Neat trick of the week: two independent bookstores in Frisco, Colo., are merging, effective May 1.

The Next Page Bookstore and the Open Book will become a single business and be named the Next Page Bookstore and operate from Next Page's location. Frisco is near Vail and Breckenridge.

Karen Berg, who founded Next Page two years ago, said, "Big box bookstores are struggling, and Summit County recently lost a favorite independent bookstore. We are delighted for the opportunity to bring a measure of something positive to our community in this tough economy."

Amy Yundt, founder of the Open Book and now co-owner of the Next Page, said, "Both Karen and I love books, love the business of books and are 100% committed to this community. By joining together we will be in a much stronger business position to deliver the best indie bookstore experience to Summit County, and will be able to provide an even higher level of service in the form of merchandise, events and expertise to our customers."

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The New York Times wrote breathlessly about romance fiction, whose sales are up by a variety of measures, as people seek "a happy ending" in tough economic times. Among indicators: Nielsen data show the category up 7% last year; B&N romance sales are reportedly up; and public libraries are finding increased demand for romance titles.

The story recounts some of the exciting characteristics of the romance market: romance readers are very loyal to authors and series; romance readers buy more titles than literary fiction readers; romance titles in e-book format have lured a significant group of readers.

One happy romance reader commented: "I would give up something else if money was tight. I would give up my manicure and pedicure. I have my priority list, and books are pretty high on my priority list."

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A Florida man has been arrested for stealing some 3,000 items from Books-A-Million stores in southwest Florida and selling many of them for about $40,000 on eBay, the Charlotte Sun and Weekly Herald reported. The items had a retail value of more than $116,000.

Richard Michael Mullaney had been concealing items in "baggy clothes." The year-long scheme unraveled when a regional store investigator who was monitoring eBay "noticed a large number of new audio books being sold below market value."

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Big Sleep Books, a new and used mystery bookstore in St. Louis, Mo., is "just a little hole in the wall, but they've managed to survive since 1988," the Washington Post wrote.

"This is just my fun," Helen Simpson, who owns the store with Ed King, told the paper. "It's not a living, but I'm retired, and my partner has a good job."

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Carlton Books, a division of Carlton Publishing Group in the U.K., is being distributed by Sterling Publishing in the U.S. The first 33 Carlton books to be distributed by Sterling will be on the fall list.

Carlton specializes in illustrated history, sports, humor, entertainment, music, reference and lifestyle books. Among fall titles are 21st Century Design, 1001 Little Ways to Spend Less and Live Well, Titanic Experience, Treasures of the Winter Olympics, Leonardo da Vinci, The Story of Flight and a four-volume set about World War II.

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The Experiment, a new trade publishing company, will focus on practical nonfiction, including health, nutrition, fitness, psychology, relationships, self-help, parenting, sexuality, science and the environment, and be distributed by Publishers Group West. The inaugural fall list includes Roots of Empathy: Changing the World Child by Child by Canadian social entrepreneur Mary Gordon and Screw Cupid: The Sassy Girl's Guide to Picking Up Hot Guys by Samantha Scholfield.

The company was founded by Matthew Lore, who oversaw Avalon Publishing's Marlowe & Company imprint and then was v-p, executive editor, at Da Capo Press/Da Capo Lifelong Books. His partners are Peter Burri, general partner, who has 16 years of experience in finance and operations with many publishing and book distribution companies, and advisor and principal investor Richard Gallen, who has been an attorney and publishing investor for more than 20 years.

Others involved in the Experiment are Rose Carrano of Rose Carrano Public Relations, who is handling publicity; Betty Anne Crawford, founder of Books Crossing Borders, who is handling foreign rights; and Pauline Neuwirth of Neuwirth & Associates, overseeing production and printing.

Powell's Books, Portland, Ore., is exploring a new market--a farmers market. Beginning April 25 and lasting through October 24, on the last Saturday of each month, the bookstore will operate a 10' x 20' booth in the Portland Farmers Market's PSU location, where it will sell new and used books.

The book selections will change with the seasons, so that the first several themes are "going to seed," which features titles about seed gardening and composting, and "localvores," which highlights books about preparing local food and eating locally, while later in the year, "preserving" has books about "capturing the harvest" and "fun with fungi" focuses on books about hunting and cooking mushrooms.

In a statement, Michael Lamb, customer services manager of Powell's, said, "Our participation in the farmers market is a natural extension of our sustainability efforts and that is part of the reason why we'll offer used books."

Ann Forsthoefel, executive director of the farmers market, said, "Two iconic Portland organizations are coming together to provide our shoppers a wonderful collection of books to help market-goers prepare and store the region's bounty and grow some of their own food."

Tomorrow morning on Good Morning America: Tom Bergeron, author of I'm Hosting as Fast as I Can!: Zen and the Art of Staying Sane in Hollywood (HarperOne, $25.99, 9780061765872/0061765872).

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Tomorrow morning on the Today Show: Bob Barker, author of Priceless Memories (Center Street, $24.99, 9781599951355/1599951355).

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Tomorrow on KCRW's Bookworm: T.C. Boyle, author of The Women (Viking, $27.95, 9780670020416/0670020419). As the show put it: "This richly layered conversation with T.C. Boyle centers on the subjects of art and arrogance. The Women is a biographical novel, a fiction derived from the life of Frank Lloyd Wright, focused particularly on Wright's up-and-down experiences with women. How to separate the arrogance of the artist from his art and, more to the point, more mischievously, how to separate bad-boy Boyle from bad-boy Wright, his subject?"

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Tomorrow on the Diane Rehm Show: Lucinda Roy, author of No Right to Remain Silent: The Tragedy at Virginia Tech (Harmony, $25, 9780307409638/0307409635).

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Tomorrow on the View: Anthony Bourke and John Rendall, authors of A Lion Called Christian: The True Story of the Remarkable Bond between Two Friends and a Lion (Broadway, $21.95, 9780767932301/0767932307).

Also on the View: Joy Bauer, author of Joy's Life Diet: Four Steps to Thin Forever (Morrow, $25.99, 9780061665745/0061665746).

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Tomorrow night on Larry King Live: Debbie Phelps, author of A Mother for All Seasons: A Memoir (Morrow, $25.99, 9780061780011/0061780014).

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Tomorrow night on the Daily Show with Jon Stewart: William Cohan, author of House of Cards: A Tale of Hubris and Wretched Excess on Wall Street (Doubleday, $27.95, 9780385528269/0385528264).

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Tomorrow night on the Colbert Report: Bart Ehrman, author of Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible (And Why We Don't Know About Them) (HarperOne, $25.99, 9780061173936/0061173932).

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Tomorrow night on the Late Show with David Letterman: Russell Brand, author of My Booky Wook: A Memoir of Sex, Drugs, and Stand-Up (Collins, $25.99, 9780061730412/0061730416).

Gaumont Film Company has acquired Paranoia by bestselling suspense novelist Joseph Finder and hired Barry Levy to write the screen adaptation, Variety reported. Alexandra Milchan will produce. Finder's High Crimes was previously adapted for a movie starring Morgan Freeman and Ashley Judd.

The winners of the Lukas Prize Project Awards, given to works of literary nonfiction, include, as noted by the New York Times:

• The Dark Side by Jane Mayer (Doubleday) has won the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize.
• Vermeer's Hat by Timothy Brook (Bloomsbury) has won the Mark Lynton History Prize.
• Yellow Dirt: The Betrayal of the Navajos by Judy Pasternak, which will be published by the Free Press, has won the J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award.

The awards are sponsored by Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism and the Nieman Foundation at Harvard University.

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Finalists for the 2009 Orange Award for New Writers include An Equal Stillness by
Francesca Kay, Miles From Nowhere by Nami Mun and The Personal History of Rachel DuPree by Ann Weisgarber. The winner of the £10,000 (US$14,760) bursary will be named June 1 at the Orange Award for New Writers event at Southbank Centre.

Undress Me in the Temple of Heaven: A Memoir by Susan Jane Gilman (Grand Central, $23.99, 9780446578929/0446578924, March 24, 2009)

Opening lines of books we want to read:

Kowloon

No one else seemed concerned when our plane took a nosedive. We banked sharply to the left, then plunged toward what looked like a tongue depressor, a tiny spit of land jutting into a titanium sea.

Our tray tables in their upright positions, our carry-ons stashed in the overhead bins, the plastic seat frames rattle violently. Below us, the earth went haywire. And yet the flight attendants remained placid at their stations. One of them was even leafing through--was that a golf magazine? The other picked at her cuticles. The plane continued plummeting. I gripped the armrests. Dear God, we are all about to die with a splat! Across the aisle from me, a businessman tossed his newspaper aside and yawned.

. . . Beyond the little oblong window, gargantuan mountains rose up wildly in the twilight; a phalanx of apartment buildings suddenly appeared. High-rises seemed to be lining the runway, providing some sort of sadistic buffer between our 747 and the peaks . . . If we didn't land precisely, we'd careen into either the mountains or the sea.

"It's like Scylla and Charybdis down there," Claire laughed, spooling the cord from her headphones around her Walkman. She had majored in philosophy, so she tended to view the world through a prism of Greek mythology and nineteenth-century German depressives. The cabin began filling with the smell of sewage, jet fuel, rotting fish. Seeing my distress, she squeezed my arm. "Oh, sweetie. Relax. It's all part of the adventure."

--Selected by Marilyn Dahl

This is how it starts: one of your favorite sales reps comes by for an appointment and brings a few ARCs, most of which come with the highest recommendation. You snag one or two to take home and put the rest on a shelf for the staff to look through. A few more reps come by: wash, rinse, repeat. The ABA White Box mailing comes, and you snag three or four more ARCs. Several envelopes a week come from publishers, all with heartfelt letters tucked inside--a few are interesting, you snag one, put the rest to the side. The White Box kids' mailing. More rep visits. More heartfelt letters and more highest recommendations. The books pile up.

"Enough!" you cry. The ARC pile has gotten out of hand! (Again!) And so you and your staff winnow away, making a donation pile or maybe a recycling pile, until after several hours you are left with--well, a smaller ARC pile that has only books you really think you'll read someday, maybe when the book comes out in paperback.

You go home, feeling very accomplished. But when you close your front door, the carefully stacked pile of ARCs in the front hall collapses. A chain reaction starts and as ARCs tumble to the ground, you hear the crash of dishes and what might have been a muffled meow.

"After this happened last month," you mutter, "I swore I would never let the ARCs get so out of hand again!"

It's the blessing and the curse of the indie bookseller: the advanced readers copy. Although we could not be more grateful to have free reading material thrust in our direction--one of the best side benefits of the job--our enthusiasm for reading combined with the enthusiasm of those sending the books to have us read usually leads to stacks of fire hazards in store and home.

There are other problems with ARCs. Despite being printed on cheaper paper, they're more expensive to produce than "real books." From an environmental standpoint, the waste is overwhelming--both the books themselves and the resources it takes to ship them. Also there seems to be little communication at some publishers about ARCs, so that a store can get multiple copies of a book only one person wants to read, but no copies of a book five people want to read.
And yet, they're indispensible to what we do. It's how we fall in love with books, how we spread the love around our community, and by doing so, to more readers. They help with buying decisions and they help with buzz. They help with personal budgeting--I know few booksellers who could afford to buy as many books as they read every month.

So if we can't live without them, is there a way to make living with them less hazardous, less costly and less wasteful?  Much as e-books have been touted as a potential solution to the environmental and cost issues of physical books, e-ARCs are an answer that more parts of the book industry are beginning to consider.

The industry has already made a few steps towards this end. NetGalley, for example, is a site where "professional readers," a term that thankfully includes booksellers, can register for free and browse a public catalogue of books to download from participating publishers. On my first browse, I requested Last Night in Montreal from Unbridled Books and The Winter Harvest Handbook from Chelsea Green Publishing. Less than 24 hours later, I had Last Night in Montreal.

But I can read it only on my laptop, which is not comfortable for reading for long stretches. There are multiple e-readers, which would work well, but none in the price range of your average bookseller. (Or even in the price range of the above-average bookseller.)

Enter advanced.reader (aka Jenn Northington of the King's English, Salt Lake City, Utah) and her "modest proposal": that publishers, through an intermediary, subsidize the cost of e-readers for booksellers, with the understanding that booksellers would primarily use the e-readers for reading ARCs.

This would definitely save money for publishers. It is also potentially greener than paper ARCs, although the paper and shipping resources saved would have to be weighed against using more devices that need to be electrically charged on a regular basis. (A side benefit to such a program could be to increase interest on the part of customers in e-readers that aren't the Kindle--booksellers have already noticed some of their best customers are switching some reading to the Kindle because it's the reader that's most familiar to them right now.)

Of course, there are drawbacks to a switchover. Physical objects often carry an importance that electronic ones cannot. All booksellers have at least one favorite title that they never would have read if it hadn't been for the ARC showing up at the store at just the right time--much like the browsing experience is irreplaceable for finished books, it may well be for ARCs. And though many of us have had ARC overflow, a lot of stores have solved the problem by re-distributing the books to libraries, schools, shelters and other book-hungry places. By eliminating paper ARCs, indie booksellers could not only be depriving parts of the community of books, but also lessening the relationships we have with the community who receives with whom we share them.

Many other parts of the book world are making a partial electronic switch with their reading. A significant number of agents are exclusively or primarily reading requested manuscripts in electronic form as are some sales reps. Reviewers and book bloggers have been talking about the possibilities.

Right now, it seems to me that e-books and e-ARCs are things independent booksellers should continue to explore. We need to decide certain things for ourselves by trying them out, not just by reading articles and blog entries. Are e-readers the next step in our line of work?  Should we bother to get involved?  Is reading on a screen a different enough experience that certain types of book will be more common in e-book form, and others more common as "real books"?  There are a lot of things to consider, and an e-ARC program could be a good way for both booksellers and publishers to figure out the answers by playing around with the technology and discovering its potential, or lack thereof.

The conversation will continue, among other places, on Twitter; you can follow the discussions by searching the hashtags #ARCreader (for talk about publisher-sponsored readers) or #digiARCs (for talk about increasing availability of ARCs in electronic format).

I expect that wherever there are five booksellers discussing e-ARCs, there will be six opinions. What do you think? E-mail me at stephanie AT wordbrooklyn DOT com.