Describing Powell's Books, Portland, Ore., as "a how-to guide for surviving Internet and chain rivals," the Los Angeles Times examined the challenges faced by the bookstore as owner Michael Powell, 67, gradually passes the operation on to his daughter, Emily, 29, "whose business experience is limited."

"Businesses don't transition very well," said Powell, adding that his goal was to keep "from being marginalized the way music stores have been marginalized."

Using the example of online sales, the Times noted that "Powell's has a head start on this one: The company started selling books online in 1994--before Amazon--and ships millions of dollars of books, about 90% of them outside the Pacific Northwest, each year."

For her part, Emily believes the challenge will be "maintaining the culture of the store--not just the bohemian tone but stocking books that are hard to find in other independent stores, such as conservative and Christian tomes, which her father insists are usually blind spots--and preparing for the unknown."

"We're in a very antiquated industry in many respects," she said. "You have to like bookselling, not just books, in order to bring change." 

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A federal judge has ruled that "local bookstores such as the King's English and Sam Weller's Zion Bookstore, along with other local distributors of information, do not have legal standing to take part in a lawsuit regarding the Utah Harmful to Minors Act."

According to the Deseret Morning News, "the Harmful to Minors Act is intended to make Internet service providers, Web hosts and content providers limit the ability of minors to get pornography on the Internet. The bookstores filed a lawsuit in federal court challenging the law, claiming among other things that it violates the U.S. Constitution."

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Today's New York Times suggests that Judith Regan's $100 million dollar civil suit against News Corporation, "with its riveting passages about corporate connivance, public malfeasance and ill-fated romance, is as much a page-turner as any of the dozens of salacious best sellers she produced at ReganBooks, her imprint at HarperCollins before she was fired at the end of last year."

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Effective January 1, Moleskin, the Italian publisher of the little black notebooks that some Shelf Awareness staffers cannot live without, will be distributed in the U.S. by Chronicle Books as part of a new partnership between the two companies. Moleskin had been distributed by Kikkerland. Hachette Book Group is Chronicle's new fulfillment partner.

Moleskin, which already publishes notebooks, journals, planners and guidebooks, will launch a new line of softcover notebooks in February and will expand its City Notebook series in March, adding titles for Los Angeles, Chicago, Seattle, Montreal, Florence and Venice.

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Kevin Hamric has joined Quayside Publishing Group as v-p of sales and marketing and will oversee sales, marketing and publicity at the group's eight imprints--Creative Publishing international, Fair Winds Press, Motorbooks, Quarry Books, Quiver Books, Rockport Publishers, Voyageur Press and Zenith Press--and distribution of Walter Foster titles to the trade. He will work in the company's Minneapolis office.

Hamric was most recently director of book sales at Taunton Press and earlier was director of sales and operations at Sybex/John Wiley.

Mike Hejny, v-p of sales and marketing at MBI Publishing, has left the company. Quayside's current v-p of sales and marketing, Peter Ackroyd, will have new responsibilities. 

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A single manuscript page from a story by Napoleon Bonaparte sold for $35,400 at auction in France, according to the AP. The 22-page "novel," Clisson and Eugenie, was written when Napoleon was 26 and remained unpublished in his lifetime. It "was loosely based on the author's brief romance with Desiree Clary, the sister of his brother's wife."

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Kathy L. Patrick and the Pulpwood Queen Book Club are creating a new award, the Doug Marlette Award, that will go to the book club's Book of the Year and honor the late Pulitzer Prize-winning political cartoonist, author and creator of the comic strip Kudzu. As Empress Patrick put it, "Doug Marlette was a favorite author amongst the Pulpwood Queens with his books The Bridge and Magic Time both book club selections. We decided that in order for his memory, his works, and his books to live on forever, we would initiate this award as a tribute to him."

The first Doug Marlette Award will be given at the annual Pulpwood Queen convention aka Girlfriend Weekend, January 17-19 in Marshall, Tex. Marlette died in July when a pickup truck he was riding in crashed.

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Laura van den Berg of Boston, Mass., has won the first annual $5,000 Dzanc Prize, which honors a writer "working toward completion of a novel or short story collection who is also interested in bettering their community through literary community service." The award is sponsored by Dzanc Books, founded last year by Steven Gillis and Dan Wickett, to "advance great writing and to champion those writers who do not fit neatly into the marketing niches of for-profit presses."

Van den Berg, who is editor-in-chief of Emerson College's literary and arts journal, Redivider, and a Ploughshares staff member, was honored for her proposal to teach creative writing in area prisons and for the quality of her fiction writing.

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Madison Smartt Bell and William T. Vollmann have won the American Academy of Arts and Letters' 2008 Strauss Living awards, which provide each writer with $50,000 a year for five years, with the intention that they will be able to devote themselves fulltime to writing. The awards are given every five years.

Vollman was lauded by the Academy for "bold, gripping work encompassing gritty narratives that often combine fictional and journalistic techniques." Bell was praised for "exploring the dark side of human nature as experienced through characters including denizens of New York, Viet Nam, London, and Haiti."

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Richard Leigh, who sued bestselling author Dan Brown for plagiarism, died November 21, the AP (via the Guardian) reported. He was 64. Leigh had alleged that The Da Vinci Code  "appropriated the architecture" of Holy Blood, Holy Grail, a book he co-authored that was published in 1982. The suit was unsuccessful.

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On an international biblio-pilgrimage to shrines of the Beat Generation and the Lost Generation, the Sydney Morning Herald visited City Lights Books, San Francisco, Calif., and Shakespeare & Co. Bookshop in Paris.

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"The book was so much better than the film" is a line booksellers often hear, but the San Diego Union-Tribune offered a list of  "Movies better than the books that spawned them."
 

Magazines and newspapers have been making their book gift lists and checking them twice. Here's a sampling: 

The New York Times Book Review featured its annual 100 Notable Books.  

BusinessWeek offered its "top 10 picks from a particularly strong list of contenders."

"Gift books for gardeners" were highlighted by the Dallas Morning News. 

Only "titles that broke out of the pack" made the Boston Globe's list of books that "sparkle diamond bright."

The San Jose Mercury News touted "joyous holiday books" for "the younger ones on your list."

Holiday books for kids were also the focus at the Kansas City Star.

"Season's Gleanings" were featured in the Denver Post's Holiday Gift Guide.

For an English perspective, there was cogent advice in the Sunday Times about "how to buy books for Christmas" as well as a list of favorite books for children.

A list of the year's best reads, as well as "Yo ho ho and a bottle of blood: thrilling books for boys," were featured in the Independent, which also reported that Richard & Judy, "the golden couple of [British] daytime TV," had unveiled their choices for a Christmas books program later this month.  

The Hindu presented "books that struck a chord . . . [with] prominent authors, artistes and filmmakers."

Culling its picks from "a year of living bookishly," the Toronto Globe & Mail offered "The Globe 100."

Laughter seems to be the best medicine at Subterranean Books in St. Louis, Mo. "We always do well with humor," said store owner Kelly von Plonski.

The Onion's Our Dumb World, Stephen Colbert's I Am America (And You Can Too!) and Lemony Snicket's The Latke Who Couldn't Stop Screaming: A Christmas Story are some of the top sellers. Edward Gorey's darkly comic, illustrated book The Gashlycrumb Tinies sells steadily year-round and does "exceptionally well" at the holidays, said von Plonski.

BORAT and Will Self's essay collection Psychogeography are among the books featured in a window display adorned with garlands, ornaments, and lights. A second window at the entrance of the 1920s-era building in which the store is housed has an ever-changing non-book display. Currently a dining table is set for a festive holiday meal.

Subterranean Books--named Best Book Store in St. Louis by the Riverfront Times six out of the last seven years--draws in professors and students from nearby Washington University as well as tourists who frequent the pedestrian-friendly shopping thoroughfare where the store is located. This past Saturday retailers in the area participated in the annual Holiday Walk, with each merchant celebrating in a different way. Subterranean Books set a merry atmosphere by treating customers to hot cider and baked goods made by a talented staffer.

Last week the store held an event with St. Louis author Elizabeth Little. The wordsmith promoted Biting the Wax Tadpole: Confessions of a Language Fanatic, a "fun and literate" book that von Plonski expects to be a favorite gift choice. An appearance by Little on a local NPR program generated a great deal of interest in the book. "If something is mentioned on NPR or in the New York Times, our customers want it," von Plonski said.

After the picture books Jabberwocky by Christopher Dean Myers and First the Egg by Laura Vaccaro Seeger appeared in a recent issue of the New York Times Book Review, customers came in search of the titles. Another popular children's tome is Dare Wright's A Gift from the Lonely Doll, first published in 1996 and reissued several years ago. For older readers, a high school librarian who moonlights as a bookseller at Subterranean is handselling Brian Selznick's The Invention of Hugo Cabret and Markus Zusak's The Book Thief. "I expect to do well with the young adult section," von Plonski said, including Scott Westerfeld's Uglies and Pretties trilogies.

A surprise seller for the store is Alice Waters' The Art of Simple Food: Notes, Lessons, and Recipes from a Delicious Revolution. "Cookbooks are not a big or important section for us," commented von Plonski, although titles by Isa Chandra Moskowitz, co-author of Veganomicon: The Ultimate Vegan Cookbook, stir up sales.

Other solid holiday sellers are The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2007 edited by Dave Eggers and The Best American Short Stories 2007 edited by Stephen King. Anthologies are among the store's stand-outs as are series books like Continuum's 33 1/3 music-themed titles, Oxford University Press' Very Short Introductions and Penguin's Great Ideas. Penguin's new Great Journeys line is inspiring armchair travel with Anton Chekhov's A Journey to the End of the Russian Empire and Maria Bird's Adventures in the Rocky Mountains.

After a slight increase on Black Friday, which von Plonski described as "like a normal Saturday on steroids," she expects the store to maintain a standard sales pattern until mid-December. "Students have finals over the next two weeks," she noted, but once the semester ends the spending begins in earnest. "Starting December 15," she said, "we'll have hectic, crazy days every day until Christmas."--Shannon McKenna Schmidt

Sales of titles by Yrsa Sigurdardottir (l., in an Icelandic bookstore with her work) are heating up this winter in Iceland, where the author's third mystery starring a Reykjavik lawyer has just been published. Dig Your Own Grave is the No. 2 hardcover in the nation; and her second book, Ashes, is No. 1 on the paperback lists. Last Rituals, her first title featuring Thora Gudmundsdottir, was published here in October by Morrow ($23.95, 9780061143366/0061143367).

For a country of 300,000, Iceland is the kind of place where people know most everyone else and word of mouth plays a major role in establishing an author. Publishing abroad helps expand an author's reach, but Sigurdardottir noted that she writes for the local audience first and foremost. When foreign rights to Last Rituals were sold after she had written just a few chapters, briefly she considered adding material about Iceland's many historic and travel spots, "but then I decided I had to continue writing for other Icelanders."

Olafur Ragnar Grimsson, Iceland's president (who is very proud that last week the U.N. called Iceland the best country in which to live), said that the tradition of Icelandic literature written primarily for Icelanders dates back more than a millennium: when Leif Ericcson discovered America, Icelanders wrote about the trip in The Saga of Eric the Red "for themselves in a language no one else could understand. They had no need to broadcast it."

Icelanders missed an opportunity for bragging rights for being the first Europeans to the New World, but today more Icelandic titles are reaching foreign readers. The emphasis on writing for locals--who have among the highest literacy and book-reading rates in the world--means that a book that meets Icelanders' standards should satisfy readers anywhere. Last Rituals is an example of that: the complex narrative is set in the country's prosperous present but mines its magical past, where Christianity and paganism battled for centuries--and in some ways, continue to do so.--John Mutter

[Many thanks to HarperCollins and Icelandair for giving Shelf Awareness the chance to chase a story to the far reaches of the North Atlantic!]

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly has been released. The film is based upon the late Jean-Dominique Bauby's memoir of his physical, psychological and spiritual journey after a massive stroke in 1995 left him paralyzed and a victim of "locked-in syndrome." A movie tie-in edition is available (Vintage, $12.95, 9780307389251/0307389251). 

This morning on Good Morning America: James Lipton, author of Inside Inside (Dutton, $27.95, 9780525950356/0525950354).

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This morning on the Today Show: Jim Cramer, author of Jim Cramer's Stay Mad for Life: Get Rich, Stay Rich (Make Your Kids Even Richer) (S&S, $26, 9781416558859/1416558853).

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Today on NPR's Morning Edition: Alex Frankel, author of Punching In: The Unauthorized Adventures of a Front-Line Employee (Collins, $24.95, 9780060849665/0060849665).

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Today on the Diane Rehm Show: Bernd Brunner, author of Bears: A Brief History (Yale, $25, 109780300122992/0300122993).

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Today on the Oprah Winfrey Show, in a repeat: Dr. Mehmet Oz, co-author of You: Staying Young: The Owner's Manual for Extending Your Warranty (Free Press, $ 26, 9780743292566/0743292561).

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Tonight on The Colbert Report, in a repeat: Michael Bechloss, author of Presidential Courage: Brave Leaders and How They Changed America 1789-1989 (S&S, $28, 9780684857053/0684857057).

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Tonight on the Late Show with David Letterman, in a repeat: chef Jamie Oliver, author of Cook with Jamie: My Guide to Making You a Better Cook (Hyperion, $37.50, 9781401322335/1401322336).

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

Hardcover

Steps Through the Mist by Zoran Zivkovic (Aio, $29.95, 9781933083100/1933083107). "Zoran Zivkovic's novel is notable for both content and design. A master of the mosaic form, Zivkovic's stories range from beautiful to distressing, from realistic to fantastic, and his hauntingly lyrical prose is addictive, leaving us demanding more."--Keri Holmes, The Kaleidoscope: Our Focus Is You, Hampton, Iowa.

Reef by Scubazoo (DK, $40, 9780756631222/075663122X). "What an amazing pictorial adventure in the world's reefs! The photos are crisp and clear, and the narrative reveals the passion of the women and men who were involved in the project."--Debbie Campbell, The Book and Cranny, Statesboro, Ga.

Paperback

Winterbirth by Brian Ruckley (Orbit, $14.99, 9780316067690/0316067695). "Winterbirth is a showcase of an amazing new voice in science fiction. In Ruckley's first installment of the Godless World trilogy, we meet everyone from elves to kings, as well as the inevitable clash of good versus evil. An unlikely mix between the Lord of the Rings and the Dark Tower, but on a tier of its own."--Katie Glasgow, Mitchell Books, Fort Wayne, Ind.

For Ages 4 to 8

Agate: What Good Is a Moose? by Joy M. Dey, illustrated by Nikki Johnson (Lake Superior Port Cities, $17.95, 9780942235739/0942235738). "Agate is a moose with self-esteem issues. He really is a gem--he just doesn't know it. Dey's lively, lyrical text reminds us to look for inner strength in ourselves and others. Johnson's stunning yet simple watercolors capture the personality and beauty of every animal in the book."--Anita Zager, Northern Lights Books & Gifts, Duluth, Minn.

[Many thanks to Book Sense and the ABA!]