"I'm part proprietor of a small used-book store in Maine. I don't really own the building. I guess I sort of own the books until someone comes along and buys them. I'm like the junior partner in a very funky clubhouse of a used-book store. It's something that makes me very happy. . . . I did it for the pleasure. It didn't have to do anything with my career or the Internet or the publishing world. It was just to be handling the books. I worked in used-book stores for 15 years on and off. That was the only work I ever had before becoming a full-time writer. I have a lot of osmotic book knowledge just from handling books I didn't ever read. Turning them over in my hands, trying to figure out where they came from and why they exist and whether they should be priced at $4 or $6."--Author Jonathan Lethem, in a Time magazine interview. 

During a week in which hardcover prices keep plummeting, Scribner announced that the digital edition of Stephen King's Under the Dome will sell for $35, considerably higher than the $9.99 retail price that has been something of an industry standard for bestselling e-books, the Associated Press reported.

"Given the current state of the marketplace and trends in digital book pricing, we believe that this is the most appropriate publishing sequence for this particular 1,088 page work of fiction," said Adam Rothberg, spokesman for Simon & Schuster. Under the Dome's e-book edition will be released December 24, a month after the novel is published in hardcover.

The Wall Street Journal reported that "King said that he wanted to delay the e-book edition in hopes of helping independent bookstores and the national bookstore chains sell the hardcover edition. "I never thought we'd see people preordering a copy for $8.98," he said. "My thinking was to give bookstores a chance to make some money."

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The Village Voice's Best of NYC 2009 list includes:

Best Book Store Expanding in the Face of a Vanishing Industry--BookCourt, Brooklyn, where "somehow, in the face of Amazon, the Kindle, and the ominous presence of Barnes & Noble, this family-run shop continues to thrive."

Best Bookstore for Commuters--Penn Books on the Long Island Rail Road Corridor at Penn Station, "the best little bookstore in the nation's busiest train station—hell, North America's busiest passenger-transport facility, period."

Best Booking Coup--Housing Works Used Bookstore Café's 'Live From Home' concert series, which "pulled the incredible victory of nabbing Björk and the Dirty Projectors for an exclusive, cosmos-colliding benefit concert in the Soho store."

Best Small Press--Melville House Publishing, whose "2008 leap across the Hudson River from Hoboken to DUMBO means they're fully ours now, and Amen."

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Amazon and Elliott Bay Book Co. were on the agenda for the Seattle Weekly, which explored "the divergent fates of these two iconic and respected local booksellers."

While Elliott Bay is considering relocation options (Shelf Awareness, October 19, 2009), "business is booming at Amazon . . . With the aid of some helpful city rezoning in South Lake Union, with Paul Allen's Vulcan as its landlord, the company is preparing to move 20,000 employees out of the ID and the old PacMed Building on Beacon Hill and into 11 spiffy new office buildings served by the shiny new SLUT. (The old waterfront trolley tracks leading to Pioneer Square have been gathering rust for years.) Oh, and we're about to pay for a $200-million makeover of Mercer Street, so Amazon employees have it even nicer in their new hood."

The Weekly also observed that "Amazon alone isn't killing Elliott Bay and its bricks-and-mortar brethren. But it has the lobbying clout to get what it wants from the city, and the bargaining power to get what it wants from landlords: 1.6 million square feet versus Elliott Bay's few, wood-planked floors."

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The big announcement from Jessica Stockton Bagnulo and Rebecca Fitting was in yesterday's e-mail newsletter: "Greenlight Bookstore is now open! We started taking sales on Saturday, and we're thrilled by the response of the neighborhood already. We're still putting out little fires and tweaking our system to make sure it's all set up right (so bear with us if we have a few hiccups), but now that we're open, we love visitors! Come see us anytime; our hours between now and the end of the year are 10-10 Monday through Saturday and 12-8 on Sundays." Greenlight's launch party and grand opening is this coming Saturday, October 24.

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Tasty book trailer of the day: Ace of Cakes: Inside the World of Charm City Cakes by Duff Goldman and Willie Goldman (Morrow Cookbooks).

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"One of my favorite sweatshirts says, 'Lead me not into temptation . . . especially bookstores," wrote Laura Hartman in the Beacon News. She defied temptation nonetheless when, on a recent trip to downtown Oswego, Ill., she discovered Old Towne Books and Tea and met with owners Mary Murray and Leah Guillemette. "I was so excited, I couldn't wait to stop in and see if we were actually getting our very own independent bookstore."

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"Independents matter" was the headline for an article in the Merritt, British Columbia, Herald reporting that "Merrittonians were out in force on Saturday to show their support for independent booksellers in Canada" for the Canadian Booksellers Association's Independents' Day.

Jen Eaton, owner of Country Bug Books & Gifts Eaton, "stressed the importance of locally owned and operated independent bookstores in Canadian communities. She pointed out their function as a nexus for the arts, education, culture, idea exchange, and more," the Herald wrote. "Eaton specializes in meeting the demands of local customers, often quickly selling what most distributors claim will be impossible to get rid of."

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The Curious Bookshop, East Lansing, Mich., celebrates its 40th anniversary this week. "I'm now getting not only second-generation, but third-generation customers coming in. There's people who've said, 'Oh I went to school at Michigan State when you were just starting up and now I've got grandkids,'" owner Ray Walsh told the State News. "Walsh credits his business' longevity to his eclectic variety of used and collectable books, magazines, pulps, children's books and comic books."

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Buyers beware? Spoof editions of Sarah Palin's upcoming memoir, Going Rogue: An American Life, are already in the pipeline. The Guardian reported that OR Books, a U.S. publisher, will release Going Rouge: An American Nightmare, and cartoonists Julie Sigwart and Micheal Stinson have produced Going Rouge: The Sarah Palin Rogue Coloring and Activity Book.

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"Bookshops get hip, turning into trendy lifestyle venues" in Singapore, according to Asiaone.com, which noted the trend is "in line with market demand, say bookshop owners, who add that, thanks to bookstores like Borders--which opened a cafe alongside the bookstore at its Orchard Road branch in 1997--consumers now expect more from their favourite bookshops.

"When we started out, we simply surrounded ourselves with things we liked. Often, many indie bookstores reflect their owners' personalities," said BooksActually's Karen Wai, who, Asiaone.com wrote, "sources BooksActually's lifestyle offerings from flea markets and curio shops."

MPH Bookstores, on the other hand, is moving away from the lifestyle concept. "We want to be seen as a serious bookseller . . . more substance than style," said Matthias Low, retail merchandising manager for MPH. 

In August, net book sales rose 0.9% to $1.55 billion as reported by 91 publishers to the Association of American Publishers. For the year to date, net book sales are up 2% to $6.837 billion.

Among categories:

• E-books soared 189.1% to $14.4 million.
• Adult hardcover rose 12.3% to $110.6 million.
• Adult paperback climbed 3.2% to $152.7 million.
• Higher education rose 2.9% to $868.1 million.
• University press paperback rose 2.7% to $9.6 million.
• Adult mass market was up 1.3% to $70.4 million.

• Children's/YA paperback slid 0.2% to $69.4 million.
• University press hardcover fell 2.7% to $5.8 million.
• Professional and scholarly dropped 12.4% to $89.2 million.
• Audiobook was down 12.5% to $12.9 million.
• Children's/YA hardcover fell 12.9% to $84.5 million.
• Religion dropped 13.8% to $58 million.
  
  

Today on Fresh Air: Tracy Morgan, co-author of I Am the New Black (Spiegel & Grau, 9780385527774/0385527772).

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Today on Talk of the Nation: Viktor Mayer-Schonberger, author of Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age (Princeton University Press, $24.95, 9780691138619/0691138613).

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Tomorrow morning on the Today Show: Cami Walker, author of 29 Gifts: How a Month of Giving Can Change Your Life (Da Capo Lifelong Books, $19.95, 9780738213569/073821356X).

Book TV airs on C-Span 2 from 8 a.m. Saturday to 8 a.m. Monday and focuses on political and historical books as well as the book industry. The following are highlights for this coming weekend. For more information, go to Book TV's website.

Saturday, October 24

11 a.m. At an event hosted by Politics and Prose bookstore, Washington, D.C., Howard Dean discusses his book, Howard Dean's Prescription for Real Healthcare Reform: How We Can Achieve Affordable Medical Care for Every American and Make Our Jobs Safer (Chelsea Green, $12.95, 9781603582285/1603582282). (Re-airs Sunday at 7 a.m.)

4 p.m. Henry Arnold and Ben Pearson talk about their book, Kabul 24: The Story of the Taliban's Capture and Imprisonment of Eight Western Aid Workers Six Weeks Before September 11 (Thomas Nelson, $14.99, 9781595550224/1595550224). (Re-airs Saturday at 9 p.m. and Monday at 2 a.m.)

7 p.m. Barbara Ehrenreich, author of Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America, contends with the prevailing notion that positive thinking affects actions and outcomes (Metropolitan Books, $23, 9780805087499/0805087494). (Re-airs Sunday at 4 a.m. and 2:15 p.m.)

10 p.m. John Hope Bryant interviews Michael Rosen, author of What Else but Home: Seven Boys and an American Journey Between the Projects and the Penthouse (PublicAffairs, $24.95, 9781586485627/1586485628), who recounts turning his family of three into a family of nine. (Re-airs Sunday at 9 p.m., and Monday at 12 a.m. and 3 a.m.)

Sunday, October 25

2 a.m. Max Blumenthal, author of Republican Gomorrah: Inside the Movement that Shattered the Party, argues that the right wing's so-called fringe is actually the party's mainstream (Nation Books, $25, 9781568583983/1568583982). (Re-airs Sunday at 9:45 a.m.)

10:30 a.m. John Derbyshire, author of We Are Doomed: Reclaiming Conservative Pessimism, suggests that conservatives have a traditionally gloomy outlook that they lost during Election 2008 (Crown Forum, $26, 9780307409584/0307409589). (Re-airs Sunday at 7:30 p.m.)

5 p.m. Joseph Grano, You Can't Predict a Hero: From War to Wall Street, Leading in Times of Crisis (Jossey-Bass, $27.95, 9780470411674/0470411678), focuses on six crises in his life and how he overcame major obstacles.  

American women's soccer legend Mia Hamm and Breaking Ball Films will produce the screen version of Alive and Kicking: When Soccer Moms Take the Field by New York Times sportswriter Harvey Araton. Variety reported that Hamm will produce with Scott Abramovitch and Lonny Dubrofsky. Abramovitch is writing the script.

The winners of 2009 Anthony Awards, which were presented at a ceremony during the Bouchercon World Mystery Convention in Indianapolis, Ind., last weekend, are:

• Best Novel: The Brass Verdict by Michael Connelly (Little, Brown)
• Best first novel: The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson (Knopf)
• Best paperback original: State of the Onion by Julie Hyzy (Berkley)
• Best short story: "A Sleep Not Unlike Death" by Sean Chercover, from Hardcore Hardboiled (Kensington)
• Best critical nonfiction work: Anthony Boucher: A Biobibliography by Jeffrey Marks (McFarland)
• Best children's/young adult novel: The Crossroads by Chris Grabenstein (Random House)
• Best cover art: The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, designed by Peter Mendelsund (Knopf)
• Special Service Award: Jon and Ruth Jordan

 
Following his extraordinarily successful novels Everything Is Illuminated and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, literary wunderkind Jonathan Safran Foer turns to nonfiction with Eating Animals (no subtitle given or needed), an intelligent and convincing work about the moral and environmental effect of our dietary choices, specifically as they apply to eating animals. While several outstanding books covering the same ground have been published recently, Foer's ability to synthesize his personal opinion, research and objective argument makes his a welcome addition to a growing body of work on the subject.

Throughout his college years, Foer flirted with vegetarianism (essentially avoiding meat until he wanted to eat it), but never gave serious thought to his dietary choices until the birth of his son. Then, faced with the prospect of making those choices for another person, he felt compelled to understand and investigate their impact in broader terms. Foer's research led immediately to factory farms, the source of 99% of all the animals consumed in the U.S. As Foer so ably demonstrates, it is impossible to overstate the horrors of factory farming, both in terms of sheer animal suffering and environmental devastation. The statistics are staggering: 83% of all chicken meat is infected with bacteria at the time of purchase, a typical hog factory farm produces 7.2 million tons of untreated manure annually, shrimp trawling accounts for 33% of global "bycatch" (the 145 other species that are regularly killed in the process)--and those are just a few. This is not to mention the almost unimaginable but well-documented cruelty inflicted upon the millions of animals engineered to become cheap meat, of which Foer provides many examples.

Much of the information regarding factory farms has already surfaced in other books and magazine articles. What distinguishes Foer's book is the attention he pays to narrative; that is, the stories we build around the food we eat and the culture and tradition built through these stories. It is difficult, Foer admits, to create a paradigm shift in consciousness when we are so trained to eat turkey at Thanksgiving that we willingly forget what it is and where it has come from. But a paradigm shift is exactly what we need and to illustrate this point, Foer tells the story of his grandmother, who escaped the Nazis and survived by eating scraps from garbage cans. When one day a kind farmer offered her some pork, she refused to eat it because it was not kosher. When Foer asked her why she wouldn't eat to save her life, his grandmother replied, "If nothing matters, there's nothing to save."--Debra Ginsberg

Shelf Talker: An extremely powerful and incredibly illuminating look at the moral and environmental impact of eating animals.