Lame Duck Books,
Cambridge, Mass., will vacate the basement shop it has occupied for the
past five years, but owner John Wronoski hopes the bookshop will
survive elsewhere under new ownership. The Boston Globe
reported that Wronoski "is hosting a sale (with many books discounted
by 50%) until September when he'll move the remaining books from 12
Arrow St. into the basement of his Pierre Menard Gallery next door.
Running two businesses is too much, he has decided."
Wronoski told the Globe
he would rather sell the bookshop than close it: "To that end, he is
offering his free labor for a year to ease the transition and get a new
owner up to speed."
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The Next Chapter Book Store, which
opened last week in Gainesville, Ga., "will be run by young adult men
with disabilities who live together in a house sponsored by a nonprofit
called Our Neighbor," AccessNorthGa.com.
"What
we try to do is not only just provide the opportunity for independent
living and that kind of freedom and socialization but also the ability
to be a part of society and earn a wage," said Our Neighbor executive
director Marty White.
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Tina-Marie and Bill Dearhamer, the new owners of Bookstore and More, Payson, Ariz., told the Payson Roundup
"they have big plans to one day expand the store, at 1001 S. Beeline
Highway, Suite F, into an adjacent space, turning the now bookstore into
much more, including a tea room and gift center."
"When you walk
up, there will be a sign pointing this way to the 'bookstore' and
another pointing this way to 'more,' " said Tina-Marie regarding their
vision for the bookshop's future.
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Dorchester Publishing, which publishes 25-30 mass market paperbacks a month, two-thirds of which are romances, will no longer issue print books and instead release titles only as e-books and for POD, the Wall Street Journal reported.
The company attributed the move to a drop in sales last year of 25%, "in part because of declining orders from some of its key retail accounts, including Wal-Mart Stores."
The paper noted: "Romance fans in particular have already embraced e-books, in part because customers can read them in public without having to display the covers. In addition, type size is easily adjusted on e-readers, making titles published in the mass paperback format easier to reader for older customers."
Random House spokesperson Stuart Applebaum told the Journal that the house considers mass market paperbacks "still a viable, popular, lower-priced alternative to the other reading formats. It also has a committed readership. Will that commitment be forever in a transformative marketplace? We'll have to wait and see."
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Bookstore
cats "serve as wonderfully calming (if sometimes haughty) hosts: Have a
seat, take it easy, get lost in a book. A bookstore cat is a shop's
mascot and keeper, equally adept at charming customers and, when the
lights go out, chasing away rodents."
Celebrating some of Northern California's finest bookstore cats, the San Francisco Chronicle
featured profiles of "these furry souls--hopefully not an endangered
species!--as more and more readers get their books delivered in
shrink-wrapped packages from out-of-state corporate behemoths, or
transmitted, in blips, to hand-held devices no cat would ever want to
cuddle up to."
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Vic Zoschak, owner of Tavistock Books, Alameda, Calif., has acquired an original John Steinbeck manuscript. The Island reported that Zoschak "bought the manuscript for 'His Father,' a short story published in the September 1949 issue of Reader's Digest,
from another bookseller who obtained it from a private collection. Most
of Steinbeck's manuscripts are in institutions, Zoschak said."
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Capital New York deconstructed the bestseller list at Manhattan's St. Mark's Bookshop:
"Summer reading means one thing at Barnes & Noble, and something
else at a place like this. No doubt lots of Maine summer renters are
stopping by to pump up the Borges greatest-hits collection, Everything and Nothing.
Because who would be caught dead reading it at Think! Coffee? Sorry,
what we mean is, it would be tantamount to admitting you hadn't already
read everything in there. Better to hide it inside a copy of the Régis
Debray, especially if the cute guy from the textuality seminar is
sitting nearby."
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Cool idea of the day: this coming Saturday, August 14, on what would have been Charles Bukowski's 90th birthday, Skylight Books, Los Angeles, Calif., in collaboration with the Goethe-Institut Los Angeles, is throwing an evening party for the poet, novelist and "celebrated East Hollywood resident." Guests at the evening party include Sue Hodson, manuscript curator of the Bukowski Archive at the Huntington Library, and poet Gerald Locklin. There will be readings, screenings, giveaways, food and "of course drink."
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Here's a writers conference we think we need to cover: Books & Books and Florida International University's MFA program in creative writing are sponsoring an international writers conference in Grand Cayman, October 21-23. The program includes nine daily classes in all genres, afternoon editing and publishing symposia and evening readings. Besides a range of writers, faculty include Daniel Halpern of Ecco and literary agent Marly Rusoff. Co-directors are Mitchell Kaplan of Books & Books and Les Standiford, director of FIU's MFA in Creative Writing.
For more information and to register call 305-919-5857 or e-mail campbet@fiu.edu.
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Book trailer of the day: The Wake of Forgiveness by Bruce Machart (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), which appears in October.
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The best comment about Google's estimate that there are nearly 130 million titles in existence comes from Russ Harvey of the Ecology Center Store, Berkeley, Calif.: "My wife will swear that most of those can be found in boxes in our garage."
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On
Friday, during a panel at the
Techonomy conference,
Nicholas Negroponte asserted that the physical book is dead. As
TechCrunch explained, "By 'dead,' he of course
doesn't mean completely dead. But he means that digital books are going to
replace physical books as the dominant form. His argument is related to his
One Laptop per Child Foundation.
On those laptops, he can include hundreds or thousands of books. If you think
about trying to ship that many physical books to the emerging world for each child,
it would be impossible, he reasons.... '
It's happening. It's not happening
in 10 years. It's happening in 5 years,' " Negroponte said.
At CrunchGear,
Devin Coldewey has some thoughts on such
futurist predictions: "The death of
printed books... is, of course, merely an ongoing process--a given. What is in
the air is the timing. Negroponte says not ten years, but five. Either he has
more faith than I do in consumers' plasticity, or he's talking about something
completely different." He points out some factors that put Negroponte's time
frame in doubt. Citing the most recent "Consumer
Attitudes Toward E-Book Reading" report, Coldewey believes that while consumers
are adopting e-reading, the upfront costs are still an obstacle. "And it's difficult to overestimate the
inertia of existing technologies--especially ones that have been around for a
good three millennia.
Coldewey adds, "People simply will continue to buy books. Not because
of any inadequacy in e-book technology (relevant now, but not so much in a few
years) but because books have a few fundamental advantages over e-books that
are unlikely to change. I don't think it's sentimental to say that the
security, tactility, beauty, and permanence of printed books will remain
significant selling points--and not just for five years, but for ten, twenty,
thirty. Unlike music and movies, books are imperfectly recreated in digital form.
I wouldn't make any bet that involves people no longer enjoying things."
And so Coldewey makes his own prognostication: "I predict a flip-flop,
though: when cheap e-readers become common possessions, books will cease to be
inferior alternatives and start being luxury items."
It's been a busy season
for Bay Area booksellers, especially Paul Yamazaki of San Francisco's City Lights! Last week, Chelsea Green sales rep Michael Weaver (r.) hosted a
doubleheader frontlist sales appointment with Melinda Powers of Capitola
Book Cafe, Capitola, Calif., and Yamazaki at a San Jose Giants game.
The week before, Yamazaki and Kevin Ryan and Kevin Hunsanger of Green
Apple Books, San Francisco, talked literature--so they say--at a San Francisco Giants
game, then plotted their next move at Jack London's cabin.
The Diary of a
Wimpy Kid: The Ugly Truth will be released November 9 with a first
printing of five million. In September, Amulet Books will publish Diary of a
Wimpy Kid Box of Books, collecting the initial four books
in the series.
In case any readers have been living in a cave without Internet access, here's our official announcement about one of the big movies of the summer:
In dishonor of the movie, there's Drink, Play, F@#k: One Man's Search for Anything Across Ireland, Vegas, and Thailand by Andrew Gottlieb (Black Cat/Grove/Atlantic), a parody of Eat, Pray, Love from the point of view of a jilted husband. The book has been optioned by Warner Bros. as Dumped, starring Steve Carell.
darling--HBO has sent the first six episodes to the media--is executive-produced by Martin Scorsese, who directed the pilot."
Opening
lines of a book we want to read: 
Julie Jacobs's story begins with the death of her great-aunt Rose--or maybe it began more than 600 years ago in medieval Siena. In the present day, Julie is directing a dress rehearsal of Romeo and Juliet at a Shakespeare summer camp, when Umberto, Rose's butler, arrives to tell her that her beloved great-aunt has died. At that moment, Julie wishes she had the power to "flip reality upside down like an hourglass, and that life was not a finite affair, but rather a perpetually recurring passage through a little hole in time." Little does she know how her wish will be fulfilled. 