"This is what it has come to: 'Can I come to your office and have a cup of water?' "--Literary agent and former publisher Larry Kirshbaum in yesterday's New York Times in an article on how the economic crisis has led to expense-account squeezes.

Kristen McLean, executive director of the Association of Booksellers for Children (ABC), writes about Kindle 2 and e-book pricing, as discussed here yesterday:

E-books are here to stay. Consumers are driving the trend, and it won't work to simply dismiss them. They are not a huge chunk of the market, but they are a growing one, and soon there will be a loyal customer who prefers e-books to hard copy. How fast this segment will grow is open for debate, but as an industry we better get ahead of it, figure out a sustainable cost structure and serve those customers or Amazon really will dictate the market terms.

Until now, people have had a tendency to think about e-books as somehow cheaper to produce than regular books. There is definitely some efficiency to be gained by not printing, storing and shipping a hard copy of a book, but a book costs exactly the same to bring to the point of market readiness no matter what format it ultimately takes. There are rights, advances, editorial, copy-editing and proofing expenses as well as set-up and general overhead.
 
As was rightly pointed out by Carolyn K. Reidy of Simon & Schuster, it's not a foregone conclusion that an e-book should be cheaper. It really depends on the upfront costs. The last thing we need is to habituate the consumer to an unsustainable and artificially cheap price point. There will be no going back once their expectations have been set.
 
Do publishers really want to be in a situation down the road where they have two products selling side by side in equal numbers, with the same content, and where one is less than half the price of the other? Not good, and a great way to kill the hard copy book for sure. Can our industry support its costs solely on sales of e-books at $9.99? In a hypothetical world where only e-books are bought, can a publisher afford half the revenues on the same number of units? Are we really going to make it up by doubling the e-units sold?
 
I'm not sure, especially as sheer consumer demographics are on the Baby Boomer end of things these days. We already know that the pool of active readers isn't expanding, and now some of our most committed readers are going to be dying off. If I were a publisher, I'd be thinking not just about the next three years when I price this content, but about the next 30, when all those Baby Boomer book sales go away.
 
On the retail side, the big question is how to sell e-books--a format that is tailor-made for downloading--in a bricks-and-mortar store. And this is not just a question for indie bookstores, but for all retailers who currently sell books. So far, the best (and perhaps the only viable) suggestion I've heard has come from Bob Miller, head of HarperStudio, who has proposed that anyone buying a traditional printed copy of one of his books be able to buy the e-book and audio version of the same book for an additional $2.

Some folks have questioned whether the consumer wants the extra formats. That's missing the point. One of the principles of retail is to sell customers the things they don't know they want but are happy to have. If the price point is right, it will make sense to most consumers, especially as e-books gain traction, and is an excellent opportunity to up-sell. This is an elegant solution that avoids difficult-to-maintain systems like cards, kiosks and other messy gap solutions. Frankly it's the only solution I've heard that makes sense.

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Dan Poynter of Para Publishing and an author, also had a strong reaction to the ongoing discussion about e-book pricing.

Readers will not pay the p-book (printed) price for an e-book because they know the product has not been printed, trucked or shipped. Most have not been typeset; some have not been proofed. Readers will not let publishers rip them off.
 
The larger publishers tried charging full price and their e-books did not sell. Their pricing became a self-fulfilling prophecy. Publishers said readers would not buy e-books, but it was because the price was too high.
 
Could the larger publishers be protecting their p-books? Didn't Bowker do that with the CD edition of Books in Print?
 
At Para Publishing, our books and reports are available both ways. E-books are priced at around half of the p-book price. Over the years our customers have moved toward e-books. We started offering eReport downloads in 1996. Initially 100% of our clients wanted the eReports mailed to them. Today 99% go electronically.
 
By the way, I am also an e-book reader because I am on author tours more than 6,000 miles each week. I board a plane every 2.5 days. In the past two years, I have made round-the-world trips 11 times. This travel allows me to read a lot of historical fiction on my iPhone.

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A sales rep writes about BEA and its plans to stay in New York City for the foreseeable future:

I can understand griping that BookExpo America and New York City are expensive, but not much more so than Los Angeles. You can get a decent hotel for a good price if you try early.

Harder to get around? At least you don't have to drive everywhere. A short walk from the Javits Center gets you on the subway. I say skip the shuttle busses and get over your fear of Manhattan, now the safest of the top 20 cities in the U.S.

In my humble opinion, New York still remains one of the best bookstore cities in the world.

I do agree that BEA should move around more. The new Boston convention center seems more than big enough, for example.

 

Happy 200th birthday to Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin!

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Something to Read, which had closed last year, has reopened in downtown Jackson, Tenn., according to the Jackson Sun. The store sells new and used books and is owned by d n English, co-owner of Main Street Publishing, whose offices are nearby.

Something to Read was inside the Painted Lady until it closed. Store manager Lisa Carroll told the paper, "We wanted to be involved in downtown and be in the heart of everything."

The store is located at 215 E. Main Street, Jackson, Tenn. 38301; 731-423-0105.

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Because owner Mary Suelflow couldn't find a buyer, Bound to Read, Marshall, Minn., is closing February 23, the Marshall Independent reported.

Suelflow wanted to sell the store for personal reasons as well as "the tough economy, competition and technology." A former B. Dalton Bookseller assistant manager, she opened the store five years ago and moved into its current location in August. 

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Ted Watkins, owner of Gold Beach Books, Gold Beach, Ore., told the Curry County Reporter that "sometime in early March, he will be closing the upstairs, and consolidating the bookstore to his downstairs space; he has also put the building up for sale or lease."

"My initial business model, which called for our 50,000 volumes to be listed on the Internet at the same time they were for sale in the store, never materialized as I spent nearly all of my time trying to figure out the retail sales world, something with which I had little prior experience," said Watkins. "My core employees did a wonderful job, but not having the off-season Internet sales inventory in place was our undoing and entirely my own fault. I have thought about just keeping the business in operation only during the tourist season, but I just didn't feel that was a good solution for my employees, not to mention the year-round coffee customers.

"I want to thank the community for its solid support," he added. "We couldn't have gone as long as we did without the backing of the community and I have nothing but gratitude for my customers and friends. I know any new version of the bookstore and coffeehouse will enjoy the same enthusiastic support. Although we did not achieve the long term viability as a large bookstore which I had hoped, we did come close!"

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Welcome back to Larry Portzline, whose Bookstore Tourism blog has been revived with a new motto: "It's back! And it's going to be better than ever."

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A segment on yesterday's All Things Considered offered a range of views about the Kindle and quoted several of our favorite people: M.J. Rose and Daniel Goldin (not Golding!) as well as Random House's Richard Sarnoff and James McQuivey at Forrester Research.

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Booksellers often hear their customers express the belief that working in a bookshop must be a dream job. The Chicago Tribune noted that, "even in pinched times, there's room for fantasy. What's your fantasy backup job? I mean a job that's pleasant but secure, satisfying but not all-consuming."

Only someone who hasn't worked in a bookstore could believe that the job is "not all-consuming," but Carol Felsenthal imagined she "was working at a store like Barbara's on Wells Street in Old Town, helping customers figure out which novel to read next, explaining why one Jane Austen novel, in my opinion, was better than another, or why Edith Wharton's best novel is not one of her most famous."

Unfortunately, the Trib had to rain on her fantasy: "But Barbara's on Wells, along with most small independent bookstores, is gone."

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Michelle F. Bayuk has joined Albert Whitman & Co. as director of marketing. She was most recently marketing director at the Children's Book Council and earlier worked at Scholastic, Millbrook Press, Putnam and others.

The 90-year-old publishing company was bought last year and has made, Whitman said, "a renewed dedication in creating high-quality children's books."

 

Readers' Books, Sonoma, Calif., has come up with a "homegrown stimulus package," which includes one of the most unusual bookstore sidelines we've ever seen: eggs! (Of course, they're locally grown, organic and free range.) Readers' Books co-owner Lilla Weinberger notes that produce and preserves will be arriving soon.

New York Comic Con is a combination industry and retail/consumer show that encompasses a swath of pop culture. There's a lot going on for retailers, publishers, authors and artists, librarians, teachers and perhaps most important, the fans--from in-depth panel discussions and industry summits to video game demonstrations and film screenings. Here's one fan/retailer's experience of last weekend's show in a nutshell.

Thursday: ICV2 Graphic Novel Conference: "Success in a Time of Change"

This prelude to NYCC, hosted by ICV2, looked at trends and forecasts for graphic novels and comics. The keynote address was by Art Spiegelman, creator of the Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel Maus and often described as the father of modern graphic novels (though he quipped "I'm still asking for a paternity test"). Spiegelman gave a short course on the nature and history of graphic novels, along with some predictions for the future. "Comics will be the last book standing when everything else goes to Kindle," he declared, citing comic creators' engagement with the tangible "book-ness" of their medium. Spiegelman also said that "the avant garde is where your future is, even if you don't think so," and that while comics are created in a collision between art and commerce, that collision is essentially unpredictable.

At a panel on comics adaptations of prose works it was agreed that artists working closely with authors can help create new markets, especially among teens, for established writers like Dean Koontz.

A presentation of ICV2's annual White Paper, including a year's worth of data about the comics industry, noted that although sales of "periodicals" (comics that are part of a long series) were down, graphic novel sales were up for the year, and the industry showed overall growth of about 5%. Milton Grieff, head of ICV2, cited the "counter-cyclical nature of cheap entertainment," and predicted that comics may continue to benefit from slimmer wallets (a prediction that could be applied to books as well).

A highlight of the year: the re-emergence of the 1986 graphic novel Watchmen, which sold 900,000 copies in the wake of the trailer for the upcoming movie. The book has appealed both to "lapsed comics readers" and new fans, and Grieff noted that in a tight economy, self-contained graphic novels may be do better than "periodicals."

Manga sales were down for the first time since ICV2 began collecting data, perhaps the result of saturation. However, the number of new titles for kids and tweens rose by 134%, as publishers apparently realize the market is still underserved and libraries aggressively grow their graphic novel sections to serve younger readers.

Unsurprisingly the White Paper's research showed the customers in comic shops are still overwhelmingly male and primarily in the 25-34 age range, but comics buyers in bookstores are more diverse in both age and gender. Libraries had a more even gender split as well, and their comics fans skewed toward teens and kids.

Friday: Diamond Retailer Breakfast and show floor industry hours

Thanks to my Diamond sales rep, I joined the comics retailers Friday morning for a free breakfast, giveaways (including a copy of the Spider-Man comic featuring Barack Obama on the cover) and an update on what various comics publishers are looking forward to. Diamond announced its move to a new facility in Mississippi, with a new warehouse management system that should result in better fulfillment for retailers. Dark Horse, Image, DC and Marvel touted new titles, formats, figurines or policies; interestingly, while DC is experimenting with a program to sell the No. 1 issue of a series for $1 to get new fans hooked, Marvel sells No. 1's for a higher price, presumably aimed at collectors. The issue of price was raised repeatedly in the Q&A session; retailers literally applauded those publishers who choose to keep the price of a single issue at $2.99 rather than raising it to $3.99.

Then it was off to the show floor to make the rounds before it was opened to the public. I picked up quite a few freebies, including DC's reissue of the first issue of Watchmen, and Vertigo's reimagined Unknown Soldier series featuring a humanitarian-turned-vigilante in Uganda.

Saturday: Fan Free-For-All

I brought my husband, a true comics geek, along on Saturday to help me understand the tidal wave of pop culture references that Comic Con presents. People-watching is as much a part of the convention as anything else: we saw plenty of Dark Knight Joker costumes, but also snapped photos of a member of Black Hawk Squadron (a somewhat obscure comic about a multinational group of ace pilots in World War II) and a towering Wookie (Star Wars is always a major component of the convention; Storm Troopers are everywhere you look). I bought my copy of Scott Pilgrim #5 (the delightful manga-influenced coming-of-age story from Canadian creator Bryan Lee O'Malley) from the Oni Comics booth. Michael picked up Umbrella Academy (the unlikely but compelling story of a dysfunctional family of superheroes, created by the lead singer from My Chemical Romance) from Dark Horse. We caught up with friends at the First Second booth, covetously ogled T-shirts and figurines and paused for a few minutes to watch a demo of the new Ghost Busters video game (voiced by the original cast including Bill Murray). The show floor was a cacophony of video gaming stations blasting soundtracks, the roars of crowds angling for freebies being tossed out at the bigger publishers' booths and endless lines to meet the creators at the autographing stations.

Eventually we snuck away to the panel discussions off the floor. Everything from film screenings to artist tutorials to publisher announcements to topic-specific discussions was happening at once. I found my way to the panel I moderated on nonfiction comics, and though the lack of a proper cable adapter kept us from displaying the PowerPoint images we had planned, the creators drew a sizable crowd and shared insights about their work and process. The panel featured Mike Dawson, author of Freddie and Me: A Coming-of-Age (Bohemian) Rhapsody (Bloomsbury); Dan Goldman, author of 08: A Graphic Diary of the Campaign Trail (Crown); Sabrina Jones, author of Isadora Duncan: A Graphic Biography (Hill & Wang); and George O'Connor, author of Journey Into Mohawk Country (First Second Books). From memoir to political reportage to biography to historical narrative, the panelists demonstrated the incredible diversity of contemporary comics, even within the relatively small subset of non-fiction graphic novels.  

If there's anything to take away from New York Comic Con, that may be it: comics and graphic novels now encompass an incredibly wide spectrum of subject matter, style and fan base, and the range continues to grow. (And we didn't even make it to Kids' Day on Sunday!)--Jessica Stockton Bagnulo

Anime News Network has in-depth coverage of the ICV2 White Paper.

Tomorrow morning on the Early Show: Larry Smith and Rachel Fershleiser, editors of Six-Word Memoirs on Love and Heartbreak by Writers Famous and Obscure (Harper Perennial, $10, 9780061714627/0061714623).

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Tomorrow morning on Good Morning America: Jess McCann, author of You Lost Him at Hello: A Saleswoman's Secrets to Closing the Deal with Any Guy You Want (Health Communications, $14.95, 9780757307133/0757307132).

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Tomorrow on Tavis Smiley: Neil DeGrasse Tyson, author of The Pluto Files (Norton, $23.95, 9780393065206/0393065200).

Also on Tavis Smiley: David Denby, author of Snark (Simon & Schuster, $15.95, 9781416599456/1416599452).

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Tomorrow night on 20/20: Jeff Benedict, author of Little Pink House: A True Story of Defiance and Courage (Grand Central, $26.99, 9780446508629/0446508624).

Shooting will begin on location in North Africa and France this April for Italian director Gianni Amelio's adaptation of The First Man by Albert Camus. Variety reported that the film, starring Jacques Gamblin, Denis Podalydes and Claudia Cardinale, is "Amelio's first foray into French-language filmmaking . . . Budgeted at $11.6 million and co-produced by Italy's Cattleya and Gaul's Bruno Pesery, Man will partly shoot in several seaside and desert locations in Algeria, with which France has a co-production agreement."

Book TV airs on C-Span 2 from 8 a.m. Saturday to 7 a.m. Tuesday and focuses on political and historical books as well as the book industry. The following are highlights for this coming weekend. For more information, go to Book TV's website.

Saturday, February 14

8 a.m. For an event hosted by the Strand Bookstore in New York City, Kenneth Whyte, author of The Uncrowned King: The Sensational Rise of William Randolph Hearst (Counterpoint, $30, 9781582434674/1582434670) discusses Hearst's early years. (Re-airs Saturday at 5:15 p.m. and Monday at 2:15 a.m.)

11:30 a.m. For an event hosted by the Harvard Coop, Cambridge, Mass.: Kevin Mattson, author of Rebels All!: A Short History of the Conservative Mind in Postwar America (Rutgers University Press, $21.95, 9780813543437/0813543436), contends that the right co-opted the radicalism of the 1960s. (Re-airs Saturday at 11 p.m. and Monday at 5:30 a.m.)
     
12:30 p.m. For an event hosted by Politics and Prose Bookstore, Washington, D.C., Robert Norrell, author of Up from History: The Life of Booker T. Washington (Belknap Press, $35, 9780674032118/067403211X), examines Washington's ideologies and the criticism he endured from African-American intellectuals. (Re-airs Sunday at 2 a.m. and Saturday, February 28, at 5:15 p.m.)

10 p.m. After Words. USA Today Supreme Court reporter Joan Biskupic interviews Philip Howard, author of Life Without Lawyers: Liberating Americans from Too Much Law (Norton, $24.95, 9780393065664/0393065669). (Re-airs Sunday at 9 p.m., Monday at 12 a.m. and 3 a.m., and Monday, February 22, at 12 p.m.)

Sunday, February 15

12 a.m. Nobel Peace Prize recipient Muhammad Yunus, author of Creating a World Without Poverty: Social Business and the Future of Capitalism (PublicAffairs, $14.95, 9781586486679/1586486675), talks about using micro-credit to help the poor around the world. (Re-airs Sunday at 3 p.m. and 10 p.m.)

4:30 p.m. Henry Cisneros, author of Latinos and the Nation's Future (Arte Publico Press, $29.95, 9781558855427/1558855424), discusses the growing influence of the Latin American population in the U.S. (Re-airs Monday at 4 a.m.)
    
Monday, February 16

4:30 p.m. David Pietrusza, author of 1960 LBJ vs. JFK vs. Nixon: The Epic Campaign That Forged Three Presidencies (Union Square Press, $24.95, 9781402761140/1402761147), recounts the campaign and election of 1960. (Re-airs Tuesday, February 17, at 4:30 a.m., Saturday, February 21, at 3 p.m. and Sunday, February 22, at 1 a.m.)

Two books are sharing the 2009 Lincoln Prize, awarded by the Lincoln and Soldiers Institute at Gettysburg College for "the finest scholarly work in English on Abraham Lincoln or the American Civil War soldier or a subject relating to their era."

According to the New York Times, the winners are Tried by War: Abraham Lincoln as Commander in Chief by James M. McPherson (Penguin Press) and Lincoln and His Admirals: Abraham Lincoln, the U.S. Navy and the Civil War by Craig L. Symonds (Oxford University Press).

McPherson won the Lincoln Prize in 1998 for For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War, and Symonds was a finalist in 1993. Each author wins $25,000 and a bronze cast of Lincoln.

Heroes of the Valley by Jonathan Stroud (Hyperion/Disney, $17.99, 9781423109662/142310966X, 480 pp., ages 10-up, January 2009)

The author of the Bartimaeus Trilogy proves his extraordinary versatility with this epic Viking tale for landlubbers. Although the heroes of the title are landlocked--indeed confined to a valley by age-old enemies--they operate from the same eye-for-an-eye, if-it's-not-bolted-down-it's-mine mentality as their waterlogged counterparts. Their growly names echo those of the Nordic folk: Svein, Hakon, Arne, Rurik.
 
Fourteen-year-old Halli Sveinsson and his descendents naturally believe Svein was the mightiest of the group. According to their family lore, Svein commanded that the heroes cease to war amongst themselves (over land and livestock) and unite against their common threat: the Trows. With a storyteller's lilt and command, author Stroud sets the scene: "Men walking late were snatched under within sight of home. Women and babies were dragged from their beds. . . . No one knew where the Trows' holes might open next, or what might be done." In the end, the stories go, the heroes sacrificed themselves to create an impenetrable barrier against the Trows: the cairns that contain the men's remains encircle the valley and keep it safe for all their kin and followers. The heroes' widows formed a counsel, banning all swords and armor, and an uneasy peace has ruled the valley for generations, with each hero's heirs ruling over their own House and lands. But this year, when the other residents of the valley journey to Svein's house for the annual Gathering, Halli Sveinsson meets Aud Arnesson, a feisty, independent-minded young woman who plants a seed of doubt in Halli regarding the old tales. After Olaf Hakonsson settles an old score by murdering Halli's drunk and defenseless uncle Brodir right in front of Halli, the teen embarks on a journey to Hakon's House to avenge his uncle's death.
 
At the start of the novel, Stroud characterizes Halli as a stunted, pompous and rash adolescent, "a midwinter's child," fated for an early end. Yet readers' sympathy for Halli will grow along with the teen's gradual maturation, as his exposure to the larger world gives him a more realistic sense of where he and his own family fit within it. His humbling experiences and his willingness to think about larger causes than his own transform him into an ordinary young man capable of extraordinary feats--the best kind of hero.--Jennifer M. Brown