"The driving force of all of this is the acceleration of our culture. The old days of browsing, the old days of a person coming in for three or four hours on a Saturday and slowly meandering, making a small pile of books, being very selective, coming away with six or seven gems they wanted, are pretty much over. If you go to the Strand or to Micawber Books today, it's a whole different gear, where society wants satisfaction and fulfillment now."--Logan Fox, owner of Micawber Books, Princeton, N.J., in a New York Times story. (Micawber's future is discussed below.)

Tillie Olsen, the feminist, socialist writer whose work focused on the lives of working-class women, died Monday night. She was 94.

Her titles included Tell Me a Riddle, a collection that contained the well-known short story, I Stand Here Ironing; the novel Yonnondio: From the Thirties; and a nonfiction work, Silences, about the difficulties writers face.

Olsen's texts were particularly popular on campuses, and she was a longtime advisor to the Feminist Press.

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Sadly it's that time of the year: we've learned of several more bookstores that are closing.

Baileywick Books, New Milford, Conn., is shutting its doors at the end of the month, according to the Danbury News Times. Blanchette Bailey, a retired English teacher and former middle school administrator who founded Baileywick Books 14 years ago, is 75 and is retiring for the second time, as she put it.

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Shakespeare Beethoven & Company, Dallas, Tex., has closed--on almost the same day as Black Images Book Bazaar (Shelf Awareness, December 10, 2006).

One of the original tenants of the Galleria, Shakespeare Beethoven & Company was founded 25 years ago by Vivienne Surtees, who died earlier this year. Her daughter, general manager Katie Surtees, told the Dallas News, "I think after 9/11 people realized it's much easier to buy things off the Net, and they just stopped coming to the Galleria. I've just seen such a decline in traffic here, in my end of the mall."

Surtees added that she would like to find another location. "I'm hoping to open a different version of this store in summer to fall. But I can't promise. Rents are high everywhere."

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As libraries add more audiobooks, DVDs, computers and other electronic equipment, pressure to cull books increases. Yesterday on its front page, the Washington Post browsed the issue, using the Fairfax County Public Library in Virginia as an example.

Relying on a software program that identifies books that haven't been checked out in at least two years, the library system has culled titles by Aristotle, Marcel Proust, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Emily Dickinson, Alice Walker and more at some branches (although other branches may keep the titles).

"We're being very ruthless," library director Sam Clay told the paper. "A book is not forever. If you have 40 feet of shelf space taken up by books on tulips and you find that only one is checked out, that's a cost."

 

Today we begin a look back on 2006, our first full year in existence. For starters, we have to note the scandals that marked the past year, many of which seemed like plots for bad novels. Appropriately we will borrow the words of someone else, in this case Josh Getlin of the Los Angeles Times:

"It started off with bestselling author James Frey admitting his memoir, A Million Little Pieces, was in fact a work of fiction, and ended with celebrity publisher Judith Regan getting fired for allegedly making anti-Semitic comments after her proposed O.J. Simpson confessional book-TV deal got shot down.

"In between came charges that 19-year-old Harvard novelist Kaavya Viswanathan had lifted passages from a rival chick-lit author, and hotly disputed allegations that Ian McEwan, one of the most respected names in modern literary fiction, may have been guilty of plagiarism."

In addition, it turned out that "J.T. Leroy--a bestselling author believed to be an HIV-positive teenage prostitute--was in fact a 40-year-old San Francisco woman who had concealed her identity for years."

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As some of today's news emphasizes, bookselling is more competitive than ever, and during 2006, a range of bookstores were saved, supported or created by what might be called bookstore angels.

In September, Cody's Books, which had been stretched financially by its new store in San Francisco and its long-struggling flagship in Berkeley, Calif.--which closed in June--found a savior in Yohan, Inc., the Japanese company that distributes English-language books and magazines in Japan, operates 18 bookstores in Japan and owns publisher IBC Publishing and Stone Bridge Press in Berkeley (September 6). After Yohan bought Cody's, longtime owner Andy Ross stayed on as president.

Prairie Home Companion's Garrison Keillor founded Common Good Books in St. Paul, Minn., at the end of October. Besides some of Keillor's works, the store features fewer sections than the common good bookstore.

Turnrow Book Co., which opened in August in Greenwood, Miss., and is managed by Jamie and Kelly Kornegay, was helped into existence by Fred Carl, the founder and CEO of Viking Range and a native of Greenwood who has singlehandedly revitalized much of the Mississippi Delta town's downtown (October 3). High-end kitcheware turned out to be the key ingredient in the creation of this elegant store.

College store operator Follett opened the first of a new type of store on the Drag, across from the University of Texas in Austin (March 22). Unusually the school is contributing money to the company, and the store, called Follett Intellectual Property, will not sell textbooks or UT clothing and memorabilia--products that will be staples of the University Co-op.

In another unusual college store shuffle, Micawber Books sold its business to Princeton University and will close in March; this fall, Labyrinth Books, which has scholarly stores near Columbia University and Yale University, will open a store called Labyrinth Books at Princeton, which will be near but not in Micawber's location downtown; and the U-Store, Princeton's coop, will phase out its book business by next fall--leaving book retailing to Labyrinth--and will open a satellite store selling apparel next to Labyrinth (December 5). In other words, Princeton is helping Labyrinth continue the high book service that Micawber was known for.

One angel turned out to be a grinch. Last week Doug Dutton closed his Dutton's Beverly Hills branch because the current mayor and city council--not the same ones who lured him to open in that pricey area with below-market rent--wouldn't reconsider the deal after Dutton found he was losing money (December 20).

[Tomorrow and Friday, more about last year, including promising new stores, healthy changes in the business, milestones, etc.] 

This morning on the Early Show: Jeff Bredenberg comes clean about his new book, How to Cheat at Cleaning: Time-Slashing Techniques to Cut Corners and Restore Your Sanity (Taunton, $12.95, 9781561588701).

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This morning on the Today Show, Arthur Agatston, M.D., offers prescriptions from The South Beach Heart Program: The 4-Step Plan that Can Save Your Life (Rodale, $25.95, 9781594864193).

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Today the Martha Stewart Show welcomes Donny Osmond, author of Life Is Just What You Make It: My Story So Far (Hyperion, $15.95, 9781401308612).

Also on the Martha Stewart Show: Nora Ephron, author of I Feel Bad About My Neck: And Other Thoughts on Being a Woman (Knopf, $19.95, 9780307264558), who makes Frozen Key Lime Pie with the hostess.

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Today on WAMU's Diane Rehm Show: John Taliaferro, author of In a Far Country: The True Story of a Mission, a Marriage, a Murder, and the Remarkable Reindeer Rescue of 1898 (Public Affairs, $26.95, 9781586482213).

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Tonight on the O'Reilly Factor: Dr. Laura Schlessinger expounds on The Proper Care and Feeding of Marriage (HarperCollins, $25.95, 9780061142840).

The following titles had an official pub date of yesterday:

The Mathematics of Love by Emma Darwin (Morrow, $24.95, 9780061140266). This Book Sense pick for January is by the great-great-granddaughter of Charles Darwin and features a contemporary woman who explores, via letters found in her English country school, the love of a Waterloo veteran for an "unconventional" woman.

Naomi's Guide to Aging Gratefully: Facts, Myths, and Good News for Boomers by Naomi Judd (S&S, $23, 9780743275156). Just in time for another new year, the country music star strums a happy tune.

The Case of the Missing Books by Ian Sansom (Harper Paperbacks, $12.95, 9780060822507). In this first in the author's Mobile Library series, Israel Armstrong arrives in a small Irish town to drive the mobile library but finds that the library's 15,000 books have vanished.

What are you optimistic about? Why?

This is the "Edge Annual Question--2007" (well, two questions, but who's counting?). If you visit the Edge World Question Center, you will find 160 responses from "a who's who of interesting and important world-class thinkers." Select Walter Isaacson and you will learn something about the gentle art of reverse psychology as he turns current paranoia regarding publishing's future into a mischievous fable.

"I am very optimistic about print as a technology," says Isaacson. "Words on paper are a wonderful information storage, retrieval, distribution, and consumer product. . . . Imagine if we had been getting our information delivered digitally to our screens for the past 400 years. Then some modern Gutenberg had come up with a technology that was able to transfer these words and pictures onto pages that could be delivered to our doorstep, and we could take them to the backyard, the bath, or the bus. We would be thrilled with this technological leap forward, and we would predict that someday it might replace the Internet."

In my first column for Shelf Awareness last June, I began with a simple statement that was deliberately provocative: "Most independent bookstore Web sites are a waste of time and money, and about as useful as a weathered motel on an abandoned highway." I didn't necessarily believe that, and said as much in the following paragraph. Now, however, I might add that I've found some of those weathered motels to be more effective than their neon-lit competitors.

In 2006, I visited and revisited most bookstore Web sites in the U.S., looking for tips, tactics and trouble. As 2007 begins, I'm less inclined to make overriding statements about the relative profitability or futility of indies online. Like Mr. Isaacson, I've found that perception matters; that any story about bookstores must include plot twists like individual expectations, resources and priorities.

So if I were asked "What are you optimistic about?" in terms of online indie bookselling for 2007, I would cite the range of online experimentation I've encountered rather than the quantity or quality of sites overall. I'm optimistic about the energy and thought that so many booksellers put into their sites. And I'm especially optimistic about the adaptability of booksellers who set sail online and, if their initial voyage isn't a success, try another route rather than abandoning ship.

In that regard, I was thinking this week about a particular bookshop that adapted by simplifying rather than giving up.  

Last summer, as I prepared to attend the MPIBA trade show in Denver, I communicated with Nicole Magistro of the Bookworm of Edwards in Edwards, Colo., who had recently confronted the maddening puzzle of what sufficient "online presence" should mean for her particular situation.

Bookworm had been a BookSense.com store, but Magistro opted for a simpler template with more modest goals: "We do not sell books through our current site, and it is much cheaper to run/maintain than a BookSense site. Right now we pay about $10 per month. I would love to find a way to sell more stock online, but of course that requires savvy staff to maintain it. If you are a bookseller with a small staff and a brick and mortar store, there is not much time to devote to it at all."  

Although Amazon was "far and away our biggest competitor," Magistro felt that when her customers did shop online, discount was the primary reason and that was an area where she could not compete. On the other hand, she was optimistic about the growth of traffic at her new site, due largely to increased e-mail marketing campaigns. I've heard from many booksellers that direct e-mail communication has proven to be a successful way to generate more Web site hits.

That makes sense. E-mails tell your customers stories about your bookstore, and we're in the business of selling stories for a living. If perception is nine-tenths of the law online, then maybe Walter Isaacson's print culture fable hints at a potent tool for online retail survival. Can we tell stories that sell stories?

In 2007, I'll look for stories about bookstore Internet marketing techniques. Some of these will be fresh tales you've never heard before, while others will be classics with a new twist.

I'll find happy endings where I can.  

What are you optimistic about in terms of online bookselling in 2007?--Robert Gray (column archives available at Fresh Eyes Now)