"I have a theory. It's very sophisticated. My theory is that it sold well because lots of people bought it."--Andrew Franklin, whose Profile Books in the U.K. first published Lynne Truss's Eats, Shoots and Leaves, in yesterday's New York Times Magazine on why the book became a bestseller.

Concerns that Harry Potter movies might lose audiences because of a PG rating or an aging base of fans were dispelled, as it were, over the weekend. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire grossed $101.4 million, the highest opening weekend for a Potter movie yet and one of the top five for any movie. Even Warner Bros. was pleasantly surprised.

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Martha Stewart fans began lining up at 3 a.m. on Saturday for her noon appearance at a B&N in Minneapolis, Minn., according to the Pioneer Press. After someone on line recommended Terrace Horticultural Books, which specializes in used and antiquarian gardening books, Stewart headed over to the store and bought 20 books on Japanese and Chinese gardening, garden ornaments and landscape architecture in Europe.

Kent Petterson, who owns the store with his wife, Abby L. Farr-Petterson, told the paper: "She was very kind and just the kind of person I like to have in the store. A good buyer, too. She really cleaned up."

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After eight years of holding sales at a downtown mall, Friends of the Bristol Public Library in Bristol, Conn., prepares to move into new space in the expanded library, the Bristol Press reported. The group wants to have a little more time before it checks out of the mall.

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Speaking of friends of library organizations, since opening a bookstore in 1991, the Friends of the San Antonio Public Library in Texas has donated more than $450,000 to the library from its Book Cellar. San Antonio Express-News columnist Paula Allen provides a history of the store and organization.

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Nancy Greene and Patricia McElreath are giving up Greene's Books and Beans, the coffeehouse and bookstore in New London, Conn., that they founded nine years ago, the New London Day reported. In January, Greene's daughter, Kate Greene, will take over the shop, which has benefited from an improving neighborhood. In the early days, according to the story, some people thought Greene's Books and Beans was a brothel or a front for drug sales.

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Under the headline "Books Are the Focus of This 25 Year Old," the Portsmouth Herald profiles Kristin Hays, who works at a B&N in Newington, N.H., where she is "a lead bookseller in charge of the audio, humor, games and travel sections of the store. She's also the employee who heads up the 'staff recommends' shelf."

Hays, who wants to be a professional photographer, has recommended the photo-essay book Tree: A New Vision of the American Forest by James Balog and Tooth and Claw, a collection of short stories by T. C. Boyle.

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Speaking of young booksellers, check out The Written Nerd: Confessions of an Independent Bookseller and Unrepentant Book Nerd, a new blog written by Jessica Stockton, manager of Labyrinth Books in New York City.

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The Anchorage Daily News offers a roundup of stores in the suburban Valley near Anchorage, Alaska, including Alaskana Books, Fireside Books, Annabel's and Shalom Books.

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A sudoku seminar at a B&N in Fort Myers, Fla., drew more than 200 people, according to the News-Press. One participant called sudoku "like a math class, but more fun than studying math in a classroom."

Online retailers are looking forward to the long weekend and especially a week from today, which is becoming known as "black Monday" or "cyber Monday." Many online Thanksgiving weekend specials last through Monday, according to today's Wall Street Journal.

Jupiter Research predicts online sales this holiday season will rise 18% to $26 billion. The National Retail Federation says total holiday sales were rise 5% to $435.3 billion.

Incidentally Monday is usually the biggest sales day of the week online, and lunchtime is the busiest time of the day for online orders. Apparently at least some employees hold off until their own time to shop online. . .

Karibu Books, the African-American bookseller with five stores in the metropolitan Washington, D.C., area, is moving into new territory this week. Karibu's new Baltimore, Md., store opens on Wednesday in the Security Square Mall. A grand opening celebration is scheduled for Saturday, December 10.

The company has four bookstores in Prince George's County, next to the District of Columbia in Maryland, an area that Karibu calls "the wealthiest African American community in the country." Karibu also has a large kiosk in Pentagon City in Arlington, Va., which will have a storefront location next spring.

Karibu (meaning "welcome" in Swahili) has categories such as Brothers and Sisters, Race & Culture, Street Life and more and an extensive author appearance program. The store began in 1993 on the streets of Washington and the Howard University and Bowie University campuses.

The bookseller uses the motto "books by and about African people" and says its philosophy is "to empower and educate people by providing complete access to books by and about people of African descent." It said too, that African Americans are reading "at a larger rate than ever. Karibu believes if there is 'access,' people will buy."

We hope to have more on Karibu in the near future.

For the second year in a row, the New Mexico Book Coop has organized a store for the holiday season that features books by local authors and publishers. The New Mexico Books & More store, located again in the Cottonwood Mall in Albuquerque, opened yesterday and already offers between 400-500 titles, "about 25% more" than last year, according to organizers. Some 225 authors and publishers are involved, "up about 15%." The store will be open until the last day of December.

Last year the store sold more than 3,400 books in 40 days and donated nearly $7,500 to regional literacy programs from profits. A year ago publishers had to volunteer time, but this year they don't need to. In fact, they are encouraged to be present as "meeter-greeters" but not to hang out behind the counter.

The store already has an extensive signing schedule, particularly on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays. For more information, go to the organization's Web site.

Net sales at Books-A-Million in the third quarter ended October 29 rose 3.4% to $107.6 million and the net loss was $873,000 compared to a net loss of $1.2 million in the same period in 2004. While the company had said that hurricanes had dampened sales at its stores throughout the South, earnings in the quarter were helped by $770,000 in gains from insurance recoveries for three stores permanently damaged by hurricanes during the past fiscal year.

Noting that BAM's results exceeded its previous predictions, president and CEO Sandra B. Cochran said that the company is "working hard to prepare for the holiday season, with a solid lineup of new books, including several strong movie tie-ins that we believe will create excitement in our stores." The company is raising its estimates of net income for the fiscal year by several cents a share--the estimates include the insurance gain.

During the quarter, sales at stores open a year rose 0.6%. For the first nine months of the fiscal year, comp-stores sales were up 2.9%.

BAM is paying a dividend of five cents a share on December 13.

The business section of today's New York Times traces the "soul searching" of one of the participants in Google's Book Search Library Project (last week Google Print morphed into Google Book Search): Sidney Verbar, director of the Harvard University Library, one of the five libraries whose works Google has begun to scan.

As an author and former chairman of Harvard University Press, Verba understands the concerns of publishers and authors, he told the paper. But as a librarian and teacher, he said, he believes that the Google idea "will meet the needs of students who gravitate to the Internet . . . and will aid the library's broader mission to preserve academic material and make it accessible to the world." Students, who continue to be drawn to Google for research, will be taken to the library, he insisted.

So far, Google has scanned just 40,000 Harvard books, largely in the public domain. One factor in Harvard joining the Google project: the high cost of digitizing its own collection. Google is reportedly spending more than $200 million on Google Book Search and has built its own scanners. Participating libraries receive a digital copy of each scanned book.

Just in time for Thanksgiving, two movies based more or less on books are being released this Wednesday, November 23:

In The Ice Harvest, John Cusak and Billy Bob Thornton steal from mob boss Randy Quaid. Directed by Harold Ramis (Groundhog Day), with a script by Richard Russo and Robert Benton, it is based on the novel by Scott Phillips (Ballantine, $12, 0345440196).

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Syriana, directed by Stephen Gaghan (Traffic) and starring George Clooney, Matt Damon and Amanda Peet, is based on Robert Baer's memoir, See No Evil: The True Story of a Ground Soldier in the CIA's War on Terrorism (Three Rivers Press, $14, 140004684X).

Forever Odd by Dean Koontz (Bantam, $27, 0553804162), brings back Odd Thomas, a character whom readers have wanted to know more about. The Koontz work goes on sale on Tuesday, November 29.

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Get a Life by Nadine Gordimer (FSG, $21, 0374161704) is the story of an ecologist in South Africa who's diagnosed with thyroid cancer and becomes radioactive--in more ways than one. This life starts on November 29.

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Reasons I Won't Be Coming by Elliot Perlman (Penguin, $24.95, 1573223212), a collection of nine stories, goes on sale on Thursday, December 1.

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New Woman by Jon Hassler (Penguin, $23.95, 067003455X), another novel set in Staggerford, also goes on sale on December 1.

Today the Diane Rehm Show admits Jerome Karabel, author of The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Princeton, and Yale (Houghton Mifflin, $28, 0618574581).

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Today on WAMU's Leonard Lopate Show:

• Joan Nathan, author of The New American Cooking (Knopf, $35, 1400040345), and chef Michael Lomonaco, author of Nightly Specials: 125 Recipes for Spontaneous, Creative Cooking at Home (Morrow, $34.95, 0060555629), offer tips for the upcoming Thanksgiving meal.
• George Johnson, author of Miss Leavitt's Stars: The Untold Story of the Forgotten Woman Who Discovered How to Measure the Universe (Norton, $22.95, 0393051285).
• Caryl Phillips, who talks about his novel about black vaudeville performer Burt Williams called Dancing in the Dark (Knopf, $23.95, 1400043964).
• Karen Siff Exkorn, author of The Autism Sourcebook: Everything You Need to Know about Diagnosis, Treatment, Coping, and Healing (ReganBooks, $27.95, 0060799889).

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Tonight on the Tonight Show with Jay Leno: former President Jimmy Carter, whose latest book is Our Endangered Values: America's Moral Crisis (S&S, $25, 0743284577).

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Tomorrow morning the Today Show talks turkey with Food Network host Rachael Ray, author of the 30 Minute Meals series.

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Tomorrow on WNYC's Leonard Lopate Show:

• On the anniversary of the President Kennedy's assassination, Gretchen Rubin, author of Forty Ways to Look at JFK (Ballantine, $24.95, 0345450493).
• Psychoanalyst Adam Phillips, author of Going Sane: Maps of Happiness (Fourth Estate, $24.95, 0007155395).