Notes: More Aid for Haiti; Amazon Ups E-Royalty Ante
In a particularly creative and generous move to help relief efforts in Haiti, this Saturday and Sunday, Greenlight Bookstore, Brooklyn, N.Y., is donating 10% of all sales before tax to the American Red Cross. In addition, co-owner Rebecca Fitting will match the contribution of any customer who will donate an amount equal to the store's donation--the 10% of the weekend's sales.
In an e-mail, Fitting explained: "At Greenlight we have been very fortunate in the short life of our new bookstore and we are mindful of it every day. We are thankful for our store's good fortune, and for our own personal fortune for living in a part of the world that has an infrastructure and amenities that are sorely lacking elsewhere. The past week's news about Haiti is an especially tragic event and it makes us want to give back in return."
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Effective June 30, Amazon.com is offering authors and publishers who use the Kindle Digital Text Platform another royalty option that will give them 70% of list price for each book, net of delivery costs, Reuters reported. The company will continue to offer its standard royalty option, which on average is about half the new option's rate. Delivery costs will be set at 15 cents per MB of file size.
Amazon is requiring participants to set prices on titles between $2.99 and $9.99 and at least 20% below the lowest list price for the physical book. The e-books need to available for sale in all territories in which the author or publisher has rights. In addition, the company said, "Books must be offered at or below price parity with competition, including physical book prices. Amazon will provide tools to automate that process, and the 70 percent royalty will be calculated off the sales price."
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Got cabin fever? VPR's Vermont Edition advised: "It's the time of year for kicking off your boots in front of a crackling fire and disappearing into a good book." Claire Benedict of Bear Pond Books, Montpelier, and Penny McConnel of the Norwich Bookstore, Norwich, talked about "what's flying off the shelves this winter.
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The Pueblo, Colo., Chieftain profiled the Bookery bookshop and owner Faith Bent, who bought the business in 2005, "and purchasing it is a decision Bent said she's never regretted."
"I was coming in to buy a book and there was a little note on the door that it was for sale," she recalled. "I asked how much and it was exactly the amount that was in my investment account. I thought about it for two weeks and ran the figures, then bought it.... The store's been here forever; people know where it is. [Mesa] Junction is a destination. People come here to shop, to eat in the restaurants, to go to the bakery. It's easy to get here from any place in town. All streets seem to lead here."
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Photographer Peter Ross told the Morning News (via Boing Boing) how he came to shoot "William Burroughs's Stuff," noting that the author "lived for many years in the former locker room of an 1880s YMCA, on the Bowery in New York City. The almost windowless space was known as the Bunker. When he died in 1997, his friend and mine, John Giorno, kept the apartment intact, with many of Burroughs's possessions sitting as they were."
Here's an early look at the cover for Fallout, the final chapter in Ellen Hopkins's bestselling
Crank trilogy, which will be published on September 14 (S&S/McElderry,
$18.99, 9781416950097/1416950095). It moves from the story of Kristina Snow, who
became addicted to crystal meth (aka crank, "the monster") in
Crank, and whose story continued with Glass, to the next generation. Hunter,
Autumn and Summer--three of Kristina Snow's five children--live with different
guardians and go by different last names. What they share is an
absent mother whose real love for the past 20 years has been crank. The novel
shifts among their three narratives and incorporates news items that also shed
light on their family history--one riddled with the ravages of addiction.
City Lights has not done a
tie-in title for the film, but 
Andrea Busfield is a former journalist. In her previous life, she worked for the Sun and the News of the World before leaving London for Kabul. After two-and-a-half years living in Afghanistan she penned her debut novel, Born Under a Million Shadows (Holt Paperbacks; February 2, 2010). She lives in Austria with her boyfriend and her dog--both of which she acquired in Kabul.
This deceptively simple picture book from the husband-and-wife team behind Duke Ellington: The Piano Prince and His Orchestra explores the idea of peaceful protest that brings results. What began as a silent statement by four African-American college students at a segregated Woolworth's lunch counter in Greensboro, N.C., on February 1, 1960, blossomed into a "sit-in" that spread to four more states in the South. Andrea Davis Pinkney crafts a text as spare as poetry and circles back to a refrain as simple and clear as the four friends' request: "They didn't need menus. Their order was simple. A doughnut and coffee with cream on the side." But no one will take their order because of the color of their skin. Brian Pinkney portrays the four friends in jackets and button-down shirts; two wear ties. David, Joseph, Franklin and Ezell sit silently while everyone else gets served. An African-American waitress keeps her back to the four young men as she serves a half-dozen white people at the other end of the drugstore counter.