Notes: Oscar Wilde Book Sale; Canadian Book Rage
Although it is celebrating its 40th anniversary for a full year, the Oscar Wilde Bookshop
in New York City is marking the occasion on one day in particular with
an unusual sale. On Tuesday, November 27, the landmark gay and lesbian
bookstore is offering 40% off any one book in stock priced up to $40.
The store is honoring the offer on phone orders but not on its website.
---
Borders will open a 29,981-sq.-ft.
store at Park Meadows Mall in Lone Tree, Colo., south of Denver, next
April. The store will be in the new 154,000-sq.-ft. expansion lifestyle
center called the Vistas at Park Meadows, located at the intersection
of Interstate 25 and County Line Road.
In connection with the opening, the 27,800-sq.-ft. Borders in Englewood is closing.
---
Publishers aren't celebrating the involuntary "turn
off your TV" period that has occurred because of the television
writers' strike. The temporary absence of the Colbert Report and Jon Stewart's Daily
Show has hampered marketing plans for several newly-released books, since the programs "have established themselves as prime
movers in the book world, and an appearance on one of their shows is
highly coveted by authors and publishers," as the New York Times put it.
Simon & Schuster publisher David Rosenthal said, "Often, to be honest, both Colbert and Stewart have really chosen books that don't often get television coverage--peculiar political books that in the realm of TV coverage are rather eccentric."
The Times cited the example of David Levy, author of Love and Sex With Robots: The Evolution of Human-Robot Relationships, who was scheduled to appear on the Colbert Report last week. Tina
Andreadis, director of publicity at Harper, said the "Colbert
appearance was the anchor for us flying him in from London. It was a
big disappointment. Colbert would have been the perfect outlet."
---
In other television news, today's NYT notes that Borders has developed a broadcast service called Borders TV, installed "37-inch flat-screen televisions to show original programming, advertisements, news and weather . . . in nearly 60 stores and is scheduled to reach an additional 250 stores by the end of February."
---
Book rage? As the Canadian dollar reached a value of US$1.10 last week, bookshops north of the border, previously "one of the
world's more civilized places of work and leisure," are becoming "a
charged environment, perhaps even a dangerous one," the Toronto Globe and Mail
reported.
Dust jacket pricing doesn't reflect the strong loonie so a form
of "sticker envy" is developing. Canadian booksellers and publishers
have begun "to circulate stories of
customers going beyond simply venting their dismay at hapless clerks
and turning books into projectiles, sometimes to the point of drawing
blood."
Susan Dayus, executive director of the Canadian Booksellers Association, told the Globe and Mail
she "had heard of two 'book rage' incidents recently, both occurring
outside Toronto, one at an independent retailer. But she refrained from
giving any more details, except to say that 'it sure makes it tough for
the front-line sales staff.'"
---
RDR Books publisher
Roger Rapoport has agreed to delay publication of a book using material
from a fan-created Harry Potter website in response to a lawsuit by
J.K. Rowling and Warner Bros. (Shelf Awareness, November 2, 2007).
The AP (via the International Herald Tribune) noted that Rapoport "volunteered to halt typesetting on the planned Harry Potter Lexicon
until a judge rules on whether the work constitutes a violation of
Rowling's intellectual property rights, or the copyright on her novels
held by Warner Bros." The book had been scheduled for a November 28
release.
---
A federal judge ruled in favor of Penguin Putnam in a copyright infringement case involving the book Dorothy Parker, Complete Poems. The New York Times reported that Stuart Y. Silverstein, who compiled Not Much Fun: The Lost Poems of Dorothy Parker,
had accused Penguin of using his book "as source material without
crediting him. He argued that he was entitled to 'compilation
copyright' for the creativity he had showed by including or
recategorizing some poems that other scholars had said were not proper
poems, and by excluding others that scholars had said were Parker's
work."
Judge John F. Keenan of the Federal District Court in
Manhattan "dismissed Mr. Silverstein's complaint, ruling that he did
not demonstrate any creativity in selecting the poems that appeared in Not Much Fun."
---
The New York Times
offered an interactive tour of illustrations from the Book Review's
choices for the 10 best illustrated children's books of 2007.
---
Beginning
next spring, Picador in the U.K. "will release all new novels in paperback
editions, alongside a small run of hardbacks, breaking with the trade
convention of staggered publication dates," according to the Guardian.
Publisher Andrew Kidd asked, "When are we going to accept that we live in a [paperback] country; that only a tiny handful of authors command enough reader loyalty to achieve viable hardback sales; that by concentrating promotional energy on a moribund format we are doing no favours to the format people actually want to buy?" The first Picador in simultaneous editions will be Anthem of a Reluctant Prophet by Joanne Proulx on April 4. More details at Picador's website.
---
Also in the Guardian
was a panic button update regarding the recent announcement that
Richard Madeley and Judy Finnegan, whose book club has an Oprah-like
influence on British publishing, were ending their television
partnership (Shelf Awareness,
November 5, 2007). Fortunately, the "alarms were silenced only when the
duo said they wanted to continue presenting their 'book club' as a
standalone series after next year. Whether or not a spin-off show will
have the same clout or audience figures remains to be seen, but there's
no need for emergency measures. Yet."
---
The East Valley Tribune's "Destinations" section profiled Singing Wind Bookshop, Benson, Ariz. "Readers love books. They're like bloodhounds," owner Winifred J. Bundy said of her shop's popularity despite its remote location. "They go where they can find the books."
---
Career idea of the week: aural proofreader. The Daily Yomiuri profiled Miyoko Tateyama, who has proofed more than 200 audiobooks over the past 24 years. How does she do it? "Aural proofing one title from cover to cover takes her between 10 days and two weeks. A list of mistakes is then passed on to the narrator, who is asked to correct the relevant sections of the recording."
---
A successful book proposal. Joshua Reich proposed to his girlfriend, Shianling King, in "the rare-book, botany and horticulture shelves on the fabled Strand Bookstore's third floor," according to the New York Post, which added that "the black bindings on five skinny books were embossed with one word each, reading, 'Shianling,' 'Will,' 'You,' 'Marry,' 'Me?'"
Strand's events coordinator Christina Foxley said love in the stacks is not uncommon: "It happens all the time. Even our staffers find love here."
---
Industry
veteran David Wilk has another, major trick up his sleeve: under the
name Booktrix, he will act as a "provider of publishing and web related
services." As outlined on booktrix.com,
the company will work with publishers, authors and content owners who
might "need to outsource book packaging and editorial development,
build a modern, effective website, deploy online marketing, introduce
new media into your projects, evaluate your distribution and sales
systems, or any other aspect of your business." Also, on booktrix.com,
Wilk will blog about books, issues in the book business, distribution,
the web and the future of books and reading. RSS feeds are available.
In addition, Wilk and his collaborators aggregrate book and author
video and can create video and audio to help promote books and authors as well as
run webcasts of live and recorded events. The group is also working on
initiatives and projects that will help broaden audiences for books and
authors using new media. For more information on this aspect of the
business, go to livewriters.com.
Roopa Farooki begins her story of the permutations and consequences of deception with 13-year-old Henna's marriage to the eldest son of one of Calcutta's best families, a union achieved by a network of lies "as elaborate and brazen as the golden embroidery on her scarlet wedding sari." Henna's father had successfully presented his lazy, illiterate daughter as an older, tennis-playing, poetry-quoting prime catch. The groom, Rashid Karim, quickly discerns the truth but is compelled to follow through. He had hoped for a life lived in truth and sincerity, but his wife "stained him and blotted all his future aspirations." When his daughter is born, one good thing seems to have come from the misalliance, but "Shona had been conceived with a lie, and was born in a liar's house, and into an inevitable understanding that it was always better to comfort or conceal with a lie than to hurt or expose with the truth."