Net sales at Books-A-Million in the fourth quarter ended January 31 fell 2.5% to $164 million and net sales for the year fell 4.1% to $513.3 million. Sales at stores open at least a year dropped 5.3% in the fourth quarter and dropped 7.2% for the year. Net income in the quarter slipped 4.2% to $11.4 million and fell 34.5% to $10.8 million for the year. Net income included a charge of $900,000 to reduce "the asset carrying value of certain store locations and goodwill."

In a statement, chairman and CEO Clyde B. Anderson commented: "The fiscal year closed with an improvement in the negative sales trend we experienced in the third quarter. We remain focused on maintaining discipline in expense control, inventory management and the maintenance of a strong balance sheet as we navigate the challenging economic environment. Our continued efforts in this area have been successfully demonstrated by a $2.5 million reduction in inventory and a $12.5 million reduction in debt over the previous year."

New York State's Internet Sales Tax provision "has recouped $46 million in sales tax revenue from the 30-plus vendors that registered to collect and remit sales tax" since it went into effect last July, according to Bookselling this Week. "The state expects to collect about $68 million for fiscal 2009-2010, which begins April 1."

"This is not only good news for New York State, but for other states where similar Internet Sales Tax legislation has been introduced," said ABA COO Oren Teicher. "Importantly, the fact that over 30 vendors registered under the Internet Sales Tax provision clearly disputes any notion that this provision was merely the 'Amazon tax.' As we have stated from the beginning of our efforts, the Campaign for E-Fairness was never about any particular retailer, it was always about what's fair--and that's treating every retailer equally under existing laws."

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BTW also reported that three new ABA member businesses opened in January and February:

• BookBundlz, 1419 W. Byron Street #F, Chicago, Ill. 60613-2875; 773-726-3509 (not a storefront location).
• Paragraphs on Padre Boulevard, 5505 Padre Boulevard, South Padre Island, Tex. 78597; 303-358-4464.
• Words, 179 Maplewood Avenue, Maplewood, N.J. 07040-2509; 973-763-4225 (Shelf Awareness, March 7, 2009).

In addition, Book King reopened with a new owner in a new location--11 Center Street, Rutland, Vt. 05701-4016; 802-282-4465.

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Posing the non-rhetorical question, "Will your favorite indie book store survive or be swallowed whole?" Philadelphia City Paper spoke with local bookshops to find out how they've handled "staring down the barrel of Depression 2.0."

"We're at the center of 90% of all good book events in Philadelphia," said Michael Fox, second-generation owner of Joseph Fox Bookshop. "I haven't noticed any significant changes due to the economy except that things are a bit slower at the store, which is to be expected. But it's been far from disastrous. If I were younger, I'd say we'd be here another 50 years."

At Giovanni's Room, which became the world's oldest gay-and-lesbian bookstore after the recent closing of New York's Oscar Wilde Bookshop, owner Ed Hermance said, "With a staff that includes a few veterans from Giovanni's early days, we have an enormous experience in the field which you can't get at a major chain or Amazon. Whether or not that's useful enough to matter to people--that's what we're finding out."

"To the outside observer, things may seem pretty negative," said Richard de Wyngaert, owner of Head House Books. "But a recession makes communities smaller, more tight-knit, and we are very responsive to this neighborhood's DNA in a way that Amazon or a big chain can't be. For a long time, people lost interest in the tangible experience of going to your local bookstore or movie theater, that sense of community. But I think we're coming back to it."

Deborah Sanford, who founded House of Our Own in 1971, observed, "Maybe the recession will have an effect on the chains and the Internet. Maybe the day of the small bookstore is about to return."

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Now that the NCAA's March Madness has officially begun, you may want to check the latest bracketology updates from the 2009 Tournament of Books, hosted by the Morning News and Powell's Books, Portland, Ore.: "Sixteen books enter, but only one can win the grand prize--the Rooster."
 
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"For more than a decade, I held the coveted book beat in a town that trades places every year or so with Minneapolis for the crown as 'America’s most literate city,'" wrote John Douglas Marshall in the Daily Beast, reflecting on his time as book critic for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, which ceased publication last Tuesday and will continue with an online-only edition and skeletal staff.

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Ingram Book Co. cut a total of 64 jobs in Green, Ore., and La Vergne, Tenn., according to the Tennessean, which reported that "about 500 people remain employed at the La Vergne warehouse, and 170 remain in Oregon."

"We're in this very difficult economic period where retail in all sectors is down," company spokesman Keel Hunt said. "Ingram Book Co.'s business is being impacted by a falloff in order from retail booksellers. Their sales are down from the year before."

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Effective April 1, Hachette Book Group will take on trade sales, marketing and distribution for Oxmoor House, a Time Inc. company. The change comes as Time Inc. moves all its book production under the direction of a single unit.

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At Chronicle Books:

• Kimberly Anderson has been promoted to executive director of domestic sales and will oversee all sales channels, excluding international and subsidiary rights. She joined the company in 2003 as a national account manager, selling to Amazon and warehouse clubs, then became a senior sales manager for Borders Group and oversaw mass market before becoming director of trade and mass market sales.
• Holly Smith has been appointed associate director of trade and mass market sales and will continue to manage independent trade territories, build the mass market channel and oversee and sell to Amazon directly. She joined the company last year from Tokyopop, where she was director of sales. Before Tokyopop, she was a national events manager and a community relations manager at Barnes & Noble.
• Cathleen Brady has been named director of children's marketing and publicity. She joined Chronicle in 2004 after working at Candlewick Press and Simon & Schuster's Children's Division.

The Australian booksellers and publishers associations have reacted negatively to a draft report from the government's Productivity Commission recommending that "some of Australia's 'parallel importation restrictions' (PIRs) be retained, but that the current 90-day rule be abolished and that PIR protection should only apply for 12 months from the date of first publication of a book in Australia," Bookseller & Publisher Magazine's Weekly Book Newsletter reported.

Under current law, in order to secure copyright in Australia on a new book published abroad, an Australian publisher must make the title available in Australia within a certain period after its publication--in recent years, within 30 days. The law restricts bookseller sales of foreign editions of books during that period and once the book is published within that period.

While not wanting to abolish parallel importation rules outright, the commission said, the Newsletter wrote, that parallel importation restricts competition and has " 'upwards pressure on book prices in parts of the market' and that 'most of the benefits of these higher prices accrue to publishers and authors' as well as local printers, with 'most of the costs' met by consumers."

Australian Publishers Association CEO Maree McCaskill stated the proposal would "destroy" territorial copyright and "do great harm to all involved in the Australian book industry."

Australian Booksellers Association CEO Malcolm Neil remarked on a lack of "incentives in [the Commission's proposed] system for improvements in the supply chain and, while we will need to analyse the report further, it appears to focus on a 'top end of the market' solution."

Geoffrey Jennings, co-owner and corporate counsel at Rainy Day Books, Fairway, Kans., reported the bookstore recently received an e-mail "that touched a particular nerve with me. Intellectual property and related litigation happen to be my areas of interest."

The message, from Shanghai Chooke Network Information Technology Co., Ltd, "the domain name register center in China," claimed that it had "received an application formally, one company named 'Tengfeng (China) Investment Co., Ltd' applies for the domain names (www.rainydaybooks.com.cn www.rainydaybooks.asia etc.), and the Internet keyword (rainydaybooks) on the internet Mar 17, 2009. We need to know the opinion of your company because the domain names and keyword may relate to the copyright of brand name on internet. we would like to get the affirmation of your company, please contact us by telephone or email as soon as possible."
 
Jennings responded by noting that the "company in question has no affiliation with our company. We will immediately litigate any infringement of our trademark through ICANN and/or US Federal Court."

The subsequent reply threatened that if the owners of Rainy Day Books ever wanted to do business in Asia, they should consider acting to protect their company and would be given "priority to register these domain names."

In his analysis of the exchange, Jennings observed that this "is an attempt by would-be cybersquatters to preemptively generate revenue from existing website operators. See powells.cn, borders.cn, bn.cn, etc. These domains have already been seized by entities unknown in Asia. It would appear that this company wants to generate revenue by registering and 'protecting' domains for U.S. businesses. This may or may not be legitimate, but their tactics suggest extreme caution in communicating with them. In all likelihood, any payment to them would be the tip of a nightmare. If anyone wants to register foreign variations on their web address, there are far more legitimate companies to do business with. My suggestion is to ignore any such inquiry entirely."

It was also a very good year for Barack Obama the author in 2008. The Washington Post reported that disclosure forms filed with the Secretary of the Senate stated that he earned nearly $2.5 million in royalties from sales of Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance and The Audacity of Hope.

And on January 15, just days before taking office, Obama added another $500,000 by signing a deal for an abridged version of Dreams from My Father for "middle grade or young adult readers." According to the Post, the disclosure forms also revealed that on January 9, Obama "amended a December 2004 deal with the Crown Publishing Group, which is expecting another nonfiction book from him, to note that the book 'would not be delivered during his term of office.'"

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Former president George W. Bush is planning to write a book "about twelve difficult personal and political decisions he has made in his life," the New York Times reported. The work, "tentatively titled Decision Points," is scheduled to be published by Crown Publishing Group in 2010.

"He’s already written 30,000 words," said Robert B. Barnett, a Washington lawyer who negotiated the deal. "He has no collaborator but he's working with his former chief speech writer Christopher Michel."

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In international book news, the Telegraph reported that, "on the eve of national strikes, the French have found a new way to show their dislike of Nicolas Sarkozy: by reading a 17th century tale of thwarted love that the president has said he hates."

Sarkozy has often expressed his disdain for La Princesse de Cleves by Madame de La Fayette, published in 1678. According to the Telegraph, "French readers have adopted the book as a symbol of dissent: as Mr Sarkozy's popularity falls, sales of the book are rising."

Featured during the Hot Topics segment on the View today: Dump 'Em: How to Break Up with Anyone from Your Best Friend to Your Hairdresser by Jodyne Speyer (Collins Living, $15.99, 9780061646621/0061646628).

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Sunday on NPR's Weekend Edition: Tim Green, author of Baseball Great (HarperCollins, $16.99, 9780061626869/0061626864).

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Sunday night on 60 Minutes: Steve Lopez, author of The Soloist: A Lost Dream, an Unlikely Friendship, and the Redemptive Power of Music (Berkley, $15, 9780425226001/042522600X).

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Monday for the full hour on Oprah: Steve Harvey, author of Act Like a Lady, Think Like a Man: What Men Really Think About Love, Relationships, Intimacy, and Commitment (Amistad, $23.99, 9780061728976/0061728977).

A pilot episode based upon M.J. Rose's novels The Reincarnationist and The Memorist is currently being shot in Baltimore and "looks like a strong candidate to make the Fox lineup next season," the Sun reported. One reason for optimism is that the "as-yet-untitled series about reincarnation is the work of a writer of quality drama, and the series seems to fit with what some network programmers see as the next big theme." The working title for the pilot is The Reincarnationist.

The pilot's script was written by executive producer David Hudgins, who most recently worked as writer and supervising producer of Friday Night Lights, and Deran Sarafian is directing. The cast includes Kelli Giddish, Nic Bishop and Ravi Patel. The production team also includes Lou Pitt as executive producer and M.J. Rose as consulting producer.

"Just the fact that it's being made is huge, but I really hope everything they say is true," said Rose. "It would give the books in the series a giant push to reach more readers."

The Orion Book Award finalists for 2009 are Trespass by Amy Irvine, The Wild Places by Robert Macfarlane, The Bridge at the End of the World by James Gustave Speth, Inventing Niagara by Ginger Strand and Finding Beauty in a Broken World by Terry Tempest Williams.

The winner of the Orion, which recognizes "books that deepen our connection to the natural world, present new ideas about our relationship with nature, and achieve excellence in writing," will be announced on March 27. Winner and finalists will be honored during a public event on April 15, 2009 at the Cynthia-Reeves gallery in New York City.

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The nominees for the Hugo Awards and the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer have been named by Anticipation, the 67th World Science Fiction Convention. Winners will be announced during Anticipation’s Hugo Awards ceremony on Sunday, August 9, at the Palais des congrès.
 
Finalists for best novel include Anathem by Neal Stephenson, The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman, Little Brother by Cory Doctorow, Saturn’s Children by Charles Stross and Zoe’s Tale by John Scalzi.

The John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer nominees are Aliette de Bodard, David Anthony Durham, Felix Gilman, Tony Pi and Gord Sellar.

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The shortlist for the Arthur C. Clarke Award 2009 includes Song of Time by Ian R. MacLeod, The Quiet War by Paul McAuley, House of Suns by Alastair Reynolds, Anathem by Neal Stephenson, The Margarets by Sheri S. Tepper and Martin Martin’s on the Other Side by Mark Wernham. The winner will be announced on Wednesday, April 29, at an award ceremony held on the opening night of the Sci-Fi-London Film Festival.

Susan Wiggs's life is all about family, friends . . . and fiction. She lives at the water's edge on an island in Puget Sound, and (weather permitting) she commutes to her writers' group in a 17-ft. motorboat. Her most recent novel is Fireside, published by Mira Books.

On your nightstand now:

The Urban Outfitters catalogue, a Clairefontaine notebook and pen, a tin of Bag Balm, a chapter of my work-in-progress and The Irregulars: Roald Dahl and the British Spy Ring in Wartime Washington by Jennet Conant. I adore Roald Dahl, and I'm a sucker for true stories of heroic deeds in World War II.

Favorite book when you were a child:

Harriet the Spy by Louise Fitzhugh. I slept with it under my pillow so I could channel Harriet and started carrying a notebook everywhere I went. I still do that.

Your top five authors:

Edith Wharton, E.B. White, Sharon Kay Penman, Ann Patchett, Stephen King. This list changes every time I try to narrow it down.

Book you've faked reading:

Du Coté de Chez Swann by Marcel Proust. In French. I was trying to impress a professor who I later learned was gay. Quel dommage!

Book you're an evangelist for:

I Like You by Amy Sedaris makes the perfect hostess gift. It's everyone's childhood in one volume. And Meeting God in Quiet Places: The Cotswold Parables by F. LaGarde Smith is one I tend to give people in need of comfort.

Book you've bought for the cover:

Cary Grant: A Celebration of Style by Richard Torregrossa. I'm staring at it right now. Swooooooooon! Please don't tell me he's gay, too.

Book that changed your life:

Yertle the Turtle by Dr. Seuss. It was the first book I bought with my own money, and it contained one of my earliest writing lessons--go big or go home. At age seven, I had no idea the subtext was meant to be a condemnation of fascism.

Favorite line from a book:

"Reader, I married him." From Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte. Swooooooooooon!

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

The Ginger Man by J.P. Donleavy. I sneaked my mother's copy and read it with my jaw on the floor. A story of a naughty man doing naughty things, told with such originality and playfulness with the language that I feel like reading it again right now.

In 1991, in New York, Erica Johnson met Aleš Debeljak, a sexy, melancholy Slovenian poet, in fact, the leading poet of his generation. They fell in love but not smoothly. He broke up with her several times, telling her it wouldn't work. They certainly had different outlooks on life: he preferred the resignation of melancholy while she preferred shuddering misery, which is what life with Aleš seemed to promise, according to her friends. Even he said, "You're not going to survive," but he also said, "I cannot not love you." So she left her world of city financial analysis and followed him to Ljubljana, "the wild heart of the land of ex-girlfriends."

This was an amazing time to be in Slovenia, two years after its liberation from crumbling Yugoslavia. "In late June 1991, Slovenia woke up after the surprising victory of the Ten Day War, rubbed its eyes, and looked around. The day before, it had been the perennially dull and diligent A student in a variously backward and brilliant, barren and abundant federal union made up of Montenegrin shepherds, Muslim dervishes, Zagreb coffeehouse intellectuals, Belgrade cosmopolitans. But the day after the war, Slovenia woke up alone . . . the poor and dangerous neighbor of a jittery European Union. The cordon sanitaire between civilization and chaos."

They married, and the day after her wedding she woke up to the ear-splitting sound of weeping, lamenting women--a disorienting reminder that she was in a very other country and now a "member of a black-haired wild-eyed clan of southern Catholic Slavs, the kind of family that finds it very hard to let go of their only son."

And so she started her Slovenian education, in a capital city that still had small farms alongside the streets. She had language difficulties, of course, with some wicked turns: Slovenian has a special form for two, useful for writing love poems, but maddening to master. And as attracted as she was to "the dual transforming into the plural, I rebel, along with the rest of the class, when confronted with one final grammatical/numerical twist in the Slovenian language--namely, that the plural form is used for only three and four, and when you get to five and above you revert to the singular. With the introduction of this rule, the whole project seemed to take on perverse, almost sadistic, dimensions."

Erica Johnson Debeljak has written a witty and lyrical memoir, filled with deep love for her adopted country and Slovenian family. Whether she's explaining what "forbidden bread" means or why tending graves is a passionate national pastime or rebelling against na široko (a form of triple diapering), she writes with exuberance and depth. She and her poet have three children now, and after their first child, Klara, was born, they realized that "we have substantially more items on the agenda that call for negotiation and compromise. Offsetting that, of course, our field of potential discovery and wonder is that much wider." And we are the richer for her discoveries.--Marilyn Dahl

Shelf Talker: An exuberant and tender memoir about falling in love first with a Slovenian poet, then with his country.

In Brian Moore's novel Catholics, a helicopter arrives for the first time on Muck Island, site of a still-functioning monastery built in the 13th century. The flying machine has brought a young priest to the isolated Irish landscape, sent by the Vatican to confront the Abbot about his monks' persistence in celebrating the Mass in Latin despite prohibitions from Rome.

"His vorpal blade went snicker-snack," the Abbot says mischievously, citing Lewis Carroll to mock progress. "It would be a good description of that helicopter out there."

This week has become an odd mixture of vorpal blades, ancient rites and thoughts of lost authors for me. The genesis came on St. Patrick's Day (ancient rites), when I found myself swept up in the Twitterwave (vorpal blades) by posts about everything from green-clad drunken morning revelers to instantaneous reports from SXSW to the momentum building around John Wray's Lowboy as word spread about his bullhorn reading on the L train and people began handselling the novel to one another in 140-character pops (coincidentally, about the number of words on a staff recommend card in a bookshop).

With all that buzz and more heating up my MacBook Pro, what's a book person to do? Well, I turned away from the computer for a moment and glanced at my bookshelves; just another reader transcending worlds.

And there, within reach, were some of Brian Moore's novels: Catholics, The Luck of Ginger Coffey, No Other Life, The Magician's Wife, Lies of Silence, The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne, The Colour of Blood, Black Robe, The Doctor's Wife, The Statement.

I stacked the books on my desk. I thought about everything we're discussing, speculating, proselytizing and worrying about in our business; and about this one author--born in Ireland, lived in Canada, died in Malibu, Calif.--whose books are largely out of print, but who matters so much to at least one reader: me.

On Twitter, I typed: "I must do this before midnight: I officially declare St. Patrick's Day 2009 to be 'Bring All the Novels by Brian Moore Back into Print Day.'" Random House sales rep Ann Kingman immediately retweeted, adding an enthusiastic second "(Yes, yes!)."

I spun the Twitter vorpal blades again, posting a quotation from The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne: "As he spoke, she heard America, eager America, where men talk business as others talk love."

Brian Moore was now in the Twitterstream, though I was aware, as the digital ancients say, that you can never step into the same Twitterstream twice.

A few years ago, I wrote an essay about Moore for the Dos Passos Review's Rediscovering Writers series. I mentioned that in the bookshop where I worked, I would often suggest one of the few novels still in print then (The Statement, The Magician's Wife) to customers looking for something "new." Without exception, as if part of a well-rehearsed chorus, my customers responded: Who?

Graham Greene once called Moore "my favorite living novelist." When Moore died in 1999, Tom Christie wrote an elegy in LA Weekly that began, "The most accomplished and least fashionable writer in Los Angeles died last week." In the Times Literary Supplement, Hermione Lee wrote that Moore's best quality also "prevented him from being as famous as he deserved, that he was always disappearing into his books, that he never wrote the same book twice."

I won't presume to call myself Brian Moore's ideal reader, but I do what I can to find him the audience he deserves. It isn't easy. Of his 20-plus novels, only a handful are still in print in the U.S. and that is a shame. Moore's narrative voice is crisp and disciplined. He finds a story's center and holds fiercely to it. What he doesn't reveal often reveals everything.  

I love the speed of conversation on Twitter, the ability to share ideas and observations, pick up a thread and run with it or, in John Wray's case, give a deserving writer an instantaneous, word-of-mouth spike.

What are you reading . . . now!?

But I also need to savor the other ceremony: the turning away from my MacBook and iPod Touch screens to scan those bookshelves behind my desk; to remember, and suggest to you, that Brian Moore's novels should all be in print. On Twitter, I also left another quotation, a bookseller's lament: "They're all such great readers, Miss Hearne thought, it's a pity they don't like the same books as I do."--Robert Gray (column archives available at Fresh Eyes Now)