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The Memphis Daily News
offers a "tale of two bookstores": Midtown Books, which recently moved
and has been renamed Downtown Books (succinctly reflecting the change in locale), and Burke's Book Store, which, at 131 years
old, is one of the oldest stores in the country.
After writing to customers and friends about its deep financial
problems earlier this year, Burke's has raised some $20,000 and two
fund raisers have netted $2,200. Owners Corey and Cheryl Mesler, who
have solicited advice from
the Service Corps of Retired Executives, are "more hopeful now," Corey
Mesler told the paper.
A used bookstore, Downtown, owned by Hugh Hollowell, is now located in
the basement of the Memphis Tobacco Bowl, "a smoke shop with a coffee
bar," which allows for a bit of synergy. "Tobacco Bowl already was the
place where customers could pull up a chair, light a smoke, and stay a
while," the paper wrote. "Now, in the still-evolving basement retail
space, they can get lost in a page-turner."
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Barjon's Books
in Billings, Mont., a New Age store whose motto is "a deli for the
mind," is moving to new space four times its current size, according to
the Billings Gazette.
Luckily for the move's logistics, the new location is just 386 feet
away. Concerning the expansion, owner Barbara Shenkel told the
paper, "I just really feel it's right for the downtown and right for
us."
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In October 2007, Barnes & Noble will open a store in Minot, N.D., in the Dakota Square Mall at Highway 2 and 16th Street. The store will stock close to 200,000 book, music, DVD and magazine titles and include a cafe serving Starbucks coffee.
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More about The Black Dahlia, which opens this coming Friday:
Kevin Morrissey, managing editor of Virginia Quarterly Review, tells us that VQR has an essay on its Web site by James Ellroy on the movie and his thoughts on the subject. It appeared in VQR's summer issue and is the afterword to Mysterious Press's tie-in edition.
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Unbridled
Books has launched a podcast called Unbridled Aloud, a series of
half-hour shows produced and hosted by Kay Bonetti Callison, founder of
the American Audio Prose Library, consisting of interviews with
Unbridled authors, book commentary, readings and more. The shows are
available on the publisher's Web side
and other online sites. CDs will also be available. Unbridled hopes
that bookstores and book clubs will use the podcasts so that they and
customers will get to know the house's authors better. "We think it's
much more satisfying and personal in many ways than readers guides,"
Greg Michaelson, co-founder of Unbridled, wrote to us.
The first six shows feature Lise Haines, author of small acts of sex and electricity; Edward Falco, author of Sabbath Night in the Church of the Piranha and Wolf Point; William J. Cobb, author of Goodnight, Texas; Carolyn Turgeon, author of Rain Village; Marc Estrin, author of Golem Song; and Timothy Schaffert, author of The Singing and Dancing Daughters of God.
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Brad Meltzer, who has a background in marketing, advertised his new thriller, The Book of Fate
(Warner, $25.99, 0446530999), on a car in the NASCAR Busch Series race
on Friday, "the first book advertised on the front of a racecar,"
according to today's New York Times. The car finished 32nd; as of this morning the book was running at No. 12 on Amazon.com.
"The best we can do is to be the first at anything, in terms of trying
something new and different," Meltzer told the paper, adding, "What is
spectacular about the book industry is that it has no idea of its own
demographics, no Nielsens, no way to track who is reading your book.
Why would you be foolish and market to just one tiny demographic?"
Celebrating its 30th anniversary, the Book Industry Study Group held
its annual meeting last Friday and welcomed a new executive director,
Michael Healy, editorial director of Nielsen Book Services, who
officially begins October 15 but was on hand for the BISG and BISAC
meetings--and to meet with a range of people in the industry. (About
this, he said, "People have been lining up to tell me what my
priorities should be," adding that this was just "a demonstration of
the commitment of the people who make BISG work.")
Healy called the new job "a natural step" and said it is "an exciting
time to take this position at such an extraordinary organization." He
thanked former executive director Jeff Abraham and others at BISG
for bequeathing him such a strong and financially sound organization.
"There's nothing that urgently needs fixing, which gives me the freedom
to consolidate and innovate," he said.
Among things he would like to do is increase BISG's international profile, promote greater efficiencies and drive more costs out
of the industry, focus on e-commerce (where "there is much to be done")
and monitor Web standards. "We can learn from those in the library
supply chain who are doing interesting and far-sighted things," he
added.
Healy stated that "our industry is at the beginning of a period of
absolutely transforming change" and that "the most powerful driver in
this growth" will be technology. "The emergence of a
new digital supply chain" will follow, and the book business will need to
focus on "the huge opportunities offered by digital publishing and
digital distribution." New players will emerge, too, and they will need
to be drawn into BISG. The organization will need to be a leader in
developing policies and standards and must "monitor new
developments so we can respond in the right ways," he continued.
During his seven years at Nielsen, successor to Whitaker, Healy was, he said,
encouraged to be involved in supply chain issues--a BISG focus.
Currently he is chair of the International ISBN Agency, chair of the
international committee responsible for revising the ISBN standard (and
creating ISBN-13), a director of BIC (the U.K.'s equivalent of BISG), a
member of the ONIX International steering committee and a director of
the International DOI Foundation. Obviously he has a book standards
pedigree.
Trained originally as a librarian (although "I never worked in a
library for more than a few years"), Healy spent five years working for
the British Council installing automated systems in its more than 100
libraries around the world, a job that would have been much easier, he
said, had today's standards existed then. Then he worked for Silver
Platter, "a CD-ROM pioneer of the '80s," and Chadwyck Healey, which has
large databases of texts in the humanities, before joining Whitaker.
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As has become his enlightened tradition, outgoing BISG chair Joe
Gonnella of Barnes & Noble led off the meeting by reading a poem,
in this case "Ode to the Book II" by Pablo Neruda. He thanked the "more
than 1,000 people" who participate in committees and working groups and
"make BISG relevant to the industry and the writers and readers we
serve." He also thanked fellow transition committee members Jeff
Abraham and Angela Bole, BISG's marketing and communications manager,
who kept the organization functioning since Abraham's departure in
January. (She was roundly thanked for her efforts. Gonnella, for
example, said that she had done "a terrific job keeping this ship
afloat.")
Gonnella also spoke a bit "wearing his B&N hat," saying that while
the organization has done much, there is much to do. For example, BISG
"has not yet formalized its relations with other organizations central
to its mission"; needs to do more research since "no one can say how
large the industry is, the number of publishers or number of titles to
be printed"; needs to work on "data quality and data synchronicity"
because every day sales are being lost and customers are irritated
because of bad data. He also called for a shipping label container
certification program.
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While BISG continued to grow financially and surpassed its budget in
the current fiscal year--and total assets rose to $551,000--its budget
for the coming year, which was approved at the meeting, is the first
that foresees a negative number at the end of the year, a loss of
$8,800 on projected income of $764,000. (Treasurer Jan
Nathan called this year "a little more challenging than past years.")
Extraordinary expenses, particularly involved in the transition costs
associated with hiring and moving the new executive director, account for the
projected loss.
Among other news from BISG:
