Booksellers generally lauded our item yesterday about the policy of Rainy Day Books, Fairway, Kan., not to stage events by authors and publishers whose websites do not include BookSense.com among online buying options. But some authors, publishers and distributors had a somewhat different take. Speaking for some of them, Jacqueline Church Simonds of Beagle Bay, Reno, Nev., wrote:

I agree that a link to Amazon.com might be construed as possibly insensitive to an independent bookstore. However, a link to Amazon is basic marketing for the rest of the publishing world. The only thing "unwise" is not having a link to the biggest bookseller in the country. We authors and publishers love indy booksellers, but the reality is that we have to deal with Amazon, big box stores and warehouse stores online. Where do people online usually go? Amazon.

The reason many authors and publishers don't have a BookSense link is that they don't know it exists as a sales tool. That's because most of the public don't have a clue what that name means, which is a problem, because in this market, brand is everything. They won't click on it because they don't know what it is.

Consider our experience. Beagle Bay has had a BookSense link on our book pages--at the top!--since we began. In five years, I think we've tracked 12 links to BookSense, which led to two sales. In the same time, I can't tell you how many sales we've had via the Amazon link--in the thousands, for sure.

The problem is not that no one wants to use BookSense, it's that the public hasn't been educated about why it's a good idea (a green thing, a progressive thing, "a small = good" thing) to use BookSense instead of Amazon. Put your energy into raising awareness rather than bludgeoning authors for "non-compliance."

Five authors published by conservative house Regnery Publishing have sued Eagle Publishing, Regnery's owner, charging that by selling or giving away copies of their books to book clubs, newsletters and other organizations owned by Eagle, it is intentionally engaging in a "fraudulent, deceptively concealed and self-dealing scheme to divert book sales away from retail outlets" and avoid standard royalty payments, the New York Times reported.

The plaintiffs include Jerome R. Corsi, co-author of Unfit for Command: Swift Boat Veterans Speak Out Against John Kerry, and Richard Miniter, author of Dereliction of Duty: The Eyewitness Account of How Bill Clinton Compromised America's National Security.

Miniter calculated that he receives about $4.25 a copy when his Regnery books are sold in bookstores or online but only 10 cents a copy when sold through the Conservative Book Club. He commented: "Why is Regnery acting like a Marxist cartoon of a capitalist company?"

In an e-mail to the Times, an Eagle lawyer said, "No publisher in America has a more acute marketing sense or successful track record at building promotional platforms for books than Regnery Publishing. These disgruntled authors object to marketing strategies used by all major book publishers that have proved successful time and again as witnessed by dozens of Regnery bestsellers."

--- 

Word Traffic Books, Tallahassee, Fla., will hold its grand opening Saturday, November 10. The Tallahassee Democrat reported that the new bookshop, which is owned by Van and Chelsea Fox, will celebrate with free food and drink, two author readings, specials and door prizes.

"The store is committed to providing an alternative to the corporate chains in both service and selection, supporting independent publishers and showcasing marginalized literary voices," said Van Fox.

Word Traffic Books is located at 1227 E. Lafayette Street, Tallahassee, Fla. 32301; 850-422-9673.

---

Oprah Winfrey has pulled The Education of Little Tree by Forrest Carter from a list of recommended titles on her website. According to the Associated Press (via Business Week), the blame was placed on an "archival 'error' for including a work considered the literary hoax of a white supremacist."

Winfrey spokeswoman Angela DePaul said that although she did not know how long the book had been listed on the website, the "archived listing was posted in error and has been removed."

The AP couldn’t resist adding that James Frey's A Million Little Pieces is still listed on Oprah's website.

---

Cool biblio-meteorological idea of the day. The latest e-mail newsletter from the Regulator Bookshop, Durham, N.C., revealed the unexpected power of books to relieve drought.

In the October 19 edition, the Regulator had requested "folks to email us books that had the word 'rain' in the title, and said 'Who knows? If we gather enough titles the clouds may gather, the rain may fall. Stranger things have happened.'" Three days later, four inches of rain fell, but "no one in the local media caught on to why the rain came, and I expect that with power like this, it is best for us to walk softly."

The rainmaking booklist included Henderson the Rain King, The Right Attitude to Rain, Neon Rain, Right as Rain, Bringing the Rain, Rain Dogs, Black Rain, The Rainmaker, Rainbow Stories, Looking for a Rain God, Drinking the Rain, Come on Rain, The Small Rain, Red Earth and Pouring Rain, Prayers for Rain and The Silence of the Rain, among others. 

Unfortunately, "The drought is still with us. We're still open to suggestions for more 'rain' books. If we can make this list twice as long . . ." 

--- 

Where do bibliophiles come from?

"I was in a thrift shop in 1995 or 1996," Rick Stoutamyer, owner of Stoutamyer Fine Books, Middleburg, Va., told the Fauquier Times-Democrat, "and I found a book about stained glass windows designed by Marc Chagall that included two original Chagall lithographs. I bought the book for $40, which is a lot of money for a thrift shop book. I sold it a day later for $850 to another bookseller, and he sold it for $1,700 a week later. At that point, I got hooked. It's like panning for gold. Anything can be anyplace at anytime."

Baltimore Chop: a play in baseball that the original Orioles invented in the 1890s that involved the batter chopping the ball down hard onto or in front of home plate to make a high bounce and allow him to make it to first base. A new bookstore in downtown Baltimore.

The carrying baskets say Coliseum Books, one of the few signs of a new store's legacy. The famed New York City bookstore that stood at 57th and Broadway for 27 years and closed its revived Bryant Park location late last year lives on in a small but delightful way just a few hundred miles down the turnpike. Baltimore Chop, a new general independent in Baltimore City, is owned by Andy Rubin, son of Sy Rubin, a founder of Coliseum.
 
Andy Rubin quietly turned his online business selling mostly baseball and other sports books into a bricks-and-mortar location on April 9 this year--opening day at Oriole Park at Camden Yards, which is a stone's throw from the 1,000-sq.-ft. shop. The house where Babe Ruth was born is about a home-run trot away.
 
Rubin, who jokes that he's been in the book business so long he still calls BEA ABA, grew up in the presence of the man who opened the old Bookmasters Book Store in the 1960s, where the Black Panthers held meetings and where one could find the The Anarchist's Cookbook for sale.
 
After attending the old High School of Music & Art in New York City, Rubin entered University of Oklahoma thinking of going for a business degree. Working for the school newspaper as a photographer, sports writer and editor, he decided to get a journalism degree instead.
 
Soon Rubin made contact with the local ABC affiliate and worked in TV production in both New York and Oklahoma City. When his boss was transferred to Baltimore, Rubin went along.
 
"I traded in tornados and bombings for Baltimore" Rubin said. He later went to work for Baltimore Ravens TV before taking some time off to care for his ailing father and to help look for a new home for Coliseum Books, when it gave up its longtime space in early 2002 because of a huge rent increase.

"I made several offers in Manhattan, including a great building in lower Manhattan after 9/11," Rubin said. "The deal didn't go through, but I knew it was a great location. Borders is there now." Rubin said that his father worked until the very end. "My dad was still on the phone trying to make deals and negotiate a lease for the bookstore from his hospital bed," he said. "But it just didn't work out."
 
After Sy Rubin died in February 2002, Rubin moved back to Baltimore and worked on his online store. Rubin, who prefers not to divulge his age and sports a long ponytail, noticed there wasn't an independent bookstore in downtown Baltimore following the closings in the '90s of Bibelot and the famed Louie's Bookstore. Baltimore, once known as "The City That Reads," sorely needed a new gathering place downtown, he decided.
 
Baltimore Chop is thriving in a turn-of-the-20th century building that once housed the H&H Pants Factory and a silent movie studio. The old tin walls and ceilings have been lovingly restored by Rubin and his friend and landlord Neil Junker, a Baltimore real estate developer who specializes in restoring old buildings. During the renovation they found old time punch cards in the basement--but no pants.  
 
Although the shop specializes in sports books, it offers an eclectic assortment of books from Zen to Zane. Chuck Palahniuk, John Grisham, Hilary and Bill Clinton can also be found in the stacks and display tables. A small children's section doubles as a napping place for Rubin, who opens the shop at 6:30 a.m. to catch the medical staff changing shifts at a nearby hospital in search of coffee and newspapers.
 
Quirky furniture, free wi-fi and a cute coffee nook in the red-walled shop create a warm, homey environment. The clever use of chalkboard paint on the shelves and walls allows for ever-changing shelf talkers and section labels. The beautifully restored tin ceiling above the entrance hints at the history of this old Baltimore building in the aptly named Ridgley's Delight neighborhood.
 
Besides the books, the store features live music (voted Baltimore's Best Venue for live performances by Baltimore Magazine) as well as art glass. Yes--art glass! In his spare time, Rubin blows glass. The music performances come from contacts he's made over the years in Nashville.
 
Baltimore Chop may be the only bookstore in the world that sells Baltimore baseball bobble heads, dichroic and decorative Venetian art glass and hand-blown glass jewelry. Oh, and you can also make toast to go along with your latte.--Susan L. Weis, proprietress of breathe books, Baltimore, Md.
 
Baltimore Chop is located at 625 Washington Blvd., Baltimore, Md. 21230; 410-752-HITS; baltimorechop.com (for the online bookstore) and myspace.com.baltimorechop (for the bricks-and-mortar store).

This morning on the Early Show: Bill O'Reilly, author of Kids Are Americans Too (Morrow, $24.95, 9780060846763/0060846763).

Also on the Early Show: Morton A. Meyers, author of Happy Accidents: Serendipity in Modern Medical Breakthroughs (Arcade, $29.95, 9781559708197/1559708190).

---

This morning on the Today Show:

• Shirley MacLaine, whose new book is Sage-ing While Age-ing (Atria, $26, 9781416550419/1416550410).
• Kathleen Squires of Real Simple, who discusses the magazine's new book, Real Simple: Cleaning (Real Simple, $21.95, 9781933821399/1933821396).
• Elizabeth Rogers, author of The Green Book: The Everyday Guide to Saving the Planet One Simple Step at a Time (Three Rivers Press, $12.95, 9780307381354/0307381358).

---

This morning's Book Report, the weekly AM radio book-related show organized by Windows a bookshop, Monroe, La., features two interviews:

• Arthur A. Levine, editor of Click, a novel by 10 authors in support of Amnesty International (Scholastic, $16.99, 9780439411387/0439411386)
• Christopher Paul Curtis, author of Elijah of Buxton (Scholastic, $16.99, 9780439023443/0439023440)

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.

---

Today on Martha Stewart: Anne Kreamer, author of Going Gray: What I Learned about Beauty, Sex, Work, Motherhood, Authenticity, and Everything Else That Really Matters (Little, Brown, $23.99, 9780316166614/0316166618).

---

Today on WNYC's Leonard Lopate Show: Joshua Henkin, author of Matrimony: A Novel (Pantheon, $23.95, 9780375424359/0375424350).

---

Today on NPR's Fair Game: Mark Penn, author of Microtrends: The Small Forces Behind Tomorrow's Big Changes (Twelve, $25.99, 9780446580960/0446580961).

---

Today on Talk of the Nation: Terri Irwin, author of Steve and Me: Life with the Crocodile Hunter (Simon Spotlight, $25.95, 9781416953883/1416953884).

---

Today on the View: Kayce Freed Jennings, author of Peter Jennings: A Reporter's Life (Thorndike Press, $31.95, 9781410402714/1410402711).

---

Tonight on the Colbert Report, in a repeat: J. Craig Venter, author of A Life Decoded (Viking, $25.95, 9780670063581/0670063584).

An auspicious beginning for The Melancholy Fate of Capt. Lewis by Michael Pritchett (Unbridled Books, $24.95, 9781932961416/1932961410), a Book Sense and Midwest Connections Pick: at a pub party at the Leopold Gallery in Kansas City, Mo., Unbridled Books's co-publisher Greg Michalson (r.) introduces Pritchett.

Elizabeth Hay has won the Giller Prize for Canadian literature, the country's richest literary prize, for her novel Late Nights on Air, the CBC reported. "I'm very thrilled and very lucky," she said, after accepting the $40,000 award last night. "So lucky in fact, I'll probably be hit by a truck tomorrow."

CBC described the book as "the sometimes comic, sometimes tragic tale centred on the cast of characters at a small radio station in the Canadian North." The jury called Late Nights on Air "flawlessly crafted, a timeless story masterfully told," and jury member David Bergen commented, "What a cast of characters. It's as if she took a cast of characters and she found a room to put them in and that room is the North."

--- 

Talk about a longlist.

Some 137 titles have been nominated by libraries around the world for the 2008 International Impac Dublin Literary Award, which carries a prize of 100,000 euros (about $US145,000) for the best literary work of the year. The Guardian has fun discussing some of the titles on the longlist, which it calls "a monster."

The shortlist will be announced April 2 and the winner on June 12.

For all but the hardiest golfers here in the Northeast it soon it will be time to store our clubs for the winter and begin the cold months when the closest we come to our beloved game may be tinkering with our stance in front of a full-length mirror. Happily, there's a book like The Match to help ease us through the looming darkness.

Mark Frost's third venture into the world of golf history explores an until-now obscure match played on January 10, 1956, at Cypress Point Golf Club, an incomparable gem of a course on California's Monterey Peninsula. The product of a bet between Eddie Lowery, a wealthy San Francisco auto dealer, and George Coleman, an oil tycoon, the match pitted professional golf legends Byron Nelson and Ben Hogan against amateurs Ken Venturi and Harvie Ward. For 18 holes of four-ball competition on a flawless day, the amateurs matched the pros shot for shot, each competitor displaying consummate skill in a contest in which, for the players, ultimately nothing more was at stake than pride.

As compelling as is Frost's account of soaring drives and curling birdie putts, perhaps the most rewarding aspect of The Match is his exploration of the lives of the players who battled at Cypress Point that day. The biographical sketches of Nelson and Hogan will be familiar to even casual students of golf history, but Frost displays keen insight and empathy in recounting the lesser-known stories of Venturi and in particular Ward, a man who would struggle for most of his life to maintain the game's tradition of the gentleman amateur.

While the brilliant golf Frost describes more than justifies this work, its subtitle's claim that the game of golf "changed forever" that day is unabashed hyperbole. He suggests the match somehow signaled the death knell of amateur golf in the tradition of the legendary Bobby Jones and marked the moment the professional game began its ascendancy, but he offers little evidence to support that argument. On the contrary, the key elements of that evolution, namely TV and the nation's rising prosperity, already were well established and were unaffected by the result of this single golf game.

One disappointing feature of this otherwise fine book is the absence of any pictures of Cypress Point. To remedy that omission, here's a link to some wonderful photographs of that spectacular course: golfclubatlas.com/cypresspoint000161.html.  

The Match spins a revealing tale whose appeal is obvious to golf fans.  On a more subtle level, it can be read with pleasure by anyone looking for a deeper understanding of the way in which the striving for athletic greatness illumines character.--Harvey Freedenberg