"War broke out over control of Barnes & Noble Thursday," the New York Times reported, as investor Ron Burkle nominated three directors to B&N's board after the two sides failed to reach a settlement and a Delaware judge ruled against him in his "poison pill" lawsuit.
Burkle's lawsuit was
rejected by Judge Vice Chancellor Leo E. Strine of Delaware's Court of
Chancery, who ruled that B&N "had good reason to believe Burkle was
preparing a takeover bid for the company, having accumulated a nearly
20% stake, and that he would not offer other shareholders a sufficient
premium," Reuters reported.
"The
defendants have shown that their adoption and use of the rights plan
was a good faith, reasonable response to a threat to Barnes & Noble
and its stockholders," Strine wrote in his opinion.
Prior
to the ruling, B&N had issued a terse statement
yesterday regarding media reports of a possible settlement with Burkle's Yucaipa Companies (Shelf Awareness, August 12, 2010): "Barnes & Noble and Yucaipa were unable to conclude an agreement on mutually acceptable terms."
The Times noted that B&N spokesperson Mary Ellen Keating said the company was "pleased that the Delaware Chancery Court today affirmed the decision of the Barnes & Noble board of directors to adopt a shareholder rights plan to protect shareholders against Yucaipa’s efforts to gain control of the company without paying a control premium."
Burkle countered in his statement that a proxy fight was "the only way to remove what he saw as Mr. Riggio’s entrenchment atop the company," the Times wrote. "We believe the incumbent board is rife with business and personal conflicts and historically has been a rubber stamp for the Riggio family’s interests,” he said.
In a filing with the SEC, Burkle nominated himself, Stephen F. Bollenbach, chairman of KB Homes and a former chief executive of Hilton Hotels; and Michael S. McQuary, CEO of Wheego Electric Cars to the B&N board. He is also "asking shareholders to let him buy up to a 30% stake in the company without board approval," according to the Times.
DailyFinance observed that a "topsy-turvy Thursday cemented legal matters firmly in B&N's corner, quashed the possibility of compromise, and caused Burkle to set up his long-planned proxy contest. That sets the stage for a much-anticipated and likely very ugly battle between the two camps that harkens back to a very old, and very personal grudge between Burkle and founder and chairman Leonard Riggio."
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Legacy Books, Plano, Tex., which is scheduled to close tomorrow (Shelf Awareness, August 5, 2010), will be "morphing" this November into A Real Bookstore in Fairview. The Dallas Morning News called the location, between J.C. 
Penney and Macy's in the Village at Fairview, "Teri Tanner's vision for a post-recession bookstore."
Tanner, the managing partner at Legacy and a former Borders executive, will be the sole owner of A Real Bookstore, a shop she has created for the new economy. "Legacy Books is a beautiful store, but the majority of its customers came from outside of its five-mile radius, from North and East Dallas, Richardson, Allen and McKinney," she said. "A Real Bookstore will be designed and tailored also for the surrounding demographic."
Tanner chose the name A Real Bookstore because she believes it stands for several key concepts: "reading, awareness, experience, education, literacy and learning."
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The consignment sales wave continues to build among independent bookstores nationwide. Bookselling This Week reported that Boulder Book Store, Boulder, Colo., and Water Street Bookstore, Exeter, N.H., have established consignment programs with publisher Chelsea Green along the lines of the agreement reached last spring by Northshire Bookstore, Manchester Center, Vt., with the publisher earlier this spring (Shelf Awareness, April 23, 2010).
Water Street's owner Dan Chartrand said that when he read about Northshire's deal, "I called my rep and said, 'I want one of those.' "
Arsen Kashkashian, Boulder Book Store's buyer, said, "I think this model has potential with narrower, small to mid-size publishers." BTW also noted that Boulder also has a consignment deal with Sounds True: "Kashkashian reduced the store’s metaphysics section from four bookcases to two and turned the remaining two bookcases into a Sounds True display.... Despite slightly lower sales from the smaller metaphysics section, Kashkashian reported that sales from the four cases encompassing both metaphysics and Sounds True are up 70%."
Three of Mitchell Kaplan's Books & Books stores in South Florida have been selling Assouline books on consignment for more than a year, and with sales increasing "80-fold," he said, "Consignment is the way to go." More recently, he started selling TeNeus books on consignment.
For Northshire general manager Chris Morrow, this is only the beginning: "I am having discussions with two other publishers to implement consignment deals. I hope to have half a dozen partnerships worked out by next year. It is time for the industry as a whole to give consignment a fresh look."
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BTW profiled the BookMark, Atlantic Beach, Fla., which is celebrating its 20th anniversary by "getting a new, eco-friendly location 300 steps (exactly, owner Rona Brinlee counted four times) away from its old one."
BookMark will move next week and plans to reopen August 28. Brinlee said that the new storefront is "a green building with more usable space, more street parking, and better facilities for hosting author events. We’ll also have access to a studio next door on weekend nights to host large events. We’ll be closer to other retail stores, a coffee shop that’s just a few feet away, and a restaurant right next door. We’re actually even a little closer to the beach."
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Indie booksellers in the Portland, Ore., area reflected on the current business climate in the Portland Tribune.
"Our sales are down. But it is hard to distinguish what exactly is causing it," said Karin Anna, owner of Looking Glass Bookstore, Sellwood, citing the economy and e-books among likely suspects. "I think we will have to change. How to do it is the question."
"There are certainly fewer of us (local bookstores) than there used to be," Roberta Dyer, co-owner of Broadway Books in Northeast Portland observed. "Those of us who have weathered the storm so far have found support from the community and in our little niche in the neighborhood. We have a loyal customer base."
It's not just booksellers who must ponder the future of books. Lee Montgomery, executive editor at Tin House Books, said, "The tactile experience of reading a physical book cannot be replaced by a computer. A big musty hardcover from a bookstore is irreplaceable."
Tin House recently altered its submission policy to encourage writers to support their local indies. Until October 1, Tin House "will accept manuscripts from unrepresented aspiring writers--something it has not done before--if the writers attach a receipt for a book from a local bookstore," the Tribune wrote.
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Obituary note: Elaine Koster, a publisher and literary agent "who gave a
second chance to an obscure horror writer named Stephen King and took
on an unknown Khaled Hosseini and The Kite Runner," died Tuesday, the Associated Press reported. She was 69.
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The New York Times visited Two Buttons, a "store jam-packed with curios from Southeast Asia" that is owned by Eat, Pray, Love author Elizabeth Gilbert and her husband, José Nunes (aka the pseudonymous Felipe in the bestselling memoir-turned-movie). The website notes that Two Buttons is open Wednesday through Sunday, 11 a.m. to 5
p.m., "Except this coming Friday the 13th we will close at 2:30 p.m.... we are
all going to the movies."
"I don’t have the temperament of a writer; I have the temperament of a salesclerk," said Gilbert. "I like meeting and talking to people."
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Project Gutenberg founder Michael Hart's "grand plan is centered around one number: 1 billion.... His vision for a larger digital reading ecosystem includes all e-books, whether from his own organization or others or from for-profit ventures including Google's. There's the total pot of public-domain books, which Hart estimates is 25 million. If all the scanners rack up at least 10 million of those and then translate them into 100 languages, there you have a billion e-books," the Los Angeles Times reported.
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Book trailer of the day: You Were Wrong by Matthew Sharpe (Bloomsbury USA).
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In an article on the likelihood of print books becoming an endangered species, the Christian Science Monitor suggested this might not happen "as quickly as techno-enthusiasts imagine. After all, we’re still waiting for the paperless office to arrive, decades after it was forecast. (The typical office worker still consumes about 10,000 sheets of paper per year, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.)"
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For your weekend pleasure: Forget about proxy fights and economic downturns. Sporcle offers this bookish challenge: "Can you name the books below from the portion of their covers?"
Picture a ballroom full of 2,400 women (plus a few men) at New York City's Hilton
Hotel, who write about everything from parenting to politics, cooking to
fashion, social change to going green, and you have a lot of 
potential for
virtual thumbs up and thumbs down.
The BlogHer conference, held in Manhattan last weekend (August 6-7, 2010), has grown by 1,000 attendees in the space of a year, and its 100 sponsors are up 10% from 2009. That makes it even more impressive that the BlogHer organizers were able to be so responsive to the feedback of their conference-goers. Elisa Camahort, Jory Des Jardins and Lisa Stone, who founded BlogHer in 2005, introduced the conference by discussing changes they'd made to the conference format, in response to bloggers' feedback:
Social consciousness, an overriding theme at BlogHer, took shape in a number of ways. The green effort came through, from conference organizers encouraging attendees to study the conference program in a PDF format to giving everyone a reusable stainless steel water bottle). Proceeds from the art auction, curated by Kirtsy, will go to the Gulf Nature Conservancy to aid those affected by the oil spill.
The first BlogHer conference attracted just under 400 attendees. By its second year, 2006, it had doubled and expanded to two days. Registration opened last Friday for the 2011 BlogHer conference, August 6-5, at the San Diego Convention Center.--Jennifer M. Brown
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Today on Morning Joe: Tom Ajamie and Bruce Kelly, authors of Financial Serial Killers: Inside the World of Wall Street Money Hustlers, Swindlers, and Con Men (Skyhorse Publishing, $24.95, 9781616080310/1616080310).
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Today on Tavis Smiley: Anthony Bourdain, author of Medium Raw: A Bloody Valentine to the World of Food and the People Who Cook (Ecco, $26.99, 9780061718946/0061718947).
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This weekend on C-Span2: Book TV will re-broadcast the 2010 Fall Book Preview featuring Jenn Risko, publisher and co-founder of Shelf Awareness, on Saturday at 9:30 a.m. and Sunday at 4:15 p.m. and 10 p.m.
Mercedes Masohn has been cast to play Soledad Nye opposite Ben Whishaw as Webster Filmore Goodhue in the pilot of HBO's All Signs of Death, based on Charlie Huston's novel The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death. Deadline.com reported that Alan Ball "is executive producing and directing the pilot, which was written by Huston. Filming is slated to start filming in Los Angeles later this month."
In an interview with Entertainment Weekly's Shelf Life blog, Carl Hiassen, author most recently of Star Island, talked about two of his favorite book-to-film adaptations.
"The first one wasn't a movie, it was a miniseries, but I think Lonesome Dove was a tremendously faithful adaptation of Larry [McMurtry]'s novel," said Hiassen. "For fans of that novel, and God knows there are millions, I think they were immensely satisfied with what was done with that cinematically. The other one was a novel by John Gregory Dunne, but you have to help me out with this. It was a novel he did that was made into a movie with Robert Duvall, and I want to say True Confessions. I read that book and I was knocked out by it and I went to the movie with the usual trepidations, that it couldn't possibly live up to the novel, but it was pretty darn close. And I believe that John worked on that script, which would account for the quality of it. I remember seeing that, thinking, they can make a good movie out of a novel. It can be done."
Lynette Howell will co-produce On Green Dolphin Street, adapted from the novel by Sebastian Faulks. Variety reported that Howell "will produce the $20 million project through her outfit Silverwood Films, alongside Douglas Rae and Robert Bernstein of Ecosse Films. Howell's previous credits include Michelle Williams and Ryan Gosling starrer Blue Valentine and indie pic Half Nelson."
Zeitoun by Dave Eggers and Digging: The Afro-American Soul of American Classical Music by Amiri Baraka were among more than a dozen winners of this year's American Book Awards, "given for literary works that cover 'the entire spectrum of America's diverse literary community,' " the Associated Press reported (via USA Today). Other winners included Sesshu Foster's World Ball Notebook and Victor Lavelle's The Big Machine.
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Three finalists have been selected for the 2010 Thurber Prize for American Humor. The winner, who will receive $5,000 and a commemorative crystal plaque, will be named at a ceremony in New York City October 4. The shortlist includes:
Why Is My Mother Getting a Tattoo by Jancee Dunn (Villard): Thurber Prize judge Bruce Tracy called it "funny and warm and irresistibly irritating, like the best family get-togethers."
How I Became a Famous Novelist by Steve Hely (Black Cat): Judge Sloane Crosley called Hely "a magnificent satirist, a real storyteller, and a creator of a narrator who is both charmingly familiar and original. [Hely] has such enviable reserves of humor and made me laugh out loud with humiliation, hope and shame."
Mennonite in a Little Black Dress: A Memoir of Going Home by Rhoda Janzen (Holt): Judge Laurie Notaro said, "Rhoda made me laugh right out of the gate, first page. Atta girl! She's a skilled storyteller and mixes tragedy with gut-busting laughter like it was brownie mix from the box."
The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating: A True Story by Elisabeth Tova Bailey (Algonquin, $18.95, 9781565126060/1565126068, August 24, 2010)
Felled by a mysterious illness, Elisabeth Bailey has for an odd companion a snail, placed by a friend in a terrarium pot with some wild violets. She spends a year snail watching, and says this:
Spring turned to summer, summer turned to
fall, the snow came, and the snail and its offspring were still much in my
thoughts. The original snail had been the best of companions; it never asked me
questions I couldn't answer, nor did it have expectations I couldn't fulfill.
It had entertained and taught me and was beautiful to watch as it glided
silently along, leading me through a dark time into a world beyond that of my
own species. Its naturally slow-paced and solitary existence offered a
refreshing perspective on the human world. A true mentor, it lived always
within the moment and was an example of how life, on even the smallest of
scales, could be rewarding.--Selected by Marilyn Dahl
Mary Robinette Kowal is the author of Shades of Milk
and Honey (Tor, August 2010). In 2008 she received the Campbell Award for Best New
Writer and has been nominated for the Hugo and Locus awards. Her stories appear
in Asimov's, Clarkesworld and several "Year's Best"
anthologies. She is vice-president of Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of
America. In addition to writing, Kowal is a professional puppeteer, and
performs as a voice actor, recording fiction for authors such as Elizabeth
Bear, Cory Doctorow and John Scalzi. She lives in Portland, Ore., with her
husband, Rob, and over a dozen manual typewriters.
On your nightstand now:
It's a mix
of research and pleasure books in different formats, since I hate being places
without something to read. As research for a novel, I'm reading Introducing
Bert Williams: America's First Black Star by Camille Forbes, which is quite
compelling. Williams was the highest-paid vaudeville performer in America and
yet still had to have it written into his contracts that he wouldn't perform on
the stage with white women as a way to keep himself safe from accusations of
impropriety. I'm also reading Up from Slavery by Booker T. Washington on
my phone. For my e-book pleasure reading, I have Julian Comstock: A Story of
22nd-Century America by Robert Charles Wilson, which I picked up because it's
a Locus nominee and I looooooved his novel Spin.
For my paper pleasure reading, I have Moonshine by Alaya Dawn Johnson
waiting for me--vampires in 1920s New York. Mm....
Favorite book when you were a child:
Just one? Oof... if I had to pick one--which is impossible--it would probably be The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis because I loved the idea of being able to step into a world with that much magic. It might also be Madeleine L'Engle's Wrinkle in Time, because I was Meg, minus the math skills. Or maybe her Door in the Wall, because it was beautiful and made me cry. Just one? That's cruel.
Your top five authors:
This list changes all the time, but these are some of the writers for whom I have thus far loved everything they've ever written.
Guy Gavriel Kay: I love how detailed his worlds are but he still focuses on the characters. While the language is rich it all serves the greater story and it's really about the relationships.
Nancy Kress: I love the way she takes a big idea, like first contact in Steal Across the Sky, and shows us how it affects humanity by focusing on individuals. I find her work constantly compelling.
Brandon Sanderson: This is a new addition to my list and I'm now a huge fangirl. He manages to write these sweeping epic fantasies in which you never lose intimacy with the characters. Any author who can make me cry that often gets a win.
Steven Brust: I honestly think he's one of the best first-person writers out there. In his Vlad Taltos series, I really feel like I'm actually listening to Vlad tell the story.
Ellen
Kushner: The thing that kind of staggers me with Ellen's writing is the way she
can deal with Big Social Issues but have it so tightly woven into the story
that you don't even notice until after you finish reading that the story was
dealing with, say, body image.
Book you've faked reading:
Twilight by Stephanie Meyer. I wanted to talk about it with my niece but it wasn't grabbing me. So I read the first chapter and the Wikipedia entry.
Book you're an evangelist for:
The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi. He's just won a Nebula award and a Locus award, and is up for a Hugo. On a line-by-line basis, it has the beauty of a well-crafted short story and then you get into the big sweep of the novel. The science fiction of it is thoroughly and frighteningly believable, but that isn't what makes this a great book. What makes The Windup Girl beautiful and terrifying is its convincing portrayal of humanity, both as a society and as individuals.
Book you've bought for the cover:
Mothers & Other Monsters by Maureen McHugh. The whole book was so beautifully designed that I needed to own the tactile package. I did not regret it at all, once I started reading the short stories.
Book that changed your life:
An Old Fashioned Girl by Louisa May Alcott. Odd? In part I identified with the main character, who was also named Mary, but the book has stuck with me because of the way she deals with, essentially, being a freelancer in the 1880s. I didn't realize it at the time but I was learning really good lessons about economizing and how to deal with sadness. There's this philosophy she has that if you are feeling sorry for yourself that the best way to snap out of it is to do something nice for someone else. I keep going back to that and, by God, it works.
Favorite line from a book:
"Painting consists of long stretches of minutes followed by short bursts of hours." --from The Sun, the Moon, and the Stars by Steven Brust
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell. There's a whole series of Aha! moments that sent electric shocks of discovery through me as I was reading. It's still a wonderful book on re-read and there's a lot of layers that you catch the second time, but you can only get that zing of sudden understanding the first time though.
View the trailer for Shades of Milk and Honey.
"Some people are natural door openers. But most are not," wrote William H. Whyte in City: Rediscovering the Center. For Connie Brooks, owner of Battenkill Books, Cambridge, N.Y., both kinds of people--and lots of them--must open the shop's front door to sustain her business. She knows she can't just wait for that to happen.
The entrance to a 21st-century indie bookstore has become a swinging door, with booksellers searching for ways to build community outside as well as inside their shops. For Connie, one of the most successful ventures thus far has been her collaboration with the Curiosity Forum, a joint venture with Hubbard Hall and Open Studios of Washington County that hosts a wide-ranging series of events, including lectures, slide presentations, documentary film screenings, author events, demonstrations/workshops and interactive artist events.
The community's influence upon the inside of the store is evident as well. Battenkill Books features a comprehensive local and regional book inventory, prominently displayed up front, and "We’re developing a real niche of books on what I call 'homesteading,' i.e., books on everything from building a root cellar to raising chickens to maple sugaring," said Connie. "We are absolutely passionate about the books we choose for the shop. We are a small indie (one full time, three part-time staff), but I like to tell customers, 'We don’t have less of everything, we have the best of everything.' You can come in to our store, and I think this is increasingly a relief for people, not be overwhelmed by choice. We may have a small crafts section, for example, but it is an outstanding one."