Notes: Kindle Price Cut; Homeless Bookseller
Amazon has reduced the price of its Kindle e-book reader by $60. The Associated Press reported that "on Wednesday the online retailer's Web site was listing the Kindle for $299 instead of the $359 tag the device has had since its debut in 2007. It's not clear whether this is a short-term promotion or a permanent change. Amazon did not announce the price cut or have an immediate comment."
Amazon spokesman Andrew Herdener told the New York Times in an e-mail message that "the company was passing on savings to consumers from the increasing volume of Kindle sales and the decreasing costs to manufacture the digital reading device."
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When Twenty-third Avenue Books, Portland, Ore., closed suddenly last January, Stephanie Griffin lost more than her business. Willamette Week reported that the owner "became homeless after the store closed. Startled neighbors discovered this in June . . . Griffin had started panhandling outside her old store, which was still empty at the time."
"Most people would ignore me and then say 'Oh, the bookstore used to be there,'" she said. "I would say, 'I used to own that store,' and they would keep walking."
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Anne Mancilla, owner of Explore! The Book Store, Clifton Springs, N.Y., tells us that Drewstone Productions, an independent film company owned by her sons Tony and Andrew Mancilla, is filming a documentary in Sierra Leone about Joseph Kaifala, who grew up amid war and poverty, earned an education in the U.S., and has returned to his country, where he organized the construction of a school in his hometown. For more details, visit the Retracing Jeneba website.
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The Library of Congress, organizer and sponsor of the National Book Festival--which will take place Saturday, September 26, on the Mall in Washington, D.C.--announced an author lineup that includes John Grisham, Judy Blume, David Baldacci, Julia Alvarez, Judy Blume, Ken Burns, Gwen Ifill and Jodi Picoult. More than 120,000 people attended last year. Borders is "the official bookseller" of the Festival.
Librarian of Congress James H. Billington commented: "This year's National Book Festival truly offers something for everyone, with books by popular and award-winning authors in many genres and for all age groups."
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The Wall Street Journal featured "Essential Reading on Style," observing that "style is the way we interpret each other, usually unconsciously, through how we look and behave. Books that poke fun, advise or otherwise shed light on style have been piling up on my desk. My favorites are those that help determine when we’re interpreting all those signals correctly and how we can send the signals we want."
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Writing isn't everything. Bestselling author Nicholas Sparks is one of the coaches on what may be "the best high school relay team of all time," according to track and field expert Steve Underwood. The Raleigh, N.C., News & Observer reported that the New Bern High School team, which had to run as a club because of state rules, "won four national relay outdoor championships during the Nike Outdoor Nationals in Greensboro in mid-June. The same group earlier had won three national indoor relay titles."
"We had great teams in the past," Sparks said. "If you have a team that wins a national championship, it is a great year. But to win seven national titles . . ." Or, as the News & Observer put it, "It was like something out of a novel."
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"Right now, a parent somewhere is reading Harry Potter to their child for the first time," wrote Chase Hill, 23, in a New York Daily News article about his own obsession, even as an adult, with the world J.K. Rowling created. "That child will dream of a future birthday when he receives a letter in the mail from Hogwarts. To this day, around the time of the release of a new film or book, I check the mailbox hoping that my Hogwarts letter is wedged in between my phone bill, paycheck and credit card applications."
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St. Martin's Press has teamed with game manufacturer Oberon Media to create free online video games promoting the upcoming publication of Storm Cycle by Iris and Roy Johansen and Bad Moon Rising by Sherrilyn Kenyon. The publisher noted that the games "follow the plot of each book and throughout the game playing experience, players will be shown the jacket of the books and they'll get a feel for what the books are about."
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It took nearly a half-century to complete, but the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary, the "world's biggest thesaurus," will be published this fall with "800,000 meanings for 600,000 words organized into more than 230,000 categories and subcategories," according to the Times of London.
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Obituary Note: Exiled author Vasily Aksyonov, who left the Soviet Union in 1980 and lived in the U.S. for more than two decades, died this week in Moscow. He was 76. In his New York Times obituary, Aksyonov was described as "a writer who symbolized both the cultural flowering of the period after Stalin's death, known as Khrushchev's Thaw, and the clampdown that followed it."
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"Scholarly Publishing in the New Era of Scarcity," Michael Jensen's presentation at the the Association of American University Presses' annual meeting in June, is now available on YouTube.
Jensen, director of strategic web communications for the Office of Communications of the National Academies and National Academies Press, noted that the speech "allowed me to talk about the two issues that matter most to me: saving scholarly publishing, and saving civilization. In 16 minutes."
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At St. Martin's Press, Matt Baldacci, v-p, director of marketing and publishing operations, hardcover, and Anne Marie Tallberg, marketing director, SMP paperbacks, have been promoted to v-p and associate publisher for the respective divisions.
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On Tuesday, Ruth Katcher joins Egmont USA as editor-at-large. She started her career as children's book buyer for 57th St. Books in Chicago, Ill., and was most recently an executive editor at HarperCollins Children's Books. Katcher has also held editorial positions at Random House and Simon & Schuster.
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In this gripping debut novel on the launch list for Egmont USA, Pam Bachorz invents a chilling world in which teens unwittingly conform to their parents' wishes. Narrator Oscar Banks, model citizen of Candor, Fla., and son of the city's founder, knows something he's not supposed to know about. He knows about the Messages embedded in the music that plays all over Candor ("Never lie to your parents"; "Respectful space in every place")--Messages that can whip troubled kids into straight-A students or turn a beauty queen-obsessed teen into "queen nerd." Only the adults are supposed to know about those. But Campbell Banks tried to brainwash his own family into forgetting Oscar's older brother, Winston, who died in a pool-diving accident; Oscar overheard his mother confronting his father about this just before she walked out. Oscar has found a way to create a side business of his own, minting counter-Messages on CDs and helping teens escape from Candor--for the right price. Oscar must maintain a perfect façade so his father won't discover what the teen knows and sentence him to "the Listening Room" for a power-brainwash. Up to now, it's all worked perfectly. There's just one problem: Oscar falls in love with the newest Candor citizen, 17-year-old Nia Silva.
