Notes: E-Pricing Strategies; E-Book Debate
In an example of publisher qualms about e-book versions of new books undermining the more pricey traditional printed version, Sourcebooks will not offer an e-book version of the hardcover September title Bran Hambric: The Farfield Curse by Kaleb Nation for at least six months, the Wall Street Journal wrote.
"It doesn't make sense for a new book to be valued at $9.99," Sourcebooks CEO Dominique Raccah told the Journal. "The argument is that the cheaper the book is, the more people will buy it. But hardcover books have an audience, and we shouldn't cannibalize it."
But the publisher is still a fan of e-books. Only this past week Sourcebooks begin selling titles from its Casablanca mass market romance line on Smashwords. The titles are priced at $6.99, are available in nine e-book formats and are DRM-free, meaning that they can be copied and passed along.
Raccah commented: "There is discussion surrounding DRM, and while partnering with Smashwords does not mean we endorse DRM-free across the board, it does mean that we're open to exploring different possibilities to better serve our customers."
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Obituary note. Novelist and essayist Paul Hemphill died Saturday in Atlanta. He was 73. The New York Times
observed that Hemphill "brought a lean journalistic style and a sharp
ear for dialogue to essays and novels devoted to the blue-collar South
of stock-car racing, football, country music, evangelists and wayward
souls."
"Old country music had an honest catch in its voice, and
so did Hemphill, writing about baseball or whiskey or his old man or
himself (sometimes in the third person)," said Roy Blount Jr. "He could
tell what it was like for people who are just scraping by."
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Jenn Northington of the King's English Bookshop, Salt Lake City, Utah, and Emily Pullen of Skylight Books, Los Angeles, Calif., "duke it out" about books, e-books, media, reading and perhaps life itself on the Emerging Leaders blog (http://youngbooksellers.blogspot.com/2009/07/book-is-dead-long-live-book.html).
Northington's conclusion (which perhaps can be fully appreciated only after reading the full post): "The moral of the story? DigiARCs won't fall on your head and are fun to read, an iPod Touch is a great investment, and pizza is better without anchovies."
Pullen noted: "I'm sure that the digital medium could accomplish things in a novel that graphics or the written word could not, and THAT is where its innovation and interest lies for me. Not in its ability to replicate exactly what I might get in a book. And yet, that seems to be what developers of devices and digital formats are striving for at this point. They have yet to examine its possibilities as a medium."
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Bookstore backdrop: the philosophy shelf at the Book Oasis, Stoneham, Mass., appears for ".02 seconds" in a music video made by the band Sarah Rabdau and the Self-Employed Assassins.
Book Oasis owners Dan and Debbie Sullivan said that a customer who is a video director asked to shoot parts of the video at the store. Filming took about an hour; Book Oasis's brush with music video fame comes at about 2:48 into the video.
The Sullivans also reported that the store has won the Reader's Choice Best of Stoneham and the Silver Regional Award for best bookstore, which covers seven towns, in a recent reader's choice poll sponsored by the local community newspapers.
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Busted: Pamela Redmond Satran, whose new book is How Not to Act Old: 185 Ways to Pass for Phat, Sick, Hot, Dope, Awesome, or at Least Not Totally Lame (HarperCollins), stars in several very funny videos in which she is cited for various age infractions, including counting out exact change when making purchases in stores and dialing on her cell phone with one index finger as well as holding the phone at arm's length. Incidentally the impressive Age Police officer in the videos is Noah Levinson, son of Debbie Galant, founder of Baristanet.com and author of, among other titles, Fear and Yoga in New Jersey.
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Through August 15, Adrian Newell will match all donations--up to $1,000 each--to the Glenn Goldman Booksellers Scholarship Fund, which Newell, Book Soup and the Southern California Independent Booksellers Association established to support booksellers' education and careers and to honor Goldman, longtime owner of Book Soup in Los Angeles who died in January. As SCIBA put it: "Glenn and Adrian had a very special relationship that began with their love of books, bookselling and booksellers."
Contributions may be mailed to the SCIBA office at 959 E. Walnut Street, #220, Pasadena, Calif. 91106. The Fund's first two scholarships will include lodging and a transportation allowance to SCIBA's Author Feast and Book Award Dinner in October and to the ABA's Winter Institute next February.
For information about scholarships, contact SCIBA at 626-793-8435 or office@scbabooks.org.
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Literary
inspiration is going under the auctioneer's gavel in England, where
bidding on one of Cornwall's "best-loved beaches" is expected "to start
at about £50,000 [US$80,783]," BBC News
reported. "Upton Towans beach in Gwithian and the
lighthouse on nearby Godrevy Island are widely thought to have inspired
the Virginia Woolf novel To the Lighthouse."
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The Oops! Award goes to Next Magazine,
which has announced the fiction winner of the Montana New Zealand Book
Awards "before the judges have even made their decision! The magazine
published who it believed had won the fiction category in the August
edition of its magazine. . . . The actual winner of the award will be
announced at a ceremony at the Auckland Museum on July 27," according
to the New Zealand Herald.
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In honor of the 40th Anniversary of the Coretta Scott King Book Award, to be celebrated in Chicago at ALA's Annual Conference tomorrow, TeachingBooks.net is making available more than 250 audio interviews and recordings with authors and artists as part of the Coretta Scott King Book Award Curriculum Resource Center. Subjects include Dr. Maya Angelou and George Ford--two of the first recipients of the award in the early 1970s--as well as Toni Morrison, Jerry Pinkney, Walter Dean Myers, Kadir Nelson, Faith Ringgold and Jacqueline Woodson.
The free, online resource center aimed at educators and families will include original movies filmed in the TeachingBooks.net studios of some of the award-winning authors and illustrators, as well as hundreds of lesson plans related to the award-winning books.
"Students can now learn the personal story behind each book directly from the creator, including how and why it was made," said Nick Glass, founder of TeachingBooks.net.
Deborah Taylor, chair of the Coretta Scott King Book Award, added: "We are thrilled that teachers, librarians, parents, and children will be able to listen to some of the most distinguished African American children's book authors and illustrators, and share in as well as learn more about African American life and culture."
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That summer, the summer all the rules began to change, June seemed to last for a thousand years. The temperature was merciless: ninety-eight, ninety-nine, then a hundred in the shade. It was heat to die in. Old folks collapsed, dogs were cooked alive in cars, lovers couldn't keep their hands off each other. The sky pressed down like a furnace lid, shrinking the subsoil, cracking concrete, killing shrubs from the roots up. In the parched suburbs, ice cream trucks plinked their baby tunes into streets that sweated tar. Down at the harbor, the sea reflected the sun in tiny, barbaric mirrors. Asphyxiated, you longed for rain. It didn't come.