Opened this week, Lonely Planet's store at Sydney Airport features "the full range of Lonely Planet's digital products and travel guides, as well as a selection of travel accessories, and Lonely Planet magazine," Bookseller & Publisher Online reported.

Lonely Planet sales and marketing director for Australia Howard Ralley said that travelers will "immediately see that Lonely Planet means much more than just books." Opened in association with Lagardère Services Asia Pacific, the store showcases the company's website, video and TV content, wireless guides such as the iPhone Guidebook and a portal to make custom guides.

Ralley called the store "an important base" for launching other digital aspects of Lonely Planet's business in the Asia Pacific Region and said that the concept may be expanded to other locations.

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"You have that itch. You've got the urge. You feel the need to read," observed the Denver Post in a guide to the city's bookshops. "Regardless of how bad the economy gets, you just can't seem to cut back on your book habit. Libraries are thriving as the economy falters, but there always will be those who want to own what they read. We've rounded up a sampling of some favorite bibliophile haunts, where book dealers are happy to feed your literary addiction. New or used, specialty or general, these spots can cure your word jones."

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The Trover Shop on Capitol Hill, Washington, D.C., is closing after more than a half-century in business. The Washington Post reported that a letter in the shop's window began: "It is with great sadness that we inform you of our plans to close our Capitol Hill location, but given the current economic climate and the changes in our industry, we are faced with no other viable option."

"It's tough. It's our whole life," said co-owner Andy Shuman. "This is something my dad took a lot of pride in. He worked six days a week all his life." He told the Post that several years ago, the family had owned five Trover Shops in the city. After the imminent closing of the Pennsylvania Avenue store, the only remaining Trover Shop will be the one at 13th and F Streets, which sells cards and gifts, but no books.

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In an article headlined "Bookstores Aim at Amazon With E-Readers of Their Own," Wired magazine suggested that "e-book readers promoted by big stores could also widen the gap between chain stores and independent book sellers who may not be able to offer an integrated e-book reading experience."

Stephanie Anderson, manager of WORD bookstore, Brooklyn, N.Y., told Wired that indies will still have their place in the industry. "A lot of what independent book stores are about is a place for people to go, meet authors and talk about what they are reading," she said. "For indies, the books are the most important thing but the community comes a close second."

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Boing Boing showcased Francis Ford Iowa, a blog turned book promotion marketing tool by Daniel Kraus, who noted: "I work at the American Library Association's Booklist magazine (I make a lot of ALA's videos, including the one of the FBI whistleblower that Boing Boing mentioned last year). My debut young-adult novel, The Monster Variations, comes out on August 11. As a promotional tool (but mostly because it's fun), I've been posting all the terrible movies I made as a teen growing up in Iowa."

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At the premiere in London last night of the film version of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, fans "braved rain and hail" to welcome the cast, the New York Times reported. The movie opens here next week.

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A Forbes story about investing in the current difficult economic times quoted one analyst who said that highly leveraged companies "are probably not going to be able to last."

By contrast, companies with low debt are much better positioned to survive, and among those cited were Amazon.com, with a debt-to-equity ratio of 3%, and Barnes & Noble, with no debt.

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Rob Weisbach Creative Management is adding three senior associates who will work with their own clients as well as help the agency in general:

• Erin L. Cox will represent writers and provide publicity and promotion services. She was formerly book publishing director at the New Yorker and is a sales rep for the German Book Office's Publishing Perspectives. She earlier worked in the publicity department at Scribner and was associate director of publicity at HarperCollins.
• David Groff will scout and develop writers, provide editorial expertise and offer editorial services. A writer, he has spent 25 years in the book business and was a senior editor at Crown and continues as an independent editor and publishing consultant.
• Jake Baumann will develop and represent authors and screenwriters and provide film and TV expertise. He was most recently director of development at the Weinstein Company and earlier worked at Wild Child Films and Laura Ziskin Productions, where he was involved with many book-to-film projects.

Kay Allison, owner of the Quest Bookshop, Charlottesville, Va., "is the brains behind a program called Books Behind Bars; prisoners from nearly 40 facilities write to her asking for reading material," according to Newsplex.com, which observed that "Kay has helped thousands of prisoners mentally escape in the last 20 years."

"I just think they're people who made a mistake and they deserve another chance, and you can read that in the letters," she said.

Allison and volunteers "sort through hundreds of donated books, stored on shelves on the second floor of the [bookshop], looking to quench each prisoner's thirst for knowledge. Kay says that many of the prisoners who write in are young people trying to educate themselves or individuals studying for the GED."

The nine regional booksellers associations have created a 2010 page-a-day Eat, Sleep, Read calendar that promotes IndieBound and includes book trivia and information about books. All the regional associations will share proceeds. The calendars cost booksellers $4 each.

Many of the trivia questions come from the New Atlantic Independent Booksellers Association quiz bowl questions and answers. The calendar also includes book recommendations from the BookSense and Indie Next lists.

Congratulations to Eileen Dengler, executive director of NAIBA, who spearheaded the project, and worked with booksellers Joe Drabyak of the Chester County Book & Music Co., West Chester, Pa., Carol Besse of Carmichael's Bookstore, Louisville, Ky., and Sherri Gallante of Vroman's Bookstore, Pasadena, Calif. In addition, Workman provided editorial and production help, and Bookazine is helping with distribution.

The idea came out of a meeting of the associations' presidents and executive directors to devise "a distinctive product we could offer our members that would also help fund bookseller programming." The focus became "what we'd been doing best--talking about books and having fun with book trivia."

Dragon Fighter: One Woman's Epic Struggle for Peace with China (Kales Press, $28.95, 9780979845611/0979845610, May 2009) is by Rebiya Kadeer, a Uighur leader-in-exile, whom Beijing is saying is the mastermind behind the current protests in Xinjiang Province that involve some of the worst ethnic violence in modern Chinese history (between Uighur and Han Chinese). China has sealed off Xinjiang's capital, Urumqi, and cut off telephone and Internet services. More than 1,400 people have been arrested and more than 100 killed.

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Jef Smith, inventory supervisor at Independent Publishers Group, works with Amal Press, a Muslim publisher in the U.K. that publishes scholarly and nonfiction works relating to Islam and Islamic culture. He wrote: "They have, in my opinion, the best title for a book about Iran." It is In the Land of the Ayatollahs Tupac Shakur Is King: Reflections from Iran and the Arab World by Shahzad Aziz ($14.95, 9780955235924/0955235928).

Today on Fresh Air: Chris Anderson, author of Free: The Future of a Radical Price (Hyperion, $26.99, 9781401322908/1401322905).

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Tomorrow morning on the Today Show: Stefanie Wilder-Taylor, author of It's Not Me, It's You: Subjective Recollections from a Terminally Optimistic, Chronically Sarcastic and Occasionally Inebriated Woman (Simon Spotlight, $23.99, 9781416954149/1416954147).

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Tomorrow on KCRW's Bookworm: Matthea Harvey, author of Modern Life: Poems (Graywolf Press, $14, 9781555974800/1555974805). As the show described it: "Like dangerous toys or perilous amusement park rides, Matthea Harvey's poems careen into the unknown. This year's Kingsley Tufts Award-winner demonstrates how her love affair with the dictionary generated some of her wildest thrills."

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Tomorrow on the Diane Rehm Show: Christian Davenport, author of As You Were: To War and Back with the Black Hawk Battalion of the Virginia National Guard (Wiley, $25.95, 9780470373613/047037361X).

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Tomorrow night on the Daily Show with Jon Stewart, in a repeat: Mike Kim, author of Escaping North Korea: Defiance and Hope in the World's Most Repressive Country (Rowman & Littlefield, $24.95, 9780742556201/0742556204).

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Tomorrow night on the Colbert Report, in a repeat: Neil DeGrasse Tyson, author of The Pluto Files (Norton, $23.95, 9780393065206/0393065200).

Variety reported that "Rita Wilson is developing a series for HBO based on Jeffrey Eugenides' Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Middlesex. Wilson will exec produce the project along with writer Donald Margulies."

Mandate Pictures has purchased the film rights to You Are a Miserable Excuse for a Hero (St. Martin's Griffin, $13.95, (9780312377342/0312377347), the first book in comedian Bob Power's Just Make a Choice! series of choose-your-own-ending novels. Variety reported that Mandate "bought a comedy pitch [based on the book] from scribe D.V. DeVincentis," whose credits include High Fidelity and Grosse Point Blank.

"I wanted to drop the most indecisive man on the planet and his idiot friends into a fast-moving action movie and see what happens," said DeVincentis.

A sample of the book, including multiple endings, can be seen here. The second book in the series, The Terrible, Horrible, Temp-to-Perm Debacle (St. Martin's Griffin, $13.99, 9780312377359/0312377355), was released yesterday.

Chris Beckett's collection, The Turing Test, won the £5,000 (US$8,043) Edge Hill short story prize award. The Guardian reported that Beckett, a "social work lecturer with a sideline in science fiction writing," was something of a surprise victor over a shortlist that included Man Booker winner Anne Enright and Whitbread winner Ali Smith.

"It was a very big surprise," he said. "Anne Enright won the Booker--two of the other authors [Shena Mackay and Smith] were shortlisted--so I thought I was very small fish compared to them . . . I also thought that being a science fiction writer could count against me: a lot of people don't like it, or look at it in some way as less than literary fiction. It's a little blow for the genre, as well as for me--it might persuade a few people that maybe it's worth looking at."

The Guardian added that the award was "especially poignant for Beckett, as his publisher, the tiny Elastic Press, is in the process of winding up. He's hoping the win will mean a larger publisher might be interested in his writing."

Zane is the exceedingly successful African-American erotica writer, and her web site, Eroticanoir.com, averages a quarter million hits monthly. She is the author of 10 titles, including Nervous, The Heat Seekers and The Sex Chronicles: Shattering the Myth. She is also an editor or contributor for several other titles such as Best American Erotica 2004, Best Black Women's Erotica and the newly released essay collection, Becoming Myself: Reflections of Growing Up Female edited by Willa Shalit. In addition, Zane is the publisher of Strebor Books International, an imprint of Atria/Simon and Schuster. Her latest books are Head Bangers, published in May by Strebor, and Sensuality: Caramel Flava II, which was published in June by Atria.

On your nightstand now:

Cross by James Patterson.

Favorite book when you were a child:

Flowers in the Attic by V. C. Andrews.

Your top five authors:

D.V. Bernard, Allison Hobbs, William Fredrick Cooper, Dywane Birch and Laurinda Brown. They truly inspire me and push me to become a better writer.
 
Book you've faked reading:

Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare.
 
Book you're an evangelist for:

The Bible.

Book you've bought for the cover:

Pleasure by Eric Jerome Dickey.

Book that changed your life:

The Four Agreements by Don Miguel Ruiz.

Favorite line from a book:

"I love you and this is forever. Always has been, always will be."--Zoe Reynard from Addicted by Zane.

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

The Last Dream Before Dawn by D. V. Bernard.

If you could pick an author to review your books, who would it be?

Stephen King.

"The conventional wisdom holds that management is a kind of technology--a bundle of techniques based on scientific observations, tended by experts, and transferable to students," writes Matthew Stewart in this cold-eyed assessment of his decade as a high-priced management consultant. Trained to examine the internal logic of definitions and assumptions of a system when he studied philosophy, he revisits the writings and teachings of management consulting's founding fathers to understand its intellectual foundations.

Frederick Winslow Taylor (developer of time and motion studies) and Elton Mayo (patron saint of human resources departments for his introduction of the "feelings of the workers" into analysis of the workplace) receive the lion's share of Stewart's analysis. When he read their work closely (as opposed to relying on a blind acceptance of their reputation as genius pioneers), he was shocked to find not verifiable scientific research but only anecdotes, tautologies and fudged statistics. He cannot deny Taylor was a master salesman, but he ends up regarding him as a huckster; Mayo he simply labels a fraud. These are harsh conclusions about two of the men whose work constituted the original curricula of prestigious graduate business schools at Harvard, Yale and the University of Pennsylvania, yet management consulting later moved beyond the flawed Taylor and Mayo methods without publicly disavowing them.

Along came strategic planning, states Stewart, as a more respectable cornerstone of revised curricula at business schools. Igor Ansoff is credited with developing strategic planning, and his emphasis on "to do lists" became gospel. Stewart, however, concludes that Ansoff's work, too, "rests on a bed of nonfalsifiable tautologies, generic reminders and pompous maxims." Stewart, philosopher-turned-consultant-turned-judge, is a fierce and unforgiving skeptic about whether management consulting has ever been successful in developing a scientific and quantitative analysis of business.

His skepticism is also fanned by his personal consulting experience. His tales from the front lines are, by turns, disheartening and hilarious; they do reinforce his view that management consulting is not a discipline but a cult. As for popular business gurus like Tom Peters (In Search of Excellence) and Jim Collins (Good to Great), Stewart, the philosopher and idealist, shows no mercy in annihilating their credibility. His exhilarating deconstruction of pioneers, received wisdom, academics and gurus (with its call for a new approach to contribute to a better and more efficient society) warns thoughtful readers to define what they need from a management consultant before signing a contract and will put the fear of God in those contemplating an MBA program.--John McFarland

Shelf Talker: An exhilarating deconstruction of management consulting that helps explain how corporate America became so dysfunctional.