Because of the Columbus Day holiday on Monday, Shelf Awareness will not publish on Friday or Monday, a respite that will make covering the Frankfurt Book Fair slightly easier. We're leaving general reporting in the capable hands of several thousand other journalists. (For a range of daily stories, we recommend the fair's own effort, available in English on its Web site.)

It's been a fruitful fair even before the offical opening today. Already we learned of a Dutch bookstore whose books all have microchips on them, which has made receiving and inventory taking much easier, resulted in a more accurate database and led the store to widen its offerings by reducing quantities of each title on hand. See a glimpse of the RFID future below!

 

In Montpelier, Vt., Robert Kasow and Claire Benedict, owners of Rivendell Books, which sells used and rare books, have bought nearby Bear Pond Books, which sells mainly new books, from Linda Prescott and Michael Katzenberg, the Times-Argus reported.

The new owners are relatively new to bookselling. Katzenberg had been at Bear Pond for 33 years. Benedict will run Bear Pond, while Kasow will focus on Rivendell.

The two couples celebrated on Monday with champagne in Dixie cups.

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Patricia J. Grayson, owner of the Bookworm, Norwood, Pa., since 1983, died at age 60 on Sunday after a fall, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer. Her life partner, Jennifer J. Conway, told the paper, "She was known for turning the reluctant student and occasional reader into book lovers."

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For Stephen King's Lisey's Story, which is coming out October 24, Scribner has pushed the book "almost as if it were written by an up-and-coming author on the verge of a breakout book," as the New York Times put it today.

In the spring, the publisher sent out some 7,000 galleys to booksellers and the press. Susan Moldow of Scribner told the Times that the company courted independent booksellers, "some of whom tend to ignore Mr. King's books because they assume that the discount chains will sell most of them." She commented: "We wanted to convince [independent booksellers], both because of the content of the book and because Stephen King's readers are all over, that they should highlight it and take their own market share."

Margaret Maupin, a buyer at the Tattered Cover, Denver, Colo., said the store ordered about a third more copies than usual for a King opus, hoping to sell the book to people who don't regularly read him. "We're saying, 'Stretch yourself a little bit,' " she told the Times.

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BookExpo America is putting out a call for papers and ideas for educational and conference programming at next year's show, to be held in New York City May 31-June 3. Contact BEA's director of education Mark Dressler with any authors, editorial, marketing or PR staff with ideas or suggestions that would benefit industry colleagues. Dressler may be reached at mhdressler@chartermi.net or 231-932-0475. Deadline for suggestions is December 15. 

 

Senior management of Chicago Review Press, which owns Independent Publishers Group, has bought Trafalgar Square Publishing, the distributor in the U.S. of U.K. publishers, including Anova, BBC Books, Egmont Books, Hesperus Press, HarperCollins UK, Hodder Headline, Little Brown Book Group UK, Macmillan UK, Orion Publishing, Random House UK and S&S UK. The acquisition adds more than 50 publishers and 13,500 titles to IPG.

At the end of the year, Trafalgar, which was founded in 1973, will move from its N. Pomfret, Vt., headquarters to Chicago, where IPG is located. The IPG and Trafalgar lists will be combined for ordering, shipping and discount for the spring 2007 season. Trafalgar Square will continue to have a separate catalogue.

After the move, Trafalgar owner Caroline Robbins and managing director Paul Feldstein will stay on as consultants. Robbins will continue to own and operate Trafalgar Square Books, a publisher of equestrian, crafts and home decorating books, which will be distributed to the trade by IPG.

IPG president Mark Suchomel commented in a statement, "Because of its greater size, IPG will bring Trafalgar's publishers expanded sales opportunities, especially in the gift, academic, Canadian and library markets. We are also confident this expansion will benefit all IPG publishers by increasing IPG's leverage and influence in the market, helping all of our publishers with economies of scale."

This morning on the Today Show: New York City restaurateur Danny Meyer, author of Setting the Table: The Transforming Power of Hospitality in Business (HarperCollins, $25.95, 0060742755).

Also on the Today Show: David Kidder, author of The Intellectual Devotional: Revive Your Mind, Complete Your Education, and Roam Confidently with the Cultured Class (Rodale, $22.50, 1594865132).

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The Book Report, the weekly AM radio book-related show organized by Windows a bookshop, Monroe, La., will feature two author interviews on today's show, which has the theme "Pieces of History":

• Karen Cushman, author of The Loud Silence of Francine Green (Clarion, $16, 0618504559)
• Jennifer Armstrong, author of The American Story: 100 True Tales from American History illustrated by Roger Roth (Knopf, $34.95, 0375812563)

The show airs at 8 a.m. Central Time and can be heard live at thebookreport.net; the archived edition will be posted this afternoon.

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Today on the View: actor Morgan Freeman serves up Morgan Freeman and Friends: Caribbean Cooking for a Cause (Rodale, $35, 1594864241).

Also on the View's menu today: David Lieberman, author of Dave's Dinners: A Fresh Approach to Home-Cooked Meals (Hyperion, $27.50, 1401301290).

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Today on WAMU's Diane Rehm Show: David Cannadine, author of Mellon: An American Life (Knopf, $35, 0679450327), the new biography of Andrew W. Mellon.

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Today on the Dr. Phil Show: Frank Lawlis, author of The IQ Answer: Maximizing Your Child's Potential (Viking, $24.95, 0670037842).

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Today on NPR's Fresh Air: Andy Stern, author of A Country that Works: Getting America Back on Track (Free Press, $24, 0743297679).

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Today on CNN Headline News/Prime News with Erica Hill: Dr. Paul Rosenblatt, whose new book is Two in a Bed: The Social System of Couple Bed Sharing (SUNY Press, $23.95, 0791468305).

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Today on MSNBC's Hardball with Chris Matthews: Mark Halperin and John F. Harris, authors of The Way to Win: Taking the White House in 2008 (Random House, 1400064473). The pair will also be on NPR's Fresh Air today.

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Tonight on the Daily Show with Jon Stewart: Ian Bremmer, author of The J Curve: A New Way to Understand Why Nations Rise and Fall (S&S, $26, 0743274717).

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Tonight on the Colbert Report: Senator Byron Dorgan, author of Take This Job and Ship It: How Corporate Greed and Brain-Dead Politics Are Selling Out America (Thomas Dunne, $24.95, 031235522X) 

 

Five authors made the short list for the Giller Prize, Canada's fiction prize that carries a C$40,000 (about US$35,600) award, the Globe and Mail reported. The five are:

• Rawi Hage, author of the novel De Niro's Game
• Vincent Lam, author of Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures, a short story collection
• Pascale Quiviger, author of The Perfect Circle, a novel
• Gaétan Soucy, author of the novel The Immaculate Collection
• Carol Windley, author of Home Schooling, a short story collection

The overall winner will be named November 7.

Appropriately on the first day of the Frankfurt Book Fair, we note that the German Book Office in New York has begun a book of the month program, which will highlight, several months before publication, the appearance of a German title in the U.S. The inaugural selection, the September Book of the Month, is Measuring the World by Daniel Kehlmann, which will be released by Pantheon on November 7.

Originally published in 2005 as Die Vermessung der Welt by Rowohlt, the book won the German Book Prize and had the unusual distinction of knocking J.K. Rowling and Dan Brown off the top of German bestseller lists.

The GBO described the novel, which features Alexander von Humboldt and Carl Friedrich Gauss, this way: "Two of the most legendary German scientists at the end of the 18th century approach their studies very differently, but their goal is ultimately the same: Measuring the World. Gauss seeks insight into the world of logic by developing mathematical formulas and studying the stars. He cannot live alone, yet cannot resist jumping out of bed on his wedding night to write down a sudden inspiration. Humboldt, on the other hand, keeps his emotions to himself. Completely absorbed in his work, he is unable to appreciate the world's manifold pleasures in anything more than a professional way. He ventures to South America, a then uncharted continent, discovering unknown species of plants and animals, measuring his exact location, and keeping records of the journey to create the perfect map. These two eccentric geniuses finally meet in Berlin in 1828 to collaborate on their research when they find themselves caught up in the turmoil of Napoleonic Germany."

The following are selected significant titles appearing next Tuesday, October 10, except for one:

Innocent Man: Murder and Injustice in a Small Town by John Grisham (Doubleday, $28.95, 0385517238). The thriller master offers his first major nonfiction work, a look at an Oklahoma murder police pinned on a one-time major league ballplayer whose life had spun out of control.

Ageless: Bioidentical Hormones and Beyond by Suzanne Somers (Crown, $25, 0307237249). The former actress who has become a small cosmetics, skin care, fitness, food and advice conglomerate addresses aging.

Dangerous Nation: America in the World, 1600-1900 by Robert Kagan (Knopf, $30, 0375411054). Carnegie Endowment for International Peace senior associate, Washington Post columnist and author of Of Paradise and Power, Kagan argues that the U.S. has always been expansionist and intervened abroad.

What I Know for Sure: My Story of Growing Up in America by Tavis Smiley (Doubleday, $23.95, 0385505167). The talk show host tells his story, growing up in a large, poor family with strong religious beliefs, black in a mainly white area, and thrown into foster care for a time when his father beat him so hard he went to the hospital.

Jimmy Stewart: A Biography by Marc Eliot (Crown, $25.95, 1400052211). A solid biography of one of Hollywood's solid actors.

Through the Children's Gate: A Home in New York by Adam Gopnik (Knopf, $25, 1400041813). In this collection of essays, the New Yorker writer focuses on his family's return to New York after its sojourn in Paris.

And on Friday, the 13th:

The End (A Series of Unfortunate Events, Book 13) by Lemony Snicket, illustrated by Brett Helquist (HarperCollins, $12.99, 0064410161). An unlucky end?

 

A version of the bookstore of the future--where books are identified and tracked wirelessly by microchips either built in or affixed to them--has become reality in the Netherlands and made for a striking presentation by Ronald Janssen, senior manager of ICT at Centraal Boekhuis, at the annual meeting of the International Supply Chain Specialists yesterday in Frankfurt.

The 11,840-sq.-ft. store, called Selexyz Almere and owned by BGN, the largest bookseller in the Netherlands, opened in Almere on April 22. Because it is BGN's first new store--its other 40-plus stores were acquisitions--and allowed for adopting the technology from the ground up, it became a pilot project for the company and Centraal Boekhuis (Central Bookhouse or CB), the largest book wholesaler in the country.

The new technology is radio frequency identification (RFID), which is being used already by a handful of libraries in the U.S. As applied to the Almere project, CB puts RDIF tags on each book it supplies to Selexyz Almere; every tag has a unique number that identifies and applies only to that copy of the book. On leaving the warehouse, books for the store are packed in boxes that go through an RFID "tunnel." The complete contents are identified in seconds regardless of the placement of the books in the boxes; CB then generates an electronic advance shipping notice to Selexyz Almere. On arrival at the store, the boxes are read in a similarly quick and accurate way. By contrast, at other BGN stores and like most traditional stores, the process of checking shipments against packing slips and ASNs takes a minimum of five to six minutes.

The RFID tagging allowed Selexyz Almere to receive and process its opening stock of 35,000 books in three days compared to the usual two weeks. The system also allows two staff members at Selexyz Almere to do a full store inventory in two days, with each person using a wand that reads the tags. By contrast, in other BGN stores, a staff of 20-25 does the inventory in a day, scanning bar codes and requiring the store to be closed.

RFID lets the bookseller keep track of books much more accurately, particularly in the cases of those that "walk" from their original places on shelves or are stolen. The store inventory is available to customers on four kiosks, which can tell them exactly where the books are. (The tags are deactivated when the book is sold.)

The bookseller says that RFID has made its inventory database more accurate, freed up time for booksellers to work with customers and let it increase its stock of books while decreasing the number of copies of each title. BGN estimates that sales are 6%-8% higher than they would be without RFID.

RFID has also saved lots of money, BGN says. In the case of taking inventory, the company saves annually about 200,000 euros (about $255,000), mostly in staff salary. Moreover, by not having to close to take stock, the store does not lose estimated sales of 260,000 euros (about $331,000).

BGN likes the system so much that it aims to amplify RFID and use it in a store that will open November 8 in Maastricht. The store will use RFID in a similar way to Selexyz Almere but with one enhancement: it will also be used for theft prevention, too.

BGN and CB are working on an eventual enhancement that's even more futuristic than what's been implemented so far: "smart" shelves that have RFID antennae in them that can scan the books on them and provide "near real time inventory."

BGN wants to expand RDIF technology into its existing stores, which is prompting CB to plan some changes: by the second quarter next year, the wholesaler aims to automate the tagging process at its warehouse. It is also encouraging publishers, who so far see little immediate economic advantage to themselves, to add tags during the printing process.

While planning the pilot project, research by CB, BGN and others found that a cost of 17 cents per tag (nearly 22 U.S. cents) was a breakeven point. Competition among tag suppliers helped push costs to about 10 cents (13 cents) a tag. The research also suggested that large retailers would be the major proponents of the use of RFID in the book industry, as has been the case in the Netherlands so far.--John Mutter