In documents filed yesterday in bankruptcy court, Borders said it had reached an agreement in principle with its lenders and the unsecured creditors' committee to amend its bankruptcy financing agreements so that it won't have to close any stores in the near future.
Last week the company said it would begin shutting 51 stores for which landlords had not extended the time allowing Borders to assume or reject leases--since not having the lease extensions would violate the terms of its bankruptcy financing. In the week since then, it had reached agreements with landlords for extensions on 11 stores, bringing the number of stores that might have been closed to 40.
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Are Apple and Amazon "barreling toward a showdown"? CNN Money reported that after June 30, Apple will begin enforcing new iTunes App Store rules prohibiting applications that include "external mechanisms for purchases... such as a 'buy' button that goes to a website to purchase a digital book." The rule places Amazon's popular Kindle app "directly in Apple's crosshairs."
In a blog post cited by CNN, Forrester Research analyst James McQuivey observed that Apple recently, and quietly, "altered its app approval policies in a way that will make publishers much happier. Specifically, Apple has relaxed control over whether apps can access content paid for outside of the App Store’s purchase APIs. The company has also allowed publishers to price however they want, both outside and inside of the app."
He cautioned, however, that "there’s one app that no one is talking about but I believe everyone should have their eye on. It’s the Amazon Kindle app. This app violates even Apple's revised policies and will soon face a day of reckoning when Apple's June 30th deadline for compliance comes up." McQuivey offered Amazon some unsolicited advice:
- Release an updated, compliant App Store app, with a little attitude.
- Release an amazing HTML5 "app" that gives Kindle readers everything Amazon has to offer.
"None of this deals with the hardware side of Amazon’s business," McQuivey added, "where the company is falling far behind rival Barnes & Noble which has two Nook devices that make Amazon's current Kindle crop feel a bit like Palm Pilots."
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Another 42 Angus & Robertson stores in Australia are being shut and 19 A&R stores are being sold, the Sydney Morning-Herald reported. The closings, announced by the bankruptcy administrator for A&R's parent company, REDgroup Retail, will result in the loss of jobs for 519 people.
Since REDgroup Retail declared bankruptcy in February, the administrator has closed the 26 Borders stores in Australia as well as at least 55 A&R stores.
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In a sign of changing times in the book trade, Bertelsmann plans to close Direct Group, its book clubs and direct marketing division, effective June 30, paidContent.org reported. During the past three years, Direct Group had sold most of its international subsidiaries, including Direct Group North America (operating Book of the Month Club and Columbia House), which was acquired by Najafi Companies, the private equity firm currently considering a bid for Borders.
Although niche book clubs like the Progressive Book Club and Conservative Book Club have found some traction in recent years, the business as a whole has diminished substantially. PaidContent.org noted that "as of 2009 the Direct Group book clubs' membership in the United States had shrunk by as much as 75% from its height."
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This month's featured bookseller in Algonquin's Booksellers Rock! series is Emily Crowe, "assistant manager/buyer/bookseller/Big Kahuna" at the Odyssey Bookshop, South Hadley, Mass. Some highlights from the interview:
Strangest question a customer has ever asked: Do you arrange books by size? Because I’m looking for hardcover books about this big [frames a smallish book size with thumbs and index fingers].
Why our store kicks ass: I’d probably have to go with our Topless Tuesday tradition. (Just kidding!) Our staff, plain and simple. They’re the best folks anywhere.
I promise you won’t find this at any other store: There’s a small gold plaque above the toilet in our staff bathroom that bears witness to the fact that Anne Rice Peed Here.
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Cool idea of the day: Club Read, an October weekend retreat for some 200 booklovers that is being sponsored by the New Atlantic Independent Booksellers Association and the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance. The event will be held at the Mariners Landing Resort, Huddleston, Va., and include a dozen authors. NAIBA and SIBA bookstore members are promoting the event to their customers. As the organizers said about those customers: "If they love you for your author events, they'll love you even more for this opportunity of a lifetime."
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The Los Angeles Times profiled "the ironically named the Last Bookstore" and owner Josh Spencer, whose new location "is a mix of old and new." His dream was "to create one giant space where everything I thought was cool would be in one place. Hopefully, other people will come in and share it with me.... We sold more books here in the first three days than we did in an entire month at our last location. It seems to be working, by having a larger space and being on Spring Street, a much heavier foot-traffic area."
The Times noted that Spencer is "trying to remake the idea of the used bookstore with dusty, ancient stock." He said he thinks that "books are going to become sort of like vinyl is now: the province of people who appreciate things that are well made, appreciate craft in graphics and creativity they can feel. I think there's always going to be a great market for books, but it's definitely going to shrink to those who value and enjoy the ritual of browsing through books and holding books and turning pages. That's gradually going to become less and less, as the generations pass. This might be the last generation, I think."
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A fond farewell: The Source featured a video profile of Canadian bookseller Richard Bachmann, former owner of A Different Drummer Books, Burlington, Ont., as he was retiring from the business.
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London's Travel Bookshop in Notting Hill, which gained notoriety as Hugh Grant's workplace in the 1999 film Notting Hill, is on the market, the Kensington & Chelsea Chronicle reported. A spokeswoman for the shop said that the adult children of the current owner--who lives in France--"indicated that they would rather not follow him into the business and so he feels that the continuance of the trade would be best served by selling it on for a new generation to look after one of London's iconic and special bookshops."
Marion Gettleson, an antiques trader on Portobello Road, said: "The news about Travel Bookshop is very unfortunate. However, it's also a great opportunity for the many local people with the necessary means, to buy an iconic bookshop. With goodwill on all sides and sympathetic landlords, the Travel Bookshop surely has a profitable future. Time for action before it's lost."
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Watch this space dept.: Pottermore.com, a mysterious website featuring "a pink holding page with the description 'coming soon' and Rowling’s signature underneath," has been launched by J.K. Rowling. The Bookseller reported that Pottermore.com has sparked rumors that more Harry Potter novels are on the way, but a spokeswoman for Rowling’s PR company Stone Hill Salt said, "It is not another Harry Potter book but we cannot reveal any more at this stage, fans will have to keep an eye on the website. It will be launching soon."
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Spanish design firm Play Studios asked some children for their visions of cities of the future, then "took these ideas and rendered them into pop-up book form. The pop-up book was then beautifully animated to show three different possibilities for our future urban living," Fast Company reported.
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"Wild Thing" by the Troggs, of course. Flavorwire's literary mixtape for Max from Where the Wild Things Are ("Maurice Sendak's ultimate wild child") offers a musical selection for a child who "goes out into the wild to discover something about himself, then returns a changed man--er, boy--able to see the real world differently. When he gets homesick, he climbs back into his bedroom and finds his supper waiting for him after all, still hot, the love of a mother paramount."
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Katharine Quarmby, author of Scapegoat: Why We Are Failing Disabled People, chose her top 10 disability stories for the Guardian. "Although some of the characters are clearly not positive I think it's important to recommend influential books here, rather than the few written by disabled writers seeking to promote positive images that haven't reached the mainstream," she wrote. "It's also interesting to note that there are fewer disabled characters in the canon nowadays, except in children's literature, where there has been a deliberate attempt to promote positive images of disabled children and adults, thanks to activists like Richard Rieser and Susie Burrows."
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Flavorwire showcased a series of illustrations by Alëna Skarina inspired by Kilgore Trout, the science fiction writer who appears in several of Kurt Vonnegut's novels.
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BuzzFeed featured "9 surprising things you didn't know about Edgar Rice Burroughs," noting that Burroughs, "a prolific writer of the early twentieth century, is probably best known for creating Tarzan--but one of his most lasting creations, epic hero John Carter, is coming to life on the big screen in March 2012." If you didn't know who Edgar Rice Burroughs was, that makes 10 things.
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Bookshelf of the day: Boing Boing introduced the Scroll Bookshelf, which "appears to be a design prototype for a new kind of shelf that uses a curled, tensioned metal shelf overlaid with plastic to hold the books in place."
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Book trailer of the day: Eat Naked: Unprocessed, Unpolluted, and Undressed Eating for a Healthier, Sexier You by Margaret Floyd (New Harbinger Publications).
All of us at Shelf Awareness are happy and proud to announce that tomorrow we're launching our first major new product since we started up six years ago. It's Shelf Awareness: Enlightenment for Readers, a twice-weekly e-mail newsletter that will help readers discover new books. 
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Today we celebrate the life and work of James Joyce with myriad Bloomsday festivities worldwide. Check out the 
The film version of The Lovely Bones, adapted from Alice Sebold's novel, earned the dubious distinction of being the most complained about movie in the U.K. last year. The British Board of Film Classification had classified it 12A, though some people "felt a scene in which the character is trapped by the killer was more suited to an 18-rated film," the 
On the one hand, Flashback is a taut near-future thriller about a disgraced homicide detective who's been hired by the father of the victim in the case he couldn't solve back when he was on the Denver police force, and finds himself in the center of a global conspiracy. On the other hand, it's a novel in which one of the most sympathetic characters expresses his heartfelt wish that "the American president... who turned against Israel" had been strung up and hanged from a Washington, D.C., lamppost--with both the character and his creator seemingly oblivious to the horrific racist connotations of such a statement.
