Notes: Bookstore Educational Competition 101
Borders Group is increasing its discount to educators, including teachers, home schoolers and librarians, for books, music CDs, toys and games for classroom use to 25% from 20%. In addition, during educator appreciation week--September 29-October 7--the discount increases to 30% and can be for personal use too.
The company has also established Teaching Zone sections in its superstores, which feature educational workbooks, curriculum development books, inspirational narratives as well as many non-book items such as stickers and classroom decor products. The sections are next to the children's departments.
At the same time, Barnes & Noble has added B&N@school, a new section that provides access to educational tools for parents, teachers and librarians at B&N stores and at Barnes & Noble.com. The educator discount program, which gives 20% discounts, now applies at B&N.com, too.
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The film Julie & Julia continues to fire up book sales nationally. The Tri-City Herald
reported that Richland, Wash., bookstores Adventures Underground and
Hastings Books Music Video & Coffee prepared for the reaction, but
are still working hard to keep pace with demand.
"We realized
that once the movie came out, we would have to stock up," said Amanda
Divine of Adventures Underground. According to the Herald,
"both Hastings and Adventures Underground placed book orders
anticipating the movie to boost sales, but when Divine received her
shipment Thursday, she only received two copies of Child's My Life in France and Powell's book."
"Everything else is on back order," she said.
[Editor's note: the in-house chief editorial critic says readers MUST go see this, if only to watch Meryl Streep play Julia Child. Best viewed preceding a tasty repast.]
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The not-so-serious-movie-news update: A new film adaptation of The Brothers Karamazov "concludes at the precise moment most readers give up on the classic Russian novel," according to the Onion,
which noted that "the 83-minute film, which is based on the first 142
or so pages of Fyodor Dostoevsky's acclaimed work, has already garnered
attention for its stunning climax, in which the end credits suddenly
appear midway through Katerina's tearful speech about an unpaid debt."
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The Booksource has named Benjamin Conn executive v-p for sales, marketing and purchasing, responsible for the daily operations of the school books division. He was formerly owner and president of Knowledge Industries, which Booksource purchased late last year and moved to Booksource's headquarters in St. Louis, Mo. Knowledge Industries provides teachers and school districts with books and other educational materials targeted to specific reading goals and standards. One of the Booksource's main businesses is trade book sales to K-12 schools.
Karen Solomon, author of Jam It, Pickle It, Cure It (Ten Speed Press), with Tyler Florence, owner of the Tyler Florence Shop, Mill Valley, Calif., where last Saturday Solomon gave a talk and demo, drawing 60 people who heard it, watched it and loved it.
John Geiger opens his book with a terrifying story of the last person to escape the South Tower on 9/11, one of only four from above the 81st floor; he follows it with another horrific story of a mountain climber swept 2,000 feet by an avalanche, who regained consciousness with a broken back, a fractured arm, cracked ribs, torn knee ligaments, internal bleeding, broken nose and teeth and open wounds; then another about a scuba diver lost in a cave. What they have in common is that at the edge of giving up, they felt the presence of a guide who told them not to give up. Not only that, the presence dispensed both encouraging and practical advice: Get up, run through the fire, calm down, follow the white rope, keep going. The same thing happened to Ernest Shackleton and his two companions as they crossed the mountains and glaciers of South Georgia; it happened to Joshua Slocum when he fell ill as he circumnavigated the globe. Charles Lindbergh encountered a presence in his fuselage as he struggled to stay awake on his trans-Atlantic flight. In the words of the author, "This presence offered a sense of protection, relief, guidance, and hope, and left the person convinced he or she was not alone but that there was some other being at his or her side, when by any normal calculation there was none." This phenomenon is called the Third Man Factor, and to some will sound like fantasy or religious belief or simple delusion. It also sounds like a rare happening, but as Geiger shows in this fascinating book, the experience is almost a commonplace occurrence among polar explorers, mountaineers, astronauts, shipwreck survivors--anyone who has been put in a near-death situation.