Notes: E-Book Sales Per Capita; Borders Liquidators Race Clock

"Have you ever wondered where the most voracious e-book readers live?" asked Mark Coker of Smashwords, who crunched his company's data to see how "the states stack up against one another" and found that the "numbers are surprising, especially when you look at per capita consumption."

Coker used the 20,000 e-books Smashwords distributes to Barnes & Noble, whose reports break down sales by state. Looking at the numbers for December through February, he then employed population data from the recent U.S. census to determine "the final, coolest numbers of them all, a normalized measure of per capita e-book consumption for each state."

His top five states for per capita e-book consumption:

  1. Alaska     
  2. North Dakota
  3. Utah
  4. Wyoming
  5. Virginia


Conceding that he is not a statistician, Coker invited "the true statisticians among you to download my numbers as a starting point for further number crunching. For example, the U.S. Census Data page, where I gathered the population data, has other interesting data sets you can throw against my data, such as median household income, age of population (under 18, over 65), college education, home ownership rates, etc., so I encourage others to mine the data for more meaning."

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Liquidators are racing the clock to sell the contents of more than 200 Borders stores scheduled for closure. Bloomberg reported the liquidation is being coordinated by Hilco Merchant Resources, which  "took an equal stake in the winning bid with Gordon Brothers Group, SB Capital Group and Tiger Capital Group. Under the contract, they assumed expenses, legal costs and tasks including shoveling snow, emptying trash and managing store employees. They agreed to pay Borders 85.75% of the 'cost value' of all merchandise, according to court papers. The estimated cost value is between $180.6 million and $204 million."

The liquidators must sell as much as possible before their contract expires April 30 to maximize profit. After that date, they "can sell stock to a non-retail customer, hang onto it and attempt to sell it later when liquidating other stores, or abandon it. They can't sell to wholesalers or bulk purchasers who may return Borders stock to publishers, and thus Borders's competitors," Bloomberg wrote, adding that Borders expects the store closings to bring in about $175 million for the chain's creditors.

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While "conventional wisdom" might suggest that "multimedia content consumption is to be ceded to the iPad while plain old black-and-white e-book reading should go to e-readers such as Amazon's Kindle," Robert L. Mitchell argued in PC World magazine that the tablet may ultimately win this competition.

"The problem lies in the future of e-book content," Mitchell wrote, adding that "everyone seems to want an iPad these days. E-book reading is a subset of what an iPad or other tablet computer can do. But reading e-books is all that e-readers can do well. They're a one-trick pony."

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Fast Company's Kit Eaton offered an alternative read on the current e-market. Responding to yesterday's reports that Barnes & Noble's Nook Color manufacturers had delivered three million units thus far (Shelf Awareness, March 28, 2011), Eaton asked, "With no competing device from Amazon, can the Nook steal the Kindle's throne?... If Barnes & Noble really is ordering Nooks by the millions, is planning a big headline-grabbing update in a few weeks, and is leveraging the price of its Nook Color as one of the most affordable large-screen Android tablets that costs half the iPad's price... can the Nook actually corner the e-reader market?"

Eaton noted that "since Amazon expects to have sold around 8 million Kindles (of all types) in 2010, and B&N only launched the Nook Color in late October 2010, it looks like the Nook is definitely moving in on Amazon's turf."

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Today's New York Times looks at the impact the Bluford series--"a collection of 18 books about life at the fictional Bluford High School, written by a white man from the New Jersey suburbs of Philadelphia,"--is having on "its target audience: black and Latino urban middle and high school students who are struggling readers."

While the series is popular with students, educators expressed mixed feelings. Audra Robb, a staff developer at Columbia University's Teachers College Reading and Writing Project, said the books have "an appeal to kids who look and live in environments like the Bluford environment. When you can see yourself inside the book that you're reading, you don't feel so outside."

But Jane Bean-Folkes, a staff developer at the Reading and Writing Project, cautioned that while the series "gets the kids reading," the mature content and sensational covers were a concern. "Is it my favorite bit of literature? No."

Paul Langan, who developed the idea, wrote nine of the novels and has edited the others, said, "When you're a white guy and you’re writing a series of books for African-American teens, I think it generates a fair amount of questions. I'm not saying that I'm African-American, I'm definitely not. But the experiences that I've had have given me the ability to write stories that kids can relate to."

The Times reported that since the series debuted in 2001, "Bluford has been recognized by the Young Adult Library Services Association and other national organizations. Scholastic has attained limited rights to the series and has been publishing it, since 2007, alongside Townsend (charging $3.99). Scholastic says it has sold two million of the books; Townsend says it has sold or donated six million."

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Obituary note: H.R.F. Keating, the mystery author who published more than 50 novels (many featuring the popular Indian Inspector Ganesh Ghote), died last Sunday, the Guardian reported. He was 84.

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Paris comes to Massachusetts. The Daily Hampshire Gazette profiled White Square Fine Books & Art, Easthampton, Mass., and owner Eileen Corbeil, who modeled her bookstore after the legendary Shakespeare & Co. In her shop's window, Corbeil displays a large photo of Shakespeare & Co. founder Sylvia Beach and James Joyce, and, "in keeping with the refined look of a Parisian or London bookstore, the Corbeils painted the storefront black, with the shop's name spelled out in gold letters. Black leather couches, mission-style chairs, Oriental rugs, tall wooden bookshelves, and oak display cases fill the cozy interior."

"This is a browsing kind of place and there is an awful lot to see and digest. I want people to come in, look around, sit down and take their time reading," Corbeil said.

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"A Tale of Two Bookshops" was told by the Laguna Beach Patch, which noted that Latitude 33 Bookshop and Laguna Beach Books have "survived by offering superior customer service, publications of local interest and special literary events."

Tom Ahern, owner of Latitude 33, has experienced a shift in his customer base from locals to tourists. "Before the recession, up until 2008, about 85% of his customer base consisted of locals, and 15% were tourists. That split is now closer to 50-50," the Patch noted.

"[Locals] don't come downtown as much any more," Ahern said. "We've lost a critical mass of individual residents. People work in other areas and shop where they work, not where they live." One method the bookshop utilizes to attract customers is the quick turnaround of orders. Ahern, who has six staff members working to order books, said a customer can "order a book in the morning, and it's available the following morning."

Lisa Childers, manager of Laguna Beach Books, said, "We're doing fine every year," attributing the shop's success to customer service and staff recommendations. "We provide a great degree of customer service to the customers and to the community," she said.

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For its Fall 2011 collection, Penguin commissioned artist Jillian Tamaki to design hand-sewn covers of Jane Austen's Emma, Frances Hodgson Burnett's The Secret Garden and Anna Sewell's Black Beauty for its Penguin Threads series. The Atlantic noted that Tamaki "sketched the illustrations before stitching these designs with a needle and thread. The final covers are sculpt-embossed, maintaining some of the tactile texture of the original threads designs."

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NPR's What We're Reading series showcased Sempre Susan: A Memoir of Susan Sontag by Sigrid Nunez, What You See in the Dark by Manuel Munoz and Between Shades of Gray by Ruta Sepetys.

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On Twitter, Canadian distributor Raincoast Books expressed understandable affection for "these branch-shaped bookcases by designer Olivier Dollé."

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Book trailer of the day: Wicked Bugs by Amy Stewart (Algonquin).

 

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