300, the movie based on Frank Miller's graphic novel of the same title about the Battle of Thermopylae, took in $70 million at the box office over the weekend "as it surged past hostile critics and industry expectations," the New York Times reported.

The valiant stand by the movie was all the more inspiring because it has an R rating and no major stars. As we noted last Tuesday, Miller and director Zack Snyder have collaborated on 300: The Art of the Film (Dark Horse, $24.95, 9781593077013/1593077017), which includes production photos, studio art and more, and the new book Thermopylae: The Battle That Changed the World by Paul Cartledge (Overlook, $30, 9781585675661/1585675660) covers the same hallowed ground as the movie.

Incidentally on a scale of 1 to 100, 300 got a 300 from the 17-year-old graphic novel fan in our house.

Also over the weekend, The Namesake, based on the Jhumpa Lahiri novel, opened in just six theaters and took in $250,000.

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The Washington Post's Anthony Shadid remembers Mohammed Hayawi, owner of the Renaissance Bookstore in Baghdad, who died in the bombing a week ago on Mutanabi Street, the city's booksellers row.

Shadid wrote in part: "His quiet life deserves more than a footnote, if for no other reason than to remember a man who embraced what Baghdad was and tried to make sense of a country that doesn't make sense anymore. Gone with him are small moments of life, gentle simply by virtue of being ordinary, now lost in the rubble strewn along a street that will never be the same."

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The Bookworm, Hudson, Mass., has metamorphosized into the Spot and is no longer a general used bookstore but now sells new and used books with an emphasis on science fiction, horror, manga, thrillers and mysteries, according to the Hudson Sun.

Owner Scott Alving said "the Internet has changed all aspects of the book world. Used books are especially hot and popular online, and it's difficult to compete with that.''

So he has removed categories like history, self-help, gardening and romance and devoted space "to host gamers interested in Magic: The Gathering and classic role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons." The fate of the Bookworm's children's section is undecided.

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The Wenatchee World profiles A Book For All Seasons, Leavenworth, Wash., on the occasion of its 15th birthday, which the store celebrated Saturday with a signing and workshop with Kelly Lerner (a portion of her book's sales went to Habitat for Humanity) and children's activities, which included a contest for the best 15-line poem, to be published in the store newsletter.

A Book For All Seasons, owned by Pat Rutledge, is underneath the Innsbrucker Inn, a hotel with six literary-themed rooms such as the Shakespeare Room and the Sherlock Holmes Room. (Leavenworth is a Bavarian-themed town.)

"I always said to Ed [my husband], 'I want to be selling books when I'm 85,' " Rutledge told the paper. "Just books and words and print, the whole culture--it sounds corny, but it's what I love."

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In an update on A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier by Ishmael Beah, Saturday's New York Times reported that the book had sold more than 62,000 copies in its first three weeks on sale in Starbucks, "about two-thirds of the 92,000 copies" that the first of these Starbucks picks--For One More Day by Mitch Albom--sold in three months.

Starbucks chairman Howard Schultz told the paper, "The success of the book, in terms of units sold, is exceeding our expectations." Because A Long Way Gone is by an unknown author and has a "grisly subject," Starbucks has marketed the title "in an approachable package, emphasizing the themes of hope and redemption."

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Some Shanghai bookstore customers--often students who don't want to buy expensive reference books--take pictures of pages in books, and booksellers have a mix of reactions, the Shanghai Daily reported.

A few booksellers have taken a laissez-faire attitude while one put up a sign telling customers not to take pictures.

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Yesterday's New York Times business section pointed out a problem with digitization of information and its widespread availability on the Internet: "As more museums and archives become digital domains, and as electronic resources become the main tool for gathering information, items left behind in nondigital form, scholars and archivists say, are in danger of disappearing from the collective cultural memory, potentially leaving our historical fabric riddled with holes."

The overlooked material includes items not easily scannable, collections without money to be scanned and material whose copyright is unsecured. Another factor in the problem: more and more researchers limit their research to the Internet.

 

Today on the View, Senator Chuck Schumer speaks out about Positively American: Winning Back the Middle Class Majority One Family at a Time (Rodale Books, $24.95, 9781594865725/1594865728).

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Today on WAMU's Diane Rehm Show, John Sedgwick talks about In My Blood: Six Generations of Madness and Desire in an American Family (HarperCollins, $25.95, 9780060521592/0060521597).

Also on the Diane Rehm Show: David Kessler, former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration and author of A Question of Intent: A Great American Battle with a Deadly Industry (PublicAffairs, $21, 9781586481216/1586481215).

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Today the Oprah Winfrey Show re-airs a segment with Trinny Woodall and Susannah Constantine, authors of What You Wear Can Change Your Life (Riverhead, $22, 9781594481482/1594481482).

From last week's Book Sense bestseller lists, available at BookSense.com, here are the recommended titles, which are also Book Sense Picks:

Hardcover

Napoleon's Pyramids by William Dietrich (HarperCollins, $24.95, 9780060848323/0060848324). "Great history, exotic locales, and smashing adventure come together in this compelling novel set against Napoleon's conquest of Egypt. The pages will fly by as you learn about Napoleonic warfare, esoteric philosophy, and ancient architecture. A grand read!"--Kristine Kaufman, the Snow Goose Bookstore, Stanwood, Wash.

My Year Inside Radical Islam: A Memoir by Daveed Gartenstein-Ross (Tarcher, $24.95, 9781585425518/1585425516). "This is probably one of the most important books for Americans who wish to gain some understanding of how the human need to be a part of something larger than yourself can lead down dark and dangerous paths. Highly recommended!"--Donna Hawley, Howard's Bookstore, Bloomington, Ind.

Paperback

The Case of the Missing Books: A Mobile Library Mystery by Ian Sansom (Harper Paperbacks, $12.95, 9780060822507/0060822503). "A charming, often hilarious novel of book-loving librarian who goes to a small Northern Ireland town to run its library, only to find the real library's been closed and he's forced to run a mobile library. For fans of everything along the lines of Alexander McCall Smith and Maisie Dobbs."--David Thompson, Murder by the Book, Houston, Tex.

For Teen Readers

The Opposite of Music by Janet Ruth Young (Atheneum, $15.99, 9781416900405/1416900403). "In crisp, poetic, and memorable prose, Janet Ruth Young tells the story of how 15-year-old Billy and his family work to help his father, who is suffering from severe depression. This intelligently written first novel deals realistically with a very timely and serious subject."--Amanda MacNaughton, Paulina Springs Book Company, Sisters, Ore.

[Many thanks to Book Sense and the ABA!]

Dennis McFarland's new novel, Letter from Point Clear (Holt), will be out in August. Here he answers questions we occasionally put to people in the industry.


On the nightstand now:

Civilities and Civil Rights by William H. Chafe, The Other Struggle for Equal Schools by Ruben Donato, Everyday Zen by Charlotte Joko Beck and After This by Alice McDermott.

Favorite book when you were a child:

The Catcher in the Rye (age 13)

Top five authors:

Flannery O'Connor, John Cheever, J. M. Coetzee, Henry James, E. B. White

Book you 'faked' reading:

Moby Dick (cringe)

Book you are an 'evangelist' for:

Currently Tracy Kidder's Mountains Beyond Mountains

Book you've bought for the cover:

Hardcover of Peter Cameron's The City of Your Final Destination

Book that changed your life:

Tracy Kidder's Mountains Beyond Mountains

Favorite line from a book:

"Now, he told me, I could see what humanity was worth. It could form the conception of justice, but could not trust its flesh to provide judges. Whatever it started was likely to end in old men raving."--Rebecca West, in The Fountain Overflows

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

Pat Barker, author of The Ghost Road

The eight short stories and one novella that comprise The Death of a Confederate Colonel concern people whose lives are changed profoundly by events set against the backdrop of the Civil War. Death is present in each story, sometimes physical death, sometimes the death of dreams or of one's soul. Pat Carr's prose is elegant and spare, as clear and sharp as the icicles that become the nemesis of the woman fetching wood in "The Confederate Wife."

In "Diary of a Union Soldier," a Yankee stumbles into the house of an Arkansas woman, who dresses his wound and puts him to bed. As he sleeps, she reads his diary and ponders, "[how] was a woman ever to know that interior of a man unless she knew his words? And if the Yankee were a well man, would he be a talking man?" She wonders if his wife had ever gotten the chance to know him as well as she has in reading his diary. In another story, "The Return," diary entries are written by a young woman awaiting the homecoming of her fiancé. He arrives wounded, and she finds it increasingly difficult to plan their wedding in the heat of summer. "The Mistress of the Plantation" tells of a hot afternoon in which the plantation owner's wife realizes what has enslaved her. One of the most shocking, moving stories is the title piece, with its quiet horror that opens so simply with, "It was nearly the opium hour."

"The Slave Quarters" evokes a surprising sympathy for the mistress of the house when she is awakened, bone tired, after working until past midnight cutting cloth for the slaves' fall shirts. "If only they'd let her rest. If only they weren't constantly pulling at her skirt, hanging at her knees, dragging her into their quagmire of helplessness." She's the one who tends to the sick slaves, and she's been called because Little Cicero is ill. The slave boy is her darling, and she nurses him tenderly and desperately through the night as he suffers with malaria. As she holds the child she loves, she considers her husband, who didn't have to manage the house, who is off buying another Tennessee Walker or attending the races. He has given the slaves classical names, names she resents because they are difficult for her to pronounce and for the slaves to remember. "Nor did he consider how they wore her down with their demands and their clamoring for attention, how they eroded her the way their constant fingering had dissolved the paint from the toes of the hanging Jesus in the chapel." But she knew she couldn't defy him any more than a slave could raise a hand to her.

The novella, "Leaving Gilead," is about eight-year-old Saranell Birdsong and one of her father's slaves, Renny. When word arrives that the Yankees are coming soon, Saranell's mother decides to leave the plantation, abandoning the slaves, taking only Saranell, Renny and her personal maid Tawny. She wants to go to Arkadelphia, where the Confederate generals have set up headquarters, and packs the sterling, because "[she refused] to serve the generals even thistle tea without a decent silver set." The story is brutal, but the terror and hardships are offset by the relationship between Saranell and Renny, as the girl discovers a few things about the slave and he becomes her protector. There is an old-fashionedness about it--at times one can see the narrative cinematically, starring Sidney Poitier as the wise slave and Jodie Foster as the plucky girl. It's a strange and affecting mixture.--Marilyn Dahl

The following is excerpted from an article that first appeared in Publishing Trends, whom we thank for allowing us to reprint it here. It's an account by Lightspeed's Jim Lichtenberg about his visit to the first store we know of to use RFID tags in its books--it's owned by Dutch bookselling company BGN. For background on BGN's approach (and a definition of RFID!), see our report last fall (Shelf Awareness, October 3, 2006).

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Almere is a new bedroom community of 125,000 outside of Amsterdam. The bookstore is part of a shopping center and sits behind a huge, two-story wall of glass. In a back room, a young staff member picks up a box of 60 books and passes it through a small tunnel in a specially constructed reader--like a car through an EZ Pass toll gate. Irrespective of their orientation inside the box, all titles are read with 100% accuracy in a matter of seconds. Each is simultaneously entered into the store's main inventory database, and in the event that the book has been ordered by a customer, an SMS message or e-mail is instantly sent directly to the customer indicating that the book is now in the store and ready for pick-up. As many as 1,600 books, delivered each morning, can be logged into the store in about 10 minutes.

Once entered into inventory, books are shelved in the appropriate case. Pushing a small cart equipped with a computer, another staff member passes a hand-held reading device along each shelf and promotional table, matching titles to case or table numbers. This data is wirelessly transmitted to the central computer system, available to customers and staff alike. Thus, inventory of some 38,000 books is taken two to three times a week in a couple of hours while the store is open.

When customers use the several kiosks to enter title, authors or subjects, an Amazon-type screen pops up showing the matching title, books by the same author, and books on a similar subject, indicating whether each of these volumes is currently in the store and where. (The POS software continuously updates the inventory and location data as books are sold.) If the title is not available, a screen pops up asking if the customer would like the book to be ordered--special orders alone have increased by 8%-10%.

"We never imagined that success would be so quick," explains Jan Vink, BGN Director, who watches over every aspect of the operation.