter's grave, China and God have a parting miracle for him. 

In his 80s, Will remembers what Katherine wrote inside the cover of her Bible: "We often wait for God with hope. But sometimes we must wait for hope... and it always comes." With hope Will finds a peace with unanswered questions, even as he still longs for his wife and his true country. But his life has been and still is colored by unexpected moments of grace and a belief that God's love will never let him go.--Marilyn Dahl

Shelf Talker: A beautiful and moving novel about a missionary couple in China, a story of profound love and faith.

 

 

Where are the flying cars? Okay, the future hasn't turned out quite the way we imagined it might during the middle of the 20th century. In the book trade, it is the present that sometimes feels like it is "beyond our wildest dreams" (the false promise of any future).

But we bookish folk have always toiled in the future, reading ARCs of books that won't be published for months and trying to keep pace with news of the feverish daily changes that engulf us in the form of the latest e-reading devices (no, wait, there's an even better version just out now! And another! And another!) or the biblio-flying car wonders of an Espresso Book Machine soaring through Google's tome cloud. Future. Present. What's the difference?

This week I'm in Denver, Colo., for the Mountains & Plains Independent Booksellers Association Trade Show. It's the third MPIBA show I've covered during my four-plus years as an editor at Shelf Awareness. In preparation, I glanced through my notes from the prior two shows and found that certain themes emerged, the most intriguing one being the gradual shift from a future-focus in 2006 to a present-focus in 2010.

In 2006, what might happen next was on everyone's agenda.

"I don't know what's going to happen. The changes in the next 15 years will make the changes in the last 10 look like nothing," said Dave Weich, who was then at Powell's Books, Portland Ore. At the time, I called it the wisest statement of the weekend. He also noted that Powell's had "sold e-books for six years or so for Adobe Reader, Microsoft Reader, Palm Reader. They account for about 1% of our sales." He projected notable gains in those numbers when the long-anticipated--but then still unrealized--development of a first-rate reading device occurred. "People are committed to their device, not to their desktop computer. Eventually there is going to be an iPod for books; that's when e-books will explode."

Technology was the prevailing theme of MPIBA's 2006 panels, which featured titles like "Essential Technologies: An Overview," "Digital Media Formats and the Independent Bookstore" and "Capturing the I and My Generation (iPods, IMs and MySpace)." During the Digital Media Formats seminar, a panelist used the term "fiber-based books" to describe print editions and the audience laughed... uneasily.

The ever-prescient Carl Lennertz of HarperCollins stressed the need for every bookstore to have a high-speed Internet connection in order to acquire information from and communicate with publishers. "Catalogues may go online in the next five years," he said, adding that publishers were already offering an array of digital POP materials. He stressed the importance of ongoing communication with customers, citing Constant Contact as "the best invention since Above the Treeline." 

"Interactivity" was mentioned a lot in 2006, along with MySpace and Constant Contact. Our vocabulary wasn't ready for words like Facebook, Twitter, Kindle or iPad. Four years ago, the challenge for panelists was to convince 75% of the people in the room that it mattered to be technologically aware and proficient. Now, such a brief time later, good indie booksellers have adapted to technology and the percentages have changed dramatically in those seminar rooms.

At this week's MPIBA trade show, the panels seem to reflect something of a time and attitude shift. Sharing--well, "stealing," to be precise--ideas is an often heard phrase. The future we envisioned four years ago is now; any future envisioned today may just be a car that never flies, so we're concentrating on doing business in the present and sharing ideas.

We're going to work.

Many of this year's MPIBA panel titles reflect this practical approach:

The future is not being ignored by indie booksellers here. It is thoroughly embedded in how they do business and the conversation has branched out. The future, quite literally, is now. The present is prologue. Maybe what we need is a new concept of time. And sorry, still no flying cars. More on MPIBA next week.--Robert Gray (column archives available at Fresh Eyes Now)