Shelf Awareness for Thursday, March 15, 2007


Quarry Books: Yes, Boys Can!: Inspiring Stories of Men Who Changed the World - He Can H.E.A.L. by Richard V Reeves and Jonathan Juravich, illustrated by Chris King

Simon & Schuster: Broken Country by Clare Leslie Hall

Little, Brown Books for Young Readers: Nightweaver by RM Gray

G.P. Putnam's Sons Books for Young Readers: The Meadowbrook Murders by Jessica Goodman

Overlook Press: Hotel Lucky Seven (Assassins) by Kotaro Isaka, translated by Brian Bergstrom

News

Notes: O'Hare Arrival; 300 Reprinting; Waterstone's Changes

Hudson News and Gifts has won the first open bidding contract in a decade for some 25 news and gift store and kiosk concessions in O'Hare Airport, according to the Chicago Sun-Times. Some competitors said the bidding process was structured to favor Hudson.

In related major news, Barbara's Bookstore has apparently won a concession for five locations at the huge airport. Once a traditional bookstore with roots in the Chicago area, Barbara's has opened branches in LaGuardia and Philadelphia airports, South Street Station in Boston, several Macy's stores and a hospital.

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Following the weekend success of 300, the movie based on the Frank Miller graphic novel, Dark Horse is "rushing to get another 15,000 copies to retailers" and has ordered 30,000 more copies of the book from a printer in China, the Oregonian reported.

Since May, 192,500 copies of 300 have been sent to wholesalers and bookstores. In the period just before the movie's opening, sales of the book were about 5,000 a day. By comparison, in recent years, sales of the graphic novel, published in 1999, were 3,000-5,000 annually.

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Struggling HMV plans to close as many as 30 Waterstone's bookstores, and in the remaining ones it will "give more space to higher margin items and reduce the number of high brow books," the Guardian reported.

According to Waterstone's head Gerry Johnson, the chain will emphasize novels, cookery and children's books over "academic and humanities" titles, which he said could still be bought online. Johnson denied that the chain was being dumbed down, "pointing to the current promotion of the relaunched range of Penguin classics." 

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In today's Wall Street Journal, Jeffrey Zaslow reflects on how the public library has changed--from a basic source of information and an entryway into the world of books for earlier generations--to a place whose lures are DVDs, video games, story hours and computers, in part since many parents buy books for their children. Still, as he learned, some children know there are "good books" in them thar shelves.

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Here's one of the more unusual threats to a bookstore's livelihood that we've heard of: Twice Sold Tales, Seattle, Wash., has received notice that Sound Transit, the Seattle area's transit agency, is acquiring the building the store is located in (for a light-rail station) and will force the store to vacate the space by March 2008, according to the Kirkland Courier. Owner Jamie Lutton wants to move but told the paper "there's a 50/50 chance this will put me out of business."

Lutton opened Twice Sold Tales in a market pushcart in 1987. In 1990, she moved into the spot where the store is located now. For a while she kept her used bookstore open 24 hours on Friday, but nowadays it closes that night at an early 2 a.m.

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Another PGW publisher has landed elsewhere. Effective immediately, Learning Express is being distributed by National Book Network. Learning Express publishes both print and online assessment and remediation programs, including test-prep, skill-building and career books. It puts out more than 35 books a year.

In a statement, Learning Express president and CEO Barry Lippman said, "While the situation with AMS and PGW is unfortunate, we are extremely delighted to work with NBN again; in fact, it's more like we've come home. I am optimistic that this is going to be a wonderful reunion."
 


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Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Questions and Answers

The first printing of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, to be released on July 21, will total 12 million, Scholastic announced yesterday. The last Harry Potter title, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, had a 10.8 million first printing in 2005 and sold 6.9 million copies in the first 24 hours.

In addition, as part of the "multi-million dollar" There Will Soon Be 7 marketing campaign, Scholastic will ask seven questions--one every two weeks, beginning April 17. The company hopes that fans will debate these "big questions" online, at book clubs and elsewhere.

The campaign includes distribution of table-top easelbacks and millions of bookmarks (each featuring a question) to retailers and librarians. The company will also offer a 5-ft. high promotional piece and millions of tattoos that may be given away at Harry Potter midnight parties.

Scholastic is also scheduling a Knight Bus National Tour, that begins June 2: a bus based on the Harry Potter vehicle will visit 40 libraries in 10 metropolitan areas. At stops, fans will be invited to share on video their thoughts and feelings about the Harry Potter books.

On April 17, the company will launch its online campaign, which will include downloadable material, a poll, message boards, fan reviews, a Knight Bus Tour Tracker and a searchable midnight party database.

Incidentally we hear that Scholastic is requiring that all initial orders be in carton quantities, which is 10.


GLOW: Berkley Books: The Seven O'Clock Club by Amelia Ireland


Media and Movies

Media Heat: Russian Novelist Martin Amis

This morning on the Today Show: Dale V. Atkins, co-author of Sanity Savers: Tips for Women to Live a Balanced Life (Avon, $12.95, 9780061242953/0061242950).

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This morning on Imus in the Morning: Col. Jack Jacobs, the main spokesperson for Medal of Honor: Portraits of Valor Beyond the Call of Duty photographs by Nick Del Calzo, text by Peter Collier (Artisan, $45, 9781579653149/1579653146). 

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Today on KCRW's Bookworm: Martin Amis, author of House of Meetings (Knopf, $23, 9781400044559/1400044553). As the show described it: "Martin Amis has written a Russian novel--not just a Russian novel but a novel about the Gulags. More than this, it is a love triangle set in a prison camp, told by a survivor who is now, in the process of self-accusation and self-condemnation. How dare Amis write such a book? He did it because he could."

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Tonight on the Colbert Report, Ayaan Hirsi Ali talks about her memoir, Infidel (Free Press, $26, 9780743289689/0743289684).

 


This Weekend on Book TV: Boeing Versus Airbus

Book TV airs on C-Span 2 from 8 a.m. Saturday to 8 a.m. Monday and focuses on political and historical books as well as the book industry. The following are highlights for this coming weekend. For more information, go to Book TV's Web site.

Saturday, March 17

6 p.m. Encore Booknotes. In a segment that aired first in 2000, New York Times science reporter Gina Kolata talked about her book Flu: The Story of the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918 and the Search for the Virus that Caused It (Touchstone, $15, 9780743203982/0743203984). She drew on letters, interviews and news reports to tell the story of the flu that killed 40 million people worldwide.

9 p.m. After Words. Colonel Walter Boyne, author and former director of the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum, interviews John Newhouse, former Clinton Administration appointee and New Yorker writer, about his new book, Boeing Versus Airbus: The Inside Story of the Greatest International Competition in Business (Knopf, $26.95, 9781400043361/1400043360),  about the prolonged dogfight between the world's two largest aircraft manufacturers. (Re-airs Sunday at 6 p.m. and 9 p.m.)

11 p.m. History on Book TV. Recorded at the Nixon Library & Birthplace, Yorba Linda, Calif., as part of the Times Books American Presidents series, three historians discuss their presidential biographies: Douglas Brinkley on Gerald Ford, Joyce Appleby on Thomas Jefferson and David Greenberg on Calvin Coolidge. Timothy Naftali, author of an upcoming biography of George H.W. Bush, moderates.


Deeper Understanding

BookSense.com: Looking Back and Going Forward

Len Vlahos, director of BookSense.com writes:

Kate Whouley's piece in Shelf Awareness Tuesday, "Zip Code Blues," is long on innovative ideas, but perhaps a little short on historical fact.
 
When the BookSense.com hub site was first launched, it performed exactly as Kate is advocating the current site ought to--a user searched for a book, put it in his or her shopping cart, checked out, and was presented with a message that the order in question was being filled by Store X, the store closest to the consumer's zip code. There was no prompt for a zip code and there was no extra click.
 
So, if this system is what authors want--and we at BookSense.com freely acknowledge that one fewer click and five fewer keystrokes is empirically better than the alternative--why on Earth did we switch?
 
First and foremost, because our members asked us to. We are, after all, a trade association that exists to serve its members and we always try to be as responsive as we can. But there were other reasons, too. In no particular order:
 
Brand sanctity. The Book Sense brand has always been meant to support, not supplant, each store's brand. Creating a national website with content and commerce that placed the Book Sense brand front and center, and relegated the store's brand to a secondary role, flied in the face of the Book Sense mission--to promote the value of shopping at an independent bookstore. We were just one more mega site selling books, and because of limited resources, a mega site that was never going to present as fulsome a shopping experience as its rivals.
 
Prioritizing resources. As a full-blown e-commerce site, BookSense.com needed a significant amount of content. (Consumers expect their commerce sites to be content-rich, with author interviews, recommendations, newsletters, and more. What was the point of even trying to compete with Amazon, in their arena, without those bells and whistles?) To achieve this, we hired staff to create collateral material not only for consumers visiting BookSense.com, but also content for the program's participants to plug into their own sites. While booksellers liked the content, they evinced a strong preference for us to devote resources toward making their individual websites better. In other words, functionality for the local sites trumped content for the national site.
 
Customer service. By conducting commerce on the BookSense.com site, consumers operated from the reasonable and natural belief that Book Sense, not an individual store, was the entity selling books. This not only created the need for a larger customer service staff at ABA, it also inserted BookSense.com in the middle of the bookseller-customer relationship. This was just inappropriate.
 
Fairness. Because we have only the technical ability to fill orders from stores using BookSense.com websites, many ABA member stores--stores that use other products, like the very excellent BookSite, or that have developed their own e-commerce engines--were left out of the party. While it's still true that affiliate orders do not link through to non-participating stores, the more benign approach of a traffic aggregating site, rather than a full-blown e-commerce site, softens the blow.
 
Customer confusion. Because of the "branding," "customer service," and "fairness" issues listed above, many customers were confused as to the purpose of the site. What was the difference between Book Sense and BookSense.com, and "why should I, as a consumer, care?"
 
For all these reasons, in 2003, on the advice of the BookSense.com Users Council (a group of volunteer booksellers that meets annually to provide advice and feedback on the program), and in consultation with the ABA Board, BookSense.com was morphed from the e-commerce site Kate is advocating to the traffic aggregating site it became and still is today.
 
Is it perfect? Heck no. Is the decision not to sell via the BookSense.com hub site set in stone? Absolutely not. While we have been able to attract more than 2,000 affiliates, and while we do service over 200 bookstore participants, recent trends (specifically the rise of Web 2.0) may in fact provide good reason to revisit the idea, which is something we'll do. 
 
Thanks for listening.

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Kate Whouley responds:

Len is gracious to label my commentary innovative, but as his historical narrative illustrates, my ideas are more aptly termed retro!

In fact, I am aware of the broad-stroke history of BookSense.com. I understand the entity we call Booksense.com exists first of all to provide a robust website template and back-end solution to its independent bookstore subscribers. I know, too, that the earlier, broader vision of Booksense.com has been refined and redefined, for all the excellent reasons that Len has outlined. And for the record, I think Booksense.com does a great job for its subscribers. I'd urge all ABA members to check it out!

But there are subscribers, and there are customers. I'm attempting, in this series, to view the BookSense.com option through the eyes of potential online shoppers. Sometimes that requires me to play the Fool--asking old questions and hoping, through the passage of time and the exercise of earnest conversation, to arrive at new answers. In my best-of-all-possible-worlds, I'd like to see independent booksellers serve themselves a larger portion of the online pie, and heighten public awareness of their importance in a changing cultural landscape. Can this be done? I'd like to believe the Fool's journey is different from a Fool's errand. I'll keep asking questions, but in the meantime, here's another thoughtful response to Tuesday's commentary, this one from Nicki Leone. Pay special attention to the last two paragraphs!

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Nicki Leone of the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance writes:

Your piece seems to highlight a kind of disconnect between what BookSense.com is perceived to be, what it actually is, and what it could be. Among the "authors and author-advocate types" you mention (and I have had the same kinds of discussions with many of them) BookSense.com is regarded as the "indie alternative to Amazon." And one can't blame them for thinking this, because Amazon has defined the way we purchase books online, and BookSense.com in its early stages was actually marketed as an indie alternative to online retailers. I think this was probably a mistake on the part of the creators (and I say so as a person who completely supports the BookSense.com concept), because after all, the two options would never be equivalent. Amazon is Amazon. BookSense.com is hundreds of individual stores, each with their own pricing policies, discounting policies, shipping fees, fulfillment policies, returns policies, stock levels and even exclusive products (signed copies or locally published books and the like). So the author who wants to link to BookSense.com as "the indie alternative" is linking to a kind of mirage--as if BookSense.com were an idealized indie, one of Plato's ideal "forms" of a bookstore that exists in our minds, but not in reality.

What those authors should be doing is simply providing links on their site to their favorite store or stores. Instead of linking to BookSense.com, they should just link to Malaprops, if they live in Asheville, N.C., or Books & Books, if they live in Miami, Fla. BookSense.com is really just a very affordable set of e-commerce tools available to independent bookstores. For what it is, it is excellent--there is nothing else that even comes close. But its national marketing is minimal.

Still, what author wants to be seen as favoring one local bookstore over another? In my town there are three or four independent stores, two of which are BookSense.com stores. And even though we are all friends, none of our local authors would want to be perceived as favoring one indie over another.

So perhaps it makes more sense to think of BookSense.com as analogous to some of the used book sites--abebooks.com--rather than Amazon or bn.com. And if that is the case, then yes, BookSense.com fails the user because it requires you to choose the supplier before you can compare all the products. One should be able to come up with a list of options and sort by price, by location, look for signed copies or first editions or least expensive shipping options---and yet, this is not very satisfactory either, because I don't think the powers behind BookSense.com are interested in creating more competition among their member stores than already exists. Besides, I don't think the answer to the future of indies online lies in attempting to copy already existing business models. That strikes me as reacting defensively to a situation rather than proactively, and only highlights the areas where a small business will never be able to compete with a large online retailer. The shipping will often be too high, the fulfillment too slow, the discounts too small. Indies will never have the collective purchasing power of Amazon or a national chain, and they know better than to attempt to compete in areas they are sure to lose.

So what do they have that Amazon doesn't? Well, how about people? Very smart, very well-read people, with a lot of influence over the reading habits of their local communities. What if BookSense.com changed its focus and became not a collection of online indie bookstores, but an online community of indie booksellers? What if it became a kind of extensive version of every store's "staff recommendations" sections, and the user could search for books based on the recommendations of specific booksellers? Is that something that Amazon or Barnes & Noble could copy? No. Would it be a more useful marketing force to authors and publishers? I think so. Would it raise the visibility of any participating store? Sure, if the store had a few active reviewers. Amazon's reviews are notoriously unreliable. But the recommendations made by independent booksellers are very well respected--they are business owners, after all--they have reputations to maintain.

It seems to me that the Internet is a fundamentally populist entity--the success of things like Youtube, eBay, Wikipedia, Flickr, etc., makes this evident. In this kind of climate, independent booksellers actually have an advantage over large corporations--they are populists themselves, after all, or they wouldn't be in the business. I'd like to see BookSense.com find a way to tap into this vast, untapped potential. All that is wanting is the platform to do it. 

 



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