For the quarter ending June 30, Amazon "posted weaker-than-expected earnings on Thursday, punctuated by a steep decline in its flagship business of selling media products like books, music and DVDs," according to the New York Times.

Net sales at Amazon.com for the second quarter increased 14% to $4.65 billion from a year earlier, while net income decreased 10% to $142 million compared to the second quarter of 2008. The Times noted that "analysts polled by Thomson Reuters on average had expected $4.67 billion in revenue."

"People had looked at their recent performance and assumed that Amazon was, relatively speaking, exempt from the current downturn," said Sanford C. Bernstein analyst Jeffrey Lindsay, who added that Amazon’s quarter "was by any measure a good performance, but expectations had gotten ahead of themselves."

According to the Times, "analysts seemed to worry that the emergence of digital alternatives in Amazon’s Video on Demand, MP3 and Kindle stores--which generally have lower prices than their physical counterparts--might be weakening one of the core drivers of Amazon’s business."

"I think people are worried that the Kindle and their other digital efforts may be cannibalizing their real-world sales," Lindsay said.

For the third quarter, the company said it expects net sales between $4.75 billion and $5.25 billion, an increase of between 11% and 23% compared to third quarter 2008.

In other Amazon news, the company is purchasing Zappos.com, the online footwear retailer, for about $847 million in cash and stock. The move is Amazon's "most serious effort to tap into Internet sales of apparel, the largest online-shopping category and one in which Amazon has had limited success in the past," the Wall Street Journal reported.

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On Amazon's website, CEO Jeff Bezos apologized "for the way we previously handled illegally sold copies of 1984 and other novels on Kindle. Our 'solution' to the problem was stupid, thoughtless, and painfully out of line with our principles. It is wholly self-inflicted, and we deserve the criticism we've received. We will use the scar tissue from this painful mistake to help make better decisions going forward, ones that match our mission. With deep apology to our customers."

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Customer service matters more than ever. According to Retail Week, the recession has created "hypersensitive" customers: "The BDO Stoy Hayward research found that 71% of consumers would be happy to look elsewhere if they encountered poor customer service. Nearly half of shoppers said their expectations have risen as a result of the recession."

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In an open letter to members following the first meeting of the newly-elected board, ABA president Michael Tucker updated Bookselling this Week readers on the association's "priorities and initiatives." BTW also featured a detailed "Report on the ABA Board's 2009 Summer Meeting."

"For all of us booksellers, these have been challenging months," Tucker wrote. "In times like this, a sense of community and professional collegiality is more important than ever. In addition to its programming and initiatives, ABA is also about connection and support."

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Imagine the bookstore of tomorrow, "a bookstore without books." Galley Cat showcased Moriah Jovan's vision of a "way to be inventory-free, using the just-in-time inventory system that half the rest of the retail industry in the world has been using for going on 15 years now."

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Book trailer of the day: The Scandal Plan by Bill Folman.

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Smashwords CEO Mark Coker will be the featured speaker at the next Independent Book Publishers Association Publishing University webinar on Wednesday, July 29, at 2 p.m. EST. His presentation is titled "Making the Move to E-books:  How to Develop an E-book Strategy." For more information, visit IBPA Publishing University Online.

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At Langenscheidt Publishing Group:

Christine Ramos has been promoted to marketing director. She joined the company seven years ago as marketing manager and was most recently senior marketing manager. Earlier she worked in subsidiary rights and special sales at Viking Penguin, Facts on File and Macmillan.

Gina Garza has been promoted to publicity director. She joined the company as publicity manager last year and earlier held publicity positions at HarperCollins, DK Publishing and Simon & Schuster.

Despite the lure of ocean views in Greece, Liesl Freudenstein, children's book buyer at Boulder Book Store, Boulder, Colo., couldn't stop reading an ARC of Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins (Scholastic Press), the second in the Hunger Games series. Her husband, John, also caught the Catching Fire fire.

A trailer for Tim Burton's adaptation of Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland has been released, and the Guardian, while paying due homage to Johnny Depp's Mad Hatter, observed: "It's also our first look at the Cheshire Cat, which will be voiced by Stephen Fry, the fearsome Jabberwock (Christopher Lee) and the Knave of Hearts (the horribly underused Crispin Glover). Burton's Alice, played by Australian newcomer Mia Wasikowska, is 10 years older than Lewis Carroll's creation, which should allow for a slightly darker, more adult take on Wonderland. But don't expect anything too racy: this is, after all, a Disney movie."

Andrew Nikiforuk's Tar Sands: Dirty Oil and the Future of a Continent has won the $10,000 Rachel Carson Environment Book Award, presented by the Society of Environmental Journalists. Nikiforuk, the first Canadian to win the prize, will be honored during an awards ceremony in the Concourse Hotel and Governor’s Club in Madison, Wis., on October 7, the first day of SEJ’s 19th annual conference.

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Finalists for this year's £10,000 (US$16,442) Forward prize for best collection of poetry are Rain by Don Paterson, A Scattering by Christopher Reid, Hide Now by Glyn Maxwell, One Secret Thing by Sharon Olds, Better than God by Peter Porter and West End Final by Hugo Williams.

The £5,000 Felix Dennis Prize for best first collection shortlist includes The Missing by Sian Hughes, The Striped World by Emma Jones, Moonrise by Meirion Jordan, Furniture by Lorraine Mariner, Natural Mechanical by J.O. Morgan and Halflife by Meghan O'Rourke. Paul Farley, Michael Longley, Robin Robertson, Elizabeth Speller, George Szirtes and C.K. Williams were shortlisted for the £1,000 Forward Prize for best single poem.

The Guardian reported that Josephine Hart, chair of this year's judges, said: "Poetry is language at its best, the highest literary art form, and increasingly people are turning in these challenging times to a place they can find wisdom and beauty and without wanting to sound too pious--truth. That's young people and old."

Karin Slaughter is the author of eight novels, including Fractured, Beyond Reach and A Faint Cold Fear, which was named an International Book of the Month selection. She also contributed to and edited Like A Charm. She is a native of Georgia, where she currently lives and is working on her next novel, which Delacorte Press will publish in 2010. Her latest novel is Undone, which Delacorte published July 14.

On your nightstand now:

The Spirit of St. Louis by Charles Lindbergh. Set aside the politics of the man, and you get an amazing story of having the courage and conviction to bring an idea to fruition. This is what America used to be all about--"don't tell me it can't be done!" For 33 hours, Lindbergh sat in a wicker chair bolted inside a metal tube. He didn't have a radio. He didn't have a front window. He had to keep his knees bent the entire time. My last flight out of JFK, the guy beside of me threw a hissy fit when the stewardess told him to bring his seatback upright for landing. I thought I was going to have to slap him.

Favorite book when you were a child:

Everything in the Encyclopedia Brown canon. I wanted to be Encyclopedia Brown. Some might argue that has happened.

Your top five authors: 

Instead of "of all time" (which would make me stress about trying to sound all literarily sophisticated and crap), I'm going to do "right at this moment." Mo Hayder, Denise Mina, Flannery O'Connor (though she's on every list), Mark Billingham and Lee Child.

Book you've faked reading: 

Orlando by Virginia Woolf. I tried to read it in college, and I still have it somewhere but good googlie mooglie, just opening the cover sucks the life right out of you. Why? Why???

Book you're an evangelist for:

Currently The Help by Kathryn Stockett, though my lifelong evangelical quest is to get more people to read Gone With the Wind. As much as I loved the movie, the book should serve as a bible for authors seeking to tell a good story. Scarlett O'Hara is one of the most engaging and unique women ever created. With all of the hullabaloo, people have forgotten why Mitchell won the Pulitzer Prize in the first place. The book is just amazing.

Book you've bought for the cover: 

Bitten by Kelley Armstrong. Oh, the sexy! And it actually delivered inside, which, sadly, seldom happens.

Book that changed your life: 

Flannery O'Connor's The Complete Stories. Lord God, to me--a little girl growing up in South Georgia--this was a revelation. Here was a woman writing about violence and getting away with it! Mercy me.

Favorite line from a book:

"She would of been a good woman if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life."--Flannery O'Connor's A Good Man Is Hard to Find. Perfect.

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

I have a hard time with this because books are defined by where you were in life when you read them. I think of all my experiences--good and bad--in terms of the book I was reading when it happened. That being said, if you put a gun to my head, I'd probably say The Painted Bird by Jerzy Kosinski. I read this in high school, and I'm sure I missed most of the import, but I was so struck by the story (true or not) that it took my breath away.

"The bookstore, when we arrived there, proved to be the most extraordinary sort of bookstore I had ever entered, there not being a book in it. Instead of books, the shelves and counters were occupied with rows of small boxes."--From the story "With the Eyes Shut" by Edward Bellamy, published in 1898.

This cautionary tale begins with a narrator traveling by rail for the first time in years. His regret that he can't read on a moving train is quickly remedied by the offer of "a book which you can read with your eyes shut. . . . We've been furnishing the new-fashioned phonographed books and magazines on this train for six months now, and passengers have got so they won't have anything else."

A list of "the latest novels" is proffered, and he picks "one which I had heard favorable mention of." A small box at the side of his seat is unlocked and 15 cents paid for three hours "reading" time. Soon he hears "the tinkle of a bell," takes "a sort of two-pronged fork with tines spread in the similitude of a chicken's wishbone" from the box, and, for the remainder of his trip, "scarcely altered my position, so completely was I enthralled by my novel experience."

Nineteenth-century audiobooks. Big deal, right? But wait, there's more. He learns that the train cars will soon be equipped with phonographic guide books, connected to the running gear of the cars so that the books "call attention to every object in the landscape, and furnish the pertinent information--statistical, topographical, biographical, historical, romantic, or legendary." 

Once at his hotel, a recorded, "charming" female voice wakes him and he hears his friend speak through a personal message machine at the front desk. He also learns a new term when he asks the clerk what happens if a message is sent and "there is no little machine like this at hand to make it speak?":

"In reply the clerk directed my attention to a little box, not wholly unlike a case for a binocular glass, which, now that he spoke of it, I saw was carried, slung at his side, by every person in sight. 'We call it the indispensable because it is indispensable, as, no doubt, you will soon find for yourself.'"

At breakfast, he observes that "a number of ladies and gentlemen were engaged as they sat at table reading, or rather listening to, their morning's correspondence." The waiter brings him a phonograph copy of the Daily Morning Herald.

His friend arrives at last and is amused by the narrator's befuddlement. After visiting a clockmaker's shop to inspect an array of "time-announcers," the men are walking on the street when his friend's portable indispensable rings and he listens to a message from his wife reminding him to pick up some "story-books for the children."

On the way to the bookshop, they discuss the usefulness of "these portable memories" for everything from child-rearing to business, and his friend argues "that nobody any longer pretended to charge his mind with the recollection of duties or engagements of any sort."

At the bookshop, crowds scramble for the latest titles: "'The change seems to be a popular one,' I said, 'to judge by the crowd of book-buyers.' For the counters were, indeed, thronged with customers as I had never seen those of a bookstore before."

These "customers," however, are borrowers, not buyers. His friend explains that while "the old-fashioned printed book" is damaged and devalued by use, and must be "purchased outright or borrowed at high rates of hire," the phonograph of a book can "be lent out at an infinitesimal price."

Asked if people really don't want to own books anymore, his friend counters: "What I said about borrowing books applies only to current literature of the ephemeral sort. Everybody wants books of permanent value in his library. Over yonder is the department of the establishment set apart for book-buyers."

"Everybody" may be an overstatement, since that area is much less crowded.

When the narrator contends that surely picture books can't be replaced, he is shown how, "by the simple plan of arranging them in a continuous panorama," these titles too can be incorporated into the phonograph books phenomenon.

"What has become of printers?" he asks.

You already know the answer to that one, though his friend consoles him with this thought: "Some classes of books, however, are still printed, and probably will continue to be for some time, although reading, as well as writing, is getting to be an increasingly rare accomplishment."

As might be expected, this all turns out to be a dream in the end.

Portable Indispensables--the patent, as always, impending.--Robert Gray (column archives available at Fresh Eyes Now)