Penguin Group USA has launched an in-house network of online channels called From the Publisher's Office, which features "video interviews and readings, audio discussions of classic literature and audio and text excerpts from new releases," the Associated Press reported. The site even offers "music--original music--including 'Wouldn't You Like To,' a folksy sing-along composed, played and sung by Penguin CEO David Shanks that calls out to creators everywhere: 'Wouldn't you like to write a story? / Don't you wish that you knew how? / You could be a famous author / Listen up and find out how.'"

"I saw that all of these people in this company were doing something extra to make this work and I just got into the spirit of it," Shanks said. "I don't think there are a lot of CEOs who get up and play rock 'n' roll and sing. But I think one of the things that makes us a successful company is that we don't we take ourselves too seriously."

He added, "If we don't change, we're going to be like the dinosaurs. This is a way for us to stay on the curve of where book marketing is going. It's sort of a really interesting new world. Everybody's learning. Some of these things will work. Some of them won't."

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A post-Bloomsday treat: Listen to a rare recording of James Joyce reading his own work (via Boing Boing).

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Tomorrow the Student Bookstore in Dinkytown near the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis is opening a second bookstore, called Stadium Village Bookstore, in the Stadium Village Mall, Minnesota Daily, the university's student newspaper, reported. The store will sell new and used textbooks and offer a book rental program.

Store manager Pradeep Denoronha told the paper that the store is "targeting those students [in the Stadium Village area who don't visit the Student Bookstore] since it is a long walk from there all the way to Dinkytown."

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Effective June 29, Arthur Keeney is joining Borders Group as senior v-p, marketing, where he will report to Anne Kubek, executive v-p, merchandising and marketing.

Keeney has served for eight years as v-p and general manager at Harold Friedman, Inc., a Pennsylvania grocery retailer. From 1998 to 2001, he was senior v-p, corporate retail, at Nash Finch Company, a grocery distribution and retailer in Minneapolis, Minn.

Before that, Kenney was director of sales and advertising at Kmart's Super Kmart Division from 1993 to 1998. Coincidentally Kmart bought Borders in 1992 and merged it with its Waldenbooks division. Borders-Walden was spun off as an independent company in 1995.

Borders CEO Ron Marshall, who was CEO of Nash Finch when Kenney worked there, commented: "The greatest challenge for our company right now is to drive sales and Art brings a solid track record of demonstrated results. He has a strong sense of urgency around our priorities--including reconnecting with customers as a serious bookseller and improving execution--and has a collaborative nature that comes from serving in merchandising and operations roles as well heading marketing at major retail organizations."

"People want to do business with people, not companies," said Ann Kingman, district sales manager for Random House, a member of the BEA panel about Social Media and the Independent Bookseller. "I want to know who I'm talking to." Kingman twitters to communicate with booksellers, about 20% of whom also subscribe to her blog. (Just last week, Kingman posted an informative blog, "How I follow 1,700 people a day on Twitter in only 20 minutes a day.") 

Heather Gain, marketing manager at Harvard Bookstore in Cambridge, Mass., uses Twitter to prepare for buying appointments by "talking" with booksellers, and she tweets about events at the store and sends people to the Harvard Bookstore's Web site. But, she said, she also tweeted recently about a muffin she bought from a local bakery and received a flood of responses saying, "I want your muffin."

On that note, moderator Len Vlahos, ABA chief program officer (and now ABA's COO), observed that social networking is "not about marketing but about building relationships. Your professional and personal lives blur."

Stephanie Anderson, manager of WORD Bookstore in Brooklyn, N.Y., and a Shelf Awareness columnist, said she, too, uses Twitter to get recommendations from booksellers. For example, while recently putting together an order for Europa Editions, she tweeted bookstores to find out some good Europa titles and wound up placing an order for 10-15 books. She also "gets a read on events" through the store's Facebook invitations.

Anderson has both a personal and store account on Twitter. When she writes in the persona of the store, she said she does not talk about what she had for lunch, for instance, but as "Bookavore," she does.

Vlahos said that a lot of people wonder how booksellers can do so much social networking and keep up with their work. The answer is finding a way to weave social networking into "the fabric of your day." Anderson pointed out that people had the same worry when e-mail became widespread. "You just find time for e-mail; it's the same with Twitter." Anderson communicates with roughly 100 booksellers each day, and maintains "a minibuzz all day, just like the one I get at the Winter Institute," she said.

Vlahos also pointed out what a powerful tool Twitter can be in spreading information, citing the #amazonfail headlines-maker (the Amazon controversy surrounding the disappearance of gay-interest books from the online bookseller's rankings) as well as the groundswell of support for #buyindieday, which promoted the idea of buying at an independent business. (And of course the BEA tweetup, which began on Twitter.)

Audience members also chimed in. When one bookseller asked if Anderson was able to do her work at WORD while maintaining her Twitter pace, WORD owner Christine Onorati said emphatically, "Yes!" She also said that Anderson had used social networking to start a basketball league at the court across the street from WORD Bookstore (with league names such as the Virginia Wolves, Purple Pros, the Elements of Style and Mrs. Ballaway), and, giving her own plug for the powers of social networking, Onorati said she received 80 resumes in response to a posting about an open position at the store.

However, Vlahos acknowledged the need to manage productivity, and Kingman suggested that in larger stores it might be necessary to "come together and discuss a strategy" for social networking. Kingman also emphasized that "blogs have staying power," and "give you Googlejuice," meaning that blogs get picked up by Google's search engine (Facebook and Twitter entries do not).

Someone else in the audience asked about online book clubs. Vlahos suggested GoodReads.com, which is still independently owned. Both Shelfari and Library Thing are now owned by Amazon.

Another bookseller cajoled Vlahos: "Len, whatever happened to Second Life?" Vlahos chuckled and explained to the audience that this was an avatar universe set up by the ABA some years ago. But Vlahos also took the opportunity to make a larger point, "retweeting" a quotation from NACS's Mark Nelson at an earlier panel, attributed to Wayne Gretzky: "You have to skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it is." Last year, it looked like My Space was gaining ground; this year it's Facebook and Twitter. Who knows what the future may bring? Whatever the future holds, Vlahos suggested, booksellers have to be there.--Jennifer M. Brown

Today on Fresh Air: Atul Gawande, surgeon, New Yorker writer and author of Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance (Picador, $14, 9780312427658/0312427654).

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Tomorrow morning on the Today Show: Mark Bittman, author of Mark Bittman's Kitchen Express (Simon & Schuster, $26, 9781416575665/1416575669).

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Tomorrow on the Diane Rehm Show: Lennard Davis, author of Go Ask Your Father: One Man's Obsession with Finding His Origins Through DNA Testing (Bantam, $25, 9780553805512/0553805517).

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Tomorrow on KCRW's Bookworm: Geoff Dyer, author of Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi (Pantheon, $24, 9780307377371/0307377377). As the show put it: "Geoff Dyer on the secrets that structure his new novel (which might, on the surface, seem like two novellas). Like a good magician, he rolls up his sleeves and pretends to explain his tricks.Like a great magician, he leaves us more completely baffled than we were before."

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Tomorrow on the View: Lauren Conrad, author of L.A. Candy (HarperCollins, $17.99, 9780061767586/0061767581). She will also appear tomorrow on the Early Show and Late Night with Jimmy Fallon.

Stuart Beattie, who co-wrote the screenplay for Australia, will make his directorial debut with Tomorrow, When the War Began, which he adapted. According to the Hollywood Reporter, "Tomorrow is the first novel in a popular series of seven written by Australian John Marsden and published from 1994-99. The Tomorrow Series, as it is known, details the insurgency efforts of a band of Aussie teenagers fighting off an enemy invasion and occupation of their homeland."

"It's coming of age in a war zone," said Beattie, who added that he has read and loved all the books. A film trilogy is planned. If the movies are successful, the other four books may be adapted as a television series, Hollywood Reporter wrote.

Debut authors Jeramy Dodds and Pasha Malla won the Ontario government's two $20,000 (US$17,660) Trillium Book Awards for literary excellence in English. The National Post reported that Dodds received the poetry prize for Crabwise to the Hounds, "a debut collection that also made the short list for this year's Griffin Poetry Prize."

Malla was honored for his short story collection, The Withdrawal Method, which the jury praised as "an assured and mature first collection from one of our best young writers, one who pairs striking emotional depth with remarkable technical skill."

In the French-language category, Marguerite Andersen won $20,000 for Le figuier sur le toit, and Paul Prud'Homme's Les Rebuts: Hockey 2 took the $10,000 Trillium Book Award for children's literature.

Goat Song: A Seasonal Life, a Short History of Herding, and the Art of Making Cheese by Brad Kessler (Scribner, $24, 9781416560999/1416560998, June 23, 2009)

Opening lines of books we want to read:

Early June. The mountains turn tender green this time of year, the skies become enamel blue. The goats wear bells around their necks while we hike up Mason's Hill. There's eight of us today--seven goats, one human. We step through salad greens and the goats taste everything in sight: steeplebush, wild strawberries, buttercups, blackberry vines. We're heading to the mountains soon.

Each day we wander the Vermont woods for an hour or two. I love the leave-taking, the sound of the goats' bells, the brief nomadism. Herding is a way of doing something while doing nothing; it asks only for one's presence, awake, watching animals and earth.

Wind rakes the trees. Clouds float shadows through the grass. We enter the woods and the goats eat ash, birch and maple. This evening I'll milk the does back in the barn and when the sun goes down I'll make an aged cheese from their milk called a tomme. Months from now when snow covers the mountains, I'll open that tomme and find this day again inside its rind: the aromatic grass, the leaves, this wind.

I call the goats on. They moan back from their branches. Hannah and Lizzie, Pie and Nisa, Penny, Eustace and Alice--I know each voice as well as any human's. We're heading up the slope now. They nod through the cinnamon ferns.

A goat path in the wild leads to mountaintops where other animals can't go. Some afternoons I follow my goats and others they follow me. The Igbo of Nigeria tell their children, if lost in the wilderness follow a goat, she always knows the way back home. I've been following these goats back home each day, but where they lead surprises me still.

I want to take you there.

--Selected by Marilyn Dahl

Kate Walbert is the author of Our Kind, a finalist for the 2004 National Book Award, The Gardens of Kyoto and Where She Went. Her new novel, A Short History of Women, was published yesterday by Scribner.

On your nightstand now:

Honestly? One from the Harry Potter series because my eldest daughter is obsessed and likes to read them in my bed; Personal History by Katharine Graham; Failure by Philip Schultz; Brooklyn by Colm Toibin; The House on Fortune Street by Margot Livesey; Poems from the Women's Movement edited by Honor Moore; Innocence by Penelope Fitzgerald . . .

Favorite book when you were a child:

My Side of the Mountain by Jean Craighead George. We lived in rural Pennsylvania, and weekly I would threaten to run away or would run away to the acres of woods bordering our house. In my imagination, I was going to find a hollowed-out tree and a friendly raccoon and spend the rest of my life there, surviving on algae and nuts.

Your top five authors:

Willa Cather for The Professor's House, Virginia Woolf for Mrs. Dalloway, William Maxwell for They Came Like Swallows, Evan Connell for Mr. Bridge and Mrs. Bridge, Jane Bowles for My Sister's Hand in Mine.

Book you've faked reading:

The Old Testament and Ulysses, both while in college, both on exams. I fooled no one.

Book you're an evangelist for:

Two immediately come to mind: The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy's perfect first novel, not a misstep from start to finish; and Housekeeping, Marilynne Robinson's masterpiece, especially the last chapter in which she somehow elevates the prose to opera.

Book you've bought for the cover:

Grace Paley's Collected Stories. The cover is this gorgeous sepia-toned photograph of Grace Paley standing on a lawn scattered with leaves, a raven at her feet.

Book that changed your life:

Light in August, read while backpacking through Italy, although I'm not sure if it was Faulkner or Florence that changed my life.

Favorite line from a book:

"Where's Papa going with that ax?"--the first line of Charlotte's Web.
 
Book you most want to read again for the first time:

Rilke's Letters to A Young Poet.

The following were the bestselling titles at member stores of the Independent Mystery Booksellers Association during May:
 
Hardcovers
 
1. Dead and Gone by Charlaine Harris (Ace)
2. Gone Tomorrow by Lee Child (Delacorte)
3. The Scarecrow by Michael Connelly (Little, Brown)
4. The Language of Bees by Laurie R. King (Bantam)
5. Road Dogs by Elmore Leonard (Harper)
6. The Way Home by George Pelecanos (Little, Brown)
6. Even by Andrew Grant (St. Martin's)
6. The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie by Alan Bradley (Delacorte)
6. Walking Dead by Greg Rucka (Bantam)
10. Killer Cuts by Elaine Viets (Obsidian)
 
Paperback
 
1. The Cat, the Quilt and the Corpse by Leann Sweeney (Obsidian)
2. Clubbed to Death by Elaine Viets (Obsidian)
2. Careless in Red by Elizabeth George (Harper)
4. I Shall Not Want by Julia Spencer-Fleming (St. Martin's)
5. The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows (Dial)
6. Blood Trail by C.J. Box (Berkley)
6. Child 44 by Tom Rob Smith (Grand Central)
8. Seattle Noir by Curt Colbert (Akashic)
9. Jack Wakes Up by Seth Harwood (Three Rivers)
9. The Body in the Gallery by Katherine Hall Page (Avon)

[Many thanks to IMBA!]