Shelf Awareness for Wednesday, January 10, 2007


Del Rey Books: The Seventh Veil of Salome by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

Dial Press: Whoever You Are, Honey by Olivia Gatwood

Pantheon Books: The Volcano Daughters by Gina María Balibrera

Peachtree Publishers: Leo and the Pink Marker by Mariyka Foster

Wednesday Books: Castle of the Cursed by Romina Garber

Overlook Press: How It Works Out by Myriam LaCroix

Charlesbridge Publishing: If Lin Can: How Jeremy Lin Inspired Asian Americans to Shoot for the Stars by Richard Ho, illustrated by Huynh Kim Liên and Phùng Nguyên Quang

Shadow Mountain: The Orchids of Ashthorne Hall (Proper Romance Victorian) by Rebecca Anderson

News

Notes: More on PGW/AMS; Two N.Y. Bookstores; ABS Sold

In a letter sent on Monday, PGW president Rich Freese updated client publishers on some important issues, although in many cases, final determinations are up to the bankruptcy court handling the AMS Chapter 11 filing:

A motion the court will hear January 24 requests PGW publishers be given "critical vendor" status and PGW be allowed to make payments of "the amounts due from PGW to PGW publishers in January."

In filings, PGW asserts that "PGW publishers are the owners of their inventory held by PGW in its warehouses in accordance with our contractual relationships." Under those contracts, when books are ordered, PGW purchases them from the publishers and sells them to retailers.

Freese emphasized that "neither AMS nor PGW have ever pledged the PGW publishers' inventory held in PGW's warehouses against our credit line. Accordingly, the bank excludes the PGW publishers' inventory from its calculations against the borrowing base."

In related news, Dow Jones (via the San Jose Mercury News) reported that AMS has asked the bankruptcy court to stop attempts by publishers, including Random House and Simon & Schuster, to reclaim their books from the wholesaler.

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For the second time since Sunday, the New York Times focuses on independent bookstores: in today's case, it's an Our Towns column by Peter Applebome about the Village Bookstore, Pleasantville, N.Y., and Second Story Book Shop in neighborning Chappaqua, both of which coincidentally opened on the same day, September 9, 1972.

Village Books has had five successive owners and two names. Second Story has been owned the whole time by the legendary former ABA president Joan Ripley (who last November sent out fliers asking residents to support the store, an effort that was forwarded via e-mail by a customer and led to "a stellar Christmas season").

The "absolutes"--or lessons--from the two stores: "You can't get rich running a small-town bookstore, but smart, resourceful businesspeople can survive. If lots of trends can kill bookstores, plenty of suburbs are full of smart literate residents who treasure having one nearby. And, to some extent, people really do get what they pay for. There are good things about the fancy Borders in Mount Kisco, but if people want the small independent with the handwritten tags recommending books real people actually read--or the other local shops battling the big box stores--it's their choice whether they live or die."

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Follett Educational Services has bought Academic Book Services, which buys and sells used K-12 textbooks, Bargain Book News reported. ABS shares its facility with Kudzu Book Traders, which wholesales remainder books; Kudzu will continue its separate operation after ABS leaves.

When the sale is finalized, ABS's 18 field salespeople will be interviewed for positions with Follett Educational Services. About 20 of ABS's 140 headquarters employees will continue to be employed by Kudzu and affiliated operations.

Kudzu plans to expand its remainder book business.

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gather's book chat room 4 Borders customers. they r ready to roll.

Borders and Gather.com have gathered together into a joint project in which Borders shoppers who receive informational e-mails from the company will be offered links to a chat room on Gather.com, a social media Web site, where they can "share their thoughts on books, music and other entertainment," according to the AP (via the Washington Post). The room will also feature author interviews and information on author readings. Users will be able to earn points redeemable for Borders gift cards and other products.

"The power of social networking and social media is changing the way companies interact with their customers," Gather.com CEO Tom Gerace said in a statement. "Borders is a brand that appeals to highly educated and highly informed adults who are the core of the Gather.com community."

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This spring the Easy Chair Bookstore in Blacksburg, Va., is getting off its duff and leaving downtown to move to the University Mall, where it will share space with its sister company, Easy Chair Coffee Shop, the Roanoke Times reported.

The two-year-old bookstore, which was founded after the café, was originally going to have a café of its own, but that project never came to a boil. The café next to the Easy Chair Coffee Shop recently shut its doors.

"Now that the bookstore has two years under its belt and is supporting itself, we'd kind of like to add the cafe environment to the mix and see if the two businesses can't energize each other," co-owner Russell Chisholm told the paper.

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Cool idea of the day: instead of labeling its New Year's resolutions display "resolutions" or "I resolve . . . ," the Fountain Bookstore, Richmond, Va., is calling it "I aspire . . . " Bookseller Anna Cloninger came up with the idea, which the store considers much positive than the alternatives and which allows it to expand the display to include such things as travel books and books on how to write a novel.

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In October, Barnes & Noble plans to open a store in Rockford, Ill., in the Cherryvale Mall at 7200 Harrison Ave. When the store opens, the current B&N at 6685 East State St. in Rockford will close.  

 


HarperOne: Amphibious Soul: Finding the Wild in a Tame World by Craig Foster


Media and Movies

Media Heat: Order in the (Supreme) Court

This morning on the Today Show: Anne Fletcher, author of Weight Loss Confidential: How Teens Lose Weight and Keep It Off--And What They Wish Parents Knew (Houghton Mifflin, $26, 9780618433667).

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This morning on the Early Show: Naomi Judd riffs on Naomi's Guide to Aging Gratefully: Facts, Myths, and Good News for Boomers (S&S, $23, 9780743275156).

Also on the Early Show, Peter Walsh talks a little about his new book, It's All Too Much: An Easy Plan for Living a Richer Life with Less Stuff (Free Press, $22, 9780743292641).

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This morning on Imus in the Morning: Mike Huckabee, Governor of Arkansas and author of From Hope to Higher Ground: 12 STOPS to Restoring America's Greatness (Center Street, $19.99, 9781599957043). Huckabee will also appear on Hannity & Colmes and the Daily Show with Jon Stewart tonight.

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The Book Report, the weekly AM radio book-related show organized by Windows a bookshop, Monroe, La., will feature one author interview on today's show, which has the theme "the struggle" and includes rememberances of Tillie Olsen:

Frank S. Joseph, the former AP and Washington Post reporter and editor and author of To Love Mercy (Mid-Atlantic Highlands, $14.95, 9780974478531). The first novel is set in Chicago in the 1950s and centers on "the story of two boys from very different worlds brought together in a violent moment."

The show airs at 8 a.m. Central Time and can be heard live at thebookreport.net; the archived edition will be posted this afternoon. 

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Today the View gives a royal welcome to Sarah Ferguson, the Duchess of York, whose most recent kids' tale is Little Red's Summer Adventure (S&S Children's Publishing, $15.95, 9780689855627).

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Today on the Diane Rehm Show, Jeffrey Rosen makes the case for his The Supreme Court: The Personalities and Rivalries that Defined America (Times Books, $25, 9780805081824).

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Today on NPR's Fresh Air: Zev Chafets, author of A Match Made in Heaven: American Jews, Christian Zionists, and One Man's Exploration of the Weird and Wonderful Judeo-Evangelical Alliance (HarperCollins, $24.95, 9780060890582).

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Tonight on the Colbert Report: David Kamp comments on The United States of Arugula: How We Became a Gourmet Nation (Broadway, $26, 0767915798).

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Tonight on the Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson: LL Cool J is in the spotlight with LL Cool J's Platinum Workout: Sculpt Your Best Body Ever with Hollywood's Fittest Star (Rodale, $27.95, 9781594866081).


Park Street Press: An Autobiography of Trauma: A Healing Journey by Peter A Levine


Movies: Arthur and the Invisibles

Arthur and the Invisibles, directed by Luc Besson, goes into wide release this Friday, January 12. The animated movie, starring Freddie Highmore, Mia Farrow, Calvin 'Snoop Dogg' Broadus, David Bowie and Penny Balfour, stars 10-year-old Arthur who goes into the land of the Minimoys, creatures who are just a tenth of an inch tall, to find a treasure that will help his grandmother keep her house from a real estate developer. The tie-in is Arthur and the Invisibles by Luc Besson (HarperEntertainment, $7.99, 9780061227264).

 


G.P. Putnam's Sons: Take Me Home by Melanie Sweeney


This Weekend on Book TV: Khrushchev's Foreign Policy

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 Web site.

Saturday, January 13

6 p.m. Encore Booknotes. Part 2 of a 2001 interview with New York Times senior writer Kurt Eichenwald about The Informant: A True Story (Broadway, $16.95, 9780767903271). The book is an account of the FBI and the Justice Department's collaboration with an executive at Archer Daniels Midland who implicated the firm in an illegal scheme. The investigation was complicated when the government discovered that the executive was involved in his own illegal scheme.

7 p.m. History on Book TV. Timothy Naftali, associate professor at the University of Virginia and co-author with Aleksandr Fursenko of Khrushchev's Cold War: The Inside Story of an American Adversary (Norton, $35, 9780393058093), the second of the pair's two books about the Soviet leader's foreign policy, talked about the heated interactions between Nikita Khrushchev and Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy during the Cold War. (Re-airs Sunday at 10 a.m.)


Ooops

Chef Put Back in Martha Stewart's Kitchen

Our Media Heat mention yesterday of The Soul of a New Cuisine: A Discovery of the Foods and Flavors of Africa (Wiley, $40, 9780764569111) misattributed the author, who actually is chef Marcus Samuelsson. He wrote the title with Heidi Sacko Walters and appeared on the Martha Stewart Show yesterday.

Our apologies!



Deeper Understanding

Robert Gray: A New Island Community for Readers Like 'You'

First, let me offer my belated congratulations to You for being named Time magazine's Person of the Year. You deserve it. You outdid yourself online in 2006, turning remote islands like YouTube, MySpace and Wikipedia into virtual continents. You even went literal with the island metaphor by moving to Second Life and recreating Yourself in Your own image.

Second person singular is always in caps in YourWorld, and 2007 looks even brighter for You. One small question remains for us, however: Will the publishing industry survive the age of You? As booksellers, our (lower case) heads can't help but spin. Dare we "close the books" on 2006? Will anyone open them again?

Book communities continue to develop online in any number of interesting ways, but the odds of building a book-focused Web site that becomes a YouTube or MySpace are probably equivalent to those of buying a lottery ticket with your morning coffee and winning $20 million (disclaimer: all estimates calculated by former English major and thus subject to professional derision).

If we build it, will You come?

If we don't, will You even notice?

As I read the hype about Time magazine's Year of You, I was also having an extended e-mail conversation with Charlotte Cook, president of Komenar Publishing, a small house whose second title, My Half of the Sky by Jana McBurney-Lin, garnered a Book Sense Pick last year from Keri Holmes of the Kaleidescope bookstore in Hampton, Iowa.

We discussed at length the online as well as offline world of books, and the word "community" kept surfacing in various contexts. I'll share some of her thoughts with you in the next two columns here, but we are also joining Charlotte for the soft launch this week of the Habitual Reader, a new online community.

"Our idealism strikes again!" Charlotte says. "Nick Ponticello, our manager of operations, has pointed out that the hottest Web sites are those that create community. We want the Habitual Reader Web site to give voice to those among us who spend $$$$ every month on books and then actually read those books. The centerpiece of the site will be Profiles of Habitual Readers with suggested reading lists; a Jeff Foxworthy-like contest about who is a Habitual Reader; Homegrown Reviews; Survivor: Book Island; a list of Once Was Enough titles; and even a 'nominate your favorite bookseller' option."

Charlotte came to publishing after working in a variety of fields, including "libraries, bookstores, large retail operations (worker bee to management) and high tech (small and large companies)." She can expound upon the wonders of literary fiction as well as the lures and pitfalls of technophilia: "When I was in high tech, I learned two things: 1) There's bleeding edge, leading edge and ridiculous. Ridiculous was being high on the technology but forgetting what your business was. We also called it 'rapture of the deep'; 2) Every technology takes several introductions to find its true value in the marketplace."

Her husband, Richard, owns Sunrise Bookshop & Metaphysical Center in Berkeley, Calif. "We started Sunrise more than 30 years ago," Charlotte says, "and have been part of the independent booksellers' world this whole time. We have supported all things for indies and are longtime members of NCIBA."

Sunrise does not have a Web site. According to Richard, "We have on several occasions begun a Web site for the bookstore, but it requires a good deal of work, ongoing attention and commitment, and so far little evidence that it would repay such effort. My thoughts are subject to change on this issue."

Despite her interest in online experimentation and community building, Charlotte concurs with her husband's resistance to online retailing. Komenar Publishing does not sell books on its Web site: "We staunchly believe in community bookstores. I buy on the Web only when I know exactly what I want and can't find it locally. What the Web does is provide us with a much cheaper venue for realizing marketing and publicity needs."  

The Habitual Reader goes live this week as a work in progress with limited content but unlimited hopes.

Will You join this particular book community? Anything is possible, but everything is worth a shot.

Check in next week for an update as well as some of Charlotte's thoughts about living the life of a small publisher in a world where the stakes are anything but virtual.--Robert Gray (column archives available at Fresh Eyes Now)


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