Books-A-Million has declared a special one-time dividend of $3 a share, to be paid on July 5 to shareholders of record at the close of business on June 20. About $50.4 million will be paid to the holders of the company's 16.8 million shares.

The company's regular quarterly dividend has been nine cents a share. In the most recent quarter, net income had jumped 40% and sales rose 2.1% while sales at stores open at least a year dropped 0.5%.

The move should cause a nice jump in BAM shares, which closed yesterday at $16.81, that will last until about, oh, June 21.

This is the first move of its kind by a publicly held bookselling company that we can remember. By contrast, when wanting to directly reward investors, Barnes & Noble and Borders have bought back stock, which increases the value of remaining stock.

---

Yesterday Goldman Sachs analyst Matthew J. Fassler downgraded Borders Group to sell from neutral after the Federal Trade Commission filed suit to block Whole Foods's purchase of Wild Oats Markets, the AP reported. Fassler's reasoning: the market domination by the two major natural and organic supermarket chains parallels that of Borders and B&N in bricks-and-mortar book retailing, and many on Wall Street have bid up B&N and Borders hoping that the two will combine in one fashion or another. Borders stock closed down 4.5% at $20.79.

 

 

Congratulations to Harleysville Books, Harleysville, Pa., which was founded a year ago by president and owner Shelly Plumb. The store is celebrating its anniversary all week with a 20% sale and a book signing and Princess Tea Party with Robert and Lisa Papp, illustrators of P Is for Princess, A Royal Alphabet (Sleeping Bear Press, $17.95), this Saturday, June 9, at 3 p.m. Harleysville Books is located at 674 Main St., Salford Square, Harleysville, Pa. 19438; 215-256-9311; harleysvillebooks.com.

--- 

Annz Books & More recently opened in Chetek, Wis., according to the Chetek Alert. "I'm hoping that the community will let me know what sort of books they want," said owner Ann Zimmerman. "I took a guess as to what I thought might sell in Chetek."

---

When the Pensacola News Journal took its readers on a trip to Fairhope, Ala., one must-see stop was Karin Wilson's Page & Palette bookstore. "Like many independent bookstores across America, it's a natural place for people to meet and socialize," Wilson said.

---

On June 20, Barnes & Noble will open a store in the Glendora Market Place at 1315 Gladstone St., Glendora, Calif.  

---

Chuck Robinson, co-owner of Village Books, Bellingham, Wash., will be shot out of this world--almost--this Saturday, along with two "civilians." The winners of two sweepstakes contests--one for booksellers, the other for consumers--organized by Quirk Books to promote The Space Tourist's Handbook by Eric Anderson with Joshua Piven, published in November 2005, the trio will get a taste of weightlessness when they join a suborbital Zero-G flight from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

Robinson, who saw an ad for the contest in Shelf Awareness, commented in a Quirk announcement: "I thought it sounded exciting. I was 10 in 1957 at the dawn of the Space Age, and it was so fascinating. Now I get to experience a bit of it."

We'll check in with Capt. Chuck next week for a debriefing of what's commonly known as the vomit comet.

--- 

Bear with us:

We hear that one long-established bookstore computer inventory control system still doesn't handle 13-digit ISBNs. Here's one reason it's critical: in the second quarter of next year, the first 13-digit ISBNs with prefixes of 979 will be assigned, and when that happens, new books will no longer be able to take a 10-digit ISBN. For now, because all 13-digit ISBNs have a prefix of 978, they can have a 10-digit version; with two possible prefixes, there will be confusion about which 13-digit ISBN a 10-digit ISBN refers to.

As Michael Healy, executive director of the Book Industry Study Group, put it: "This is a very important announcement that directly affects the U.S. book industry. It marks a decisive point in the transition to ISBN-13, which was to be completed on January 1 of this year, and makes it critical that all systems are now configured to handle the full 13-digit ISBN."
 

"Our customers are not just buying a cup of coffee. They're paying for an experience," said Starbucks Entertainment president Ken Lombard, whose appearance was part of the Upfront & Unscripted series. He emphasized the company's desire to stay true to its roots as a coffee company while at the same time adding value for customers by offering a select number of books, music and movies.

Interviewed by Chris Anderson, author of The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More, Lombard said the company will select one book per quarter to sell in its locations across the country. Plans are underway to expand distribution globally, as it has done with music. The company is also considering promoting titles regionally rather than continuing its current "one-size-fits-all" model.

"We look for great content and exciting opportunities," said Lombard, whether from a bestselling author like Mitch Albom, whose novel For One More Day was the first selection, or a debut author such as Ishmael Beah, whose A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier sold 140,000 copies. The company's core consumer base ranges in age from 24-49 and has relatively high incomes. The 18-to-24-year-old market, noted Lombard, is growing rapidly.

One audience member suggested that the company pick a title written by a female author for its third book selection. Lombard revealed only that Starbucks is close to making an announcement.--Shannon McKenna

 

"Why do we insist on talking to each other instead of talking to the people who matter--the consumers?" asked Michael Hyatt, CEO, Thomas Nelson Publishers, at the seminar, "Customer Focused Publishing: How Thomas Nelson Moved Away from Imprints and Closer to Customer Needs."

Hyatt outlined his company's strategic reorganization, which eliminated nearly 20 imprints and streamlined the publisher under a single logo. In part, the change was motivated by the realization that customers care less about the companies that make books (or movies and music) than the end products.

"Our future was going to be dependent upon cooperating internally, but more importantly externally," said Hyatt. "It's very easy for us to sit in the ivory tower and cook up what the public will read." His epiphany came when he realized multiple imprints bred complexity rather than value. "It's really not about us," he said. "It's about the customer."

Thomas Nelson's new "one imprint, one presence" model has several benefits, Hyatt said, including a simplified business model, better internal collaboration, greater consumer focus and more market visibility. And in case the publisher does matter to some customers, he noted that when the company's books are shelved spine-out in bookstores now, a single logo is much more noticeable.

Ultimately, he concluded, "We realized that insiders are the least capable of seeing things from an outsider's perspective."--Robert Gray

Today on Good Morning America, former New York Times reporter Jeff Gerth sheds light on Her Way: The Hopes and Ambitions of Hillary Rodham Clinton (Little, Brown, $29.99, 9780316017428/0316017426).

---

Today on KCRW's Bookworm: Joyce Carol Oates, whose new book is The Gravedigger’s Daughter (Ecco, $26.95, 9780061236822/0061236829). As the show put it: "The Gravedigger's Daughter is Oates's most autobiographical novel and the culmination of her career-long themes and obsessions."

---

Today on Fox News & Friends: Sports Illustrated columnist Rick Reilly, author of Hate Mail from Cheerleaders: And Other Adventures from the Life of Reilly (Time Inc., $25.95, 9781933821122/1933821124).

---

Today on the Diane Rehm Show: Barbara Bisantz Raymond, author of The Baby Thief: The Untold Story of Georgia Tann, the Baby Seller Who Corrupted Adoption (Carroll & Graf, $26.95, 9780786719440/0786719443).

---

Tonight the O'Reilly Factor talks with Douglas Brinkley, historian and editor of The Reagan Diaries (HarperCollins, $35, 9780060876005/006087600X).

---

Tonight on the Charlie Rose Show, Nassim Nicholas Taleb makes an impact with The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (Random House, $26.95, 9781400063512/1400063515).

---

Tonight the Tonight Show with Jay Leno features Don Rickles, whose memoir is Rickles' Book (S&S, $24, 9780743293051/0743293053).

---

Tonight the Late Show with David Letterman laughs it up with Amy Sedaris, author of I Like You: Hospitality Under the Influence (Warner, $24.99, 9780446578844/0446578843).

---

Tonight on the Colbert Report: Cullen Murphy, author of Are We Rome?: The Fall of an Empire and the Fate of America (Houghton Mifflin, $24, 9780618742226/0618742220).

 

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, June 9

8:30 a.m. History on Book TV. Thomas Craughwell, author of Stealing Lincoln's Body (Belknap, $24.95, 9780674024588/0674024583), tells the story of the attempted theft for ransom of Lincoln's remains on the eve the 1876 election.

11 a.m.-6 p.m. Featured program: Printers Row Book Fair, including live and taped coverage. (Re-airs at 11 p.m. and Sunday at 11 p.m.) 

6 p.m. Encore Booknotes. In a segment first aired in 2004, John Dean, former counsel to President Richard Nixon and author of Warren G. Harding (Times Books, $20, 9780805069563/0805069569), discusses his examination of another presidency tarnished by scandal.

7 p.m. Public Lives. Nancy Isenberg, author of Fallen Founder: The Life of Aaron Burr (Viking, $29.95, 9780670063529/0670063525), contends that the third vice-president of the United States deserves to be included within the pantheon of the founding fathers.

9 p.m. After Words. USA Today's Supreme Court correspondent Joan Biskupic interviews historian Kenneth Ackerman, author of Young J. Edgar: Hoover, the Red Scare, and the Assault on Civil Liberties (Carroll & Graf, $28.95, 9780786717750/0786717750). Ackerman examines Hoover's early career, from his start as a 24-year-old assistant to Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer--where he played an influential role in the infamous Palmer Raids--to his appointment as head of the FBI in 1924. (Re-airs Sunday, June 10, at 6 p.m and 9 p.m.)

Sunday, June 10

7 p.m. General Assignment. William Langewiesche, author of The Atomic Bazaar: The Rise of the Nuclear Poor (FSG, $22, 9780374106782/0374106789), talks about the proliferation of nuclear weapons in poorer, more unstable countries and the threat this poses to the international community.

Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has won the Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction, which honors the best book of the past year written in English by a woman, for her Half of a Yellow Sun, set in Nigeria during the civil war when Biafra declared independence. "This really comes as a wonderful, wonderful surprise," Adichie said according to Reuters via the New York Times.

Muriel Gray, the chief judge, commented: "The judges and I were hugely impressed by the power, ambition and skill of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's novel. It's astonishing, not just in the skillful subject matter, but in the brilliance of its accessibility."

At 29, Adichie is the youngest winner of the prize, worth $60,000, and the first from Africa to win. The book (Knopf, $24.95, 9781400044160/1400044162) was published here last September.

Canadian Karen Connelly has won the Orange Broadband Award for New Writers for The Lizard Cage (Nan A. Talese, $26, 9780385518185/0385518188), which was published here in March.

--- 

At BEA, ForeWord Magazine presented its annual Book of the Year Awards. The winners of the Editors' Choice Prizes, each with a $1,500 cash prize, were:

In fiction, Sojourn by Jana Oliver (Dragon Moon Press, 9781896944302), the first science fiction book to be chosen. "This fascinating book is an intricate time travel tale involving journeys between 1888 Victorian England and the year 2057," publisher Victoria Sutherland said.

In nonfiction, The Bible of Illuminated Letters by Margaret Morgan (Barron's Educational Series, 9780764158209). ForeWord called this "a combination of history, art, and how-to, with details and examples of this historic art form."

The complete, searchable list of the winners of gold, silver and bronze awards winners and finalists is available at forewordmagazine.com/botya/.

The 12-year-old narrator of Couvillon's debut novel set in the early 1980s reveals an intelligence overshadowed by naïveté and a hunger for approval that recedes with his growing sense of self-worth. Don Schmidt begins his breathless, unwittingly funny narrative soon after he has learned that his name is actually Stanley, which sets in motion a quest to uncover the mystery behind his real identity. The family runs a chicken farm in Horse Island, La., which they inherited when Uncle Sam (Don's father's brother) died. The will stipulates that the Schmidts can live in the house for 10 years if they "keep at least twenty-five chickens at all times." Given the unusually self-absorbed heads of his household, Dick and Janice Schmidt, Don takes solace among these feathered friends, feeding them, observing them, reading about them.

Chickens are about the only thing that people in Horse Island care about, so when Don wins the chicken-judging prize, he achieves star status--and Janice basks in his reflected glow. Humor pervades everything here, and Don's innocence lands him in situations that will have readers laughing at and with him. Humor even leads to a breakthrough with Janice. When she says, "You ever notice how all the people in this town have the same letter for their first and last name? You know like, Lucy Leonard, Jessica Jaubert, Julia Jay," he responds, "Maybe it's a law here that women can only marry men whose last name has the same first letter of their first name. . . . Maybe you and Father are breaking the law and you'll have to get a divorce or go to jail." She laughs, and appreciates Don for perhaps the first time--though he is more accurate than he knows. There are more plot twists than chicken feathers in this novel, and it is a credit to Couvillon that he brings them all together to a realistic close befitting this black comedy. The adults here may not be likable, but they are fully human and even win readers' sympathy by the end, as Don proves he is the most mature among them.--Jennifer M. Brown

The following were the bestselling titles on AbeBooks.com during May:

1. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
2. The Purpose Driven Life by Rick Warren
3. The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
4. The Children of Hurin by J.R.R. Tolkien
5. Ancient Secret of the Fountain of Youth by Peter Kelder  
6. Plato and a Platypus Walk into a Bar by Thomas Cathcart
7. God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything by Christopher Hitchens
8. The Dangerous Book for Boys by Conn Iggulden
9. The Secret by Rhonda Byrne
10. A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini

[Many thanks to AbeBooks.com!]