Bookseller.com reported that British online retailer the Book Depository "has begun testing a new North America specific site ahead of its launch next month. The internet retailer is hoping to have specific pricing and content for its American customers on a bookdepository.com site. The move is part of the retailer's plans to expand overseas."
"The launch of a tailored .com website is a crucial step towards developing our brand internationally, and offering locally appropriate content and pricing," said the company’s Kieron Smith. "We already have fantastic customers in North America, and this site will offer them an even greater selection of titles plus more competitive prices backed up with our free delivery offer."
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Cool idea of the day: "It's all about the stories, and how we can connect kids to those stories," Collette Morgan of Wild Rumpus bookstore, Minneapolis, Minn., told the Star Tribune. "When we make that connection, it's just the most gratifying thing." This time the connection was being made on multiple levels, since Morgan was talking about the first of a planned three-event series called "Jammies-in-the-Trolley."
The Star Tribune described the scene this way: "As local children's author Phyllis Root read from her volumes Toot, Toot, Zoom and Flip, Flap, Fly last week, 60 children under age 9 clustered around on the floor to the clang and rattle of the Como-Harriet Streetcar in Minneapolis. The PJ-clad audience, 3 feet tall on average, was rapt and sated on the milk and cookies that had been served on the trolley platform. The sold-out rolling bedtime party was the brainchild of the streetcar line and the Wild Rumpus, the independently owned, animal-predisposed, endearingly daft children's bookstore in Minneapolis' Linden Hills neighborhood."
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Annie Philbrick and Jane Hannon, co-owners of Bank Square Books, Mystic, Conn., were lauded by the Day for their support of local authors as well as "local farmers, the environment, and healthy eating" in an article on next week's "Shop Locally, Eat Seasonally" event, which the bookshop will host "to inform the public about the wide and rich array of homegrown food and homemade products available in southeastern Connecticut."
"Bank Square Books is working towards making ourselves a community hub in addition to selling books," said Philbrick. "Our Shop Locally and Eat Seasonally event exemplifies our commitment to educating our community about what products are available from our local farms and where and how one can purchase these products."
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"Amanda Palmer was fresh off a sold-out show for 700 at the Highline Ballroom in Chelsea. And author Neil Gaiman, his best-selling novella Coraline having been adapted into a feature film, could have sold just as many tickets on his own. The duo, a sort of a gothic Vaudeville act, boasts thousands of alternative music and lit fans, but June 3 they debuted unreleased stories and songs from a cramped, makeshift stage to a crowd of just 250."
That is how New York Press reported on a recent event hosted by Housing Works Bookstore Cafe, New York, N.Y., calling it "the edgy type of a collaboration that, once upon a time, would have taken place at some artsy venue. Now those spaces are closing and Housing Works Bookstore Cafe, the non-profit on Crosby Street run by AIDS charity Housing Works, Inc., is one of the few Manhattan venues left that has a will or way to pick up the slack."
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In a profile by the Seward Phoenix LOG of Cover to Cover bookstore, Seward, Alaska, the shop's new location was called "larger, brighter and right in the hub of the tourist foot traffic. . . . It's also warm and user-friendly, especially for those who love books."
"I call it Seward's Rodeo Drive," said owner Vanita Shafer, who added that she likes "the idea of people coming into the store and curling up and reading. There's even a chair close to me in case they want to talk about books or Alaska."
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Beacon Press will publish four books by the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. that have been unavailable for almost two decades. The BBC reported that the publisher and King's son, Dexter, agreed to a deal he called a "historic partnership."
The books being republished are Stride Toward Freedom, Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?, Trumpet of Conscience and Strength to Love. In addition, "Lectures by the late activist will be compiled into new editions with introductions by leading scholars," according to the BBC, which observed that the books will be released on January 18, 2010, "three days from what would have been King's 80th birthday."
In a statement, Dexter King said, "Beacon Press will be a dedicated public outlet for his work and will help bring his urgently needed teachings of non-violence and human dignity, and his dream of freedom and equality to a new global audience."
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Chris Anderson, bestselling author and Wired magazine's editor-in-chief, said he was "'feeling terrible' about including unattributed passages from Wikipedia and other sources in his new book, Free," the Guardian reported, adding that in an e-mail, Anderson explained "the problem came about when the decision was taken not to run footnotes in the book 'at the 11th hour' after he and his publisher 'couldn't agree on a footnote policy for Wikipedia entries, which are ever-changing, and [he] resisted timestamps.' For source material without an individual author to credit, he went through the book doing write-throughs. 'Obviously in my rush I did a better job of that in some places than in others, and I feel terrible about the bits where I missed passages,' he said."
Hyperion will publish the book in July, and "notes will now be posted online." In a statement, Hyperion said, "We are completely satisfied with Chris Anderson's response. It was an unfortunate mistake."
On the Virginia Quarterly Review's blog earlier this week, Waldo Jaquith took Anderson to task regarding the issue by displaying highlighted passages and writing, "In the course of reading Chris Anderson's new book . . . for a review in an upcoming issue of VQR, we have discovered almost a dozen passages that are reproduced nearly verbatim from uncredited sources. These instances were identified after a cursory investigation, after I checked by hand several dozen suspect passages in the whole of the 274-page book. This was not an exhaustive search, since I don't have access to an electronic version of the book. Most of the passages, but not all, come from Wikipedia."
Anderson offered further clarification on his Long Tail blog, admitting, "This is entirely my own screwup, and will be corrected in the ebook and digital forms before publication (and in the notes, which will be posted online at the same time the hardcover is released), but I did want to explain a bit more how it happened and what we're doing about it."
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Public radio offered a trio of summer reading lists.
On VPR's Vermont Edition, Jane Lindholm discussed great summer reads with Linda Ramsdell of the Galaxy Bookshop, Hardwick; Stan Hynds of the Northshire Bookstore, Manchester Center; and Beth Wright of the Fletcher Free Library, Burlington.
On NPR's Here and Now, host Robin Young explored "Summer Reading for 'Tweens" with Sherry Eskin, children's librarian at the Honan-Allston branch of the Boston Public Library. Yesterday's show focused on younger 'tweens, and today will look at books for slightly older members of the age group.
And on NPR's Tell Me More, Sari Feldman of the Public Library Association and parenting contributor Jolene Ivey shared "books that should be on every child's reading list this summer. The women also discuss how to engage children in summer reading activities at local libraries."
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Lexicographers, take note. The Guardian's books blog reported that the Oxford English Dictionary's first prefaces are now available online and "this LanguageHat post is itself an able introduction."
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What do Henri Pierre Roche's Jules et Jim, Michael Cunningham's A Home at the End of the World and the Book of Genesis have in common? They appear together in the Guardian, where novelist Ewan Morrison "snuggles up with his pick of the best literary threesomes" for his "Top 10 literary ménages à trois" list.
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If you think Twitter's 140-character restriction hampers creativity, consider the almost infinite limitations and possibilities of a nine-word story by San Francisco conceptual artist Jonathan Keats "that should take approximately a thousand years to read. In celebration of the infinity issue of Opium magazine, Keats used a double layer of black ink with an incrementally screened overlay masking the words. Over the next thousand years, exposure to ultraviolet light will gradually reveal the story, one word per century," according to the New Yorker's Book Bench blog.
"Like most people, I live my life in a rush, consuming media on the run," Keats observed in Wired. "That may be fine for reading the average blog but something essential is lost when ingesting words is all about speed. My thousand-year story is an antidote. Given the printing process I've used, you can't take in more than one word per century. That's even slower than reading Proust."
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Effective July 6, Mary Faria is joining Simon & Schuster as director of mass merchandise/DSRM, children's sales. She has held sales positions at HarperCollins, Abrams and Little, Brown and is currently moving back to New York City after living in Florida for the last four years.
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Although it is not necessary to have read A Wrinkle in Time to appreciate Rebecca Stead's (First Light) latest novel, it is 12-year-old narrator Mira's favorite book (she "had probably read it a hundred times, which was why it looked so beat-up"). Mira is highly likable, trustworthy and funny, and chances are, if readers glom onto her, they will want to read or reread A Wrinkle in Time, too (this reader did). Mira never knew her father, but she's very content with her mother, her mother's boyfriend, Richard, and her life on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. The heroine likes being a "latchkey" child because, as Richard says, "Keys are power. Some of us have to come knocking" (Richard does not possess a key to their apartment). Everything is dandy, until the day that Mira's lifelong friend Sal randomly gets punched in the stomach. At least, that's what Mira thinks.