In this issue, Shelf Awareness officially introduces a new feature: our drop-in title database, which provides booksellers and librarians information about drop-in titles (also known as crash and add-in titles). Instead of receiving an array of e-mail, fax and snail-mail notifications about last-minute changes and publications, such information can be found here. For a small fee, publishers supply us with that information. We have quietly run a few editions of this, which you may have noticed; now we are ready for the grand opening.

The drop-in announcements will appear in Shelf Awareness (with a circulation of 12,000 and growing) as well as Unshelved, which reaches some 40,000 librarians, and will then reside in our searchable drop-in title database on our website. Announcements will continue to appear in the grey box in the middle of the newsletter at least once a week and soon more frequently depending on demand.

Please let us know at Jenn@shelf-awareness.com how you like the drop-in title features and what we might do to improve it. If you're a publisher who wants to know more about this new program, please click here. If you are a bookseller or librarian who finds this helpful, please forward this link to your favorite drop-in title publisher and tell them to try it out.

This is first in a series of improvements we are making to continue to help booksellers and librarians lend and sell books most effectively.

 

Citing different prices he has seen in Canada and the U.S. for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Canada's finance minister Jim Flaherty has met with some Canadian retailers in an effort to lessen the price differentials of various products now that the Canadian dollar is worth more than the U.S. dollar, the Globe and Mail reported.

But the president of Retail Council of Canada said Flaherty hadn't looked hard for a better price on HP7 in Canada and cited Collected Works, the Ottawa bookstore that has taken the unusual step of giving customers the choice of paying either the U.S. or Canadian suggested retail price.

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Today's New York Times explores the effect on the German-language book market of Switzerland's decision earlier this year to end fixed book prices. Because of fixed prices and a book-loving cultural tradition, the German market has been only lately feeling the kind of pressures felt in book industries in many other countries. (For example, Germany has two book retailing chains that have only in the past few years have hit a considerable size--and are still much smaller proportionally than their equivalents in the U.S.) One way German publishers may counteract lower retail prices in Switzerland is by selling at higher prices to Swiss retailers.

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In the quarter ended September 30, net sales at Amazon.com rose 41% to $3.262 billion and net income rose 313% to $80 million. The company attributed some of the gain to Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows--with sales of 2.5 million copies, it was Amazon's largest new product release ever--and stronger third-party sales.

Still, some analysts remain concerned about the company's profitability. As a result, although during the day the stock hit $100 a share for the first time since December 1999, in after-hours trading it dropped 10% to $90.70 a share.

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Bookstream has announced the addition of two new staff members.

• Kim Soyka, currently a buyer at the Book House of Stuyvesant Plaza, Albany, N.Y., will join the wholesaler in mid-November as part of the customer service team as well as buyer of adult titles.
• Jessica Stockton Bagnulo has joined BookStream in what the company describes as "a unique role." Although she will continue to work as events coordinator at McNally Robinson NYC bookstore, she will also, according to Bookstream, "be putting her varied talents to use by providing innovative value-added services to our customers." Jessica has more details regarding the new position at her blog, the Written Nerd. [Jessica is also Shelf Awareness's Graphic Lit columnist, the next installment of which runs this coming Friday.]

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Congratulations to Saturn Booksellers, Gaylord, Mich., which has been named small-sized retailer of the year by the Michigan Retailers Association, according to the Lansing State Journal.

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Nevermore? The Lawrence, Kan., Journal World & News reported that a "previously announced deal for three area residents to buy the independent Raven Bookstore in downtown Lawrence has fallen through," leaving the bookshop's current owners facing a "cliffhanger moment."

"We just don't know what we're going to do," said Mary Lou Wright, who, with Pat Kehde, founded the store 20 years ago. "We're certainly committed to keeping it open for a while because it is full of merchandise. But for the long term, we're not making any promises."

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Donald Linn, former owner and CEO of Consortium Book Sales & Distribution, which he sold to Perseus Books Group in August 2006, has been named publisher of the book division at the Taunton Press. In his new position, he will oversee all aspects of book publishing at Taunton and work with the magazine and web divisions to help lead the growth and diversification of the company, part of which includes moving some book content to the web.

In a statement, Linn said, "While I'm not one who thinks the printed page will ever go away, I do believe that certain types of content can be delivered effectively in electronic format."

Before buying Consortium in 2001, Linn was managing partner of Kay Planting Co., a family-owned agribusiness.

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Antoinette Kuritz writes that in spite of the Southern California wildfires, the La Jolla Writers Conference will go on as scheduled November 2-4, at the Paradise Point Resort & Spa in San Diego.

UPS and other carriers have temporarily suspended service in some parts of the area.

The fires have hit home for us. Debra Ginsberg, a Shelf Awareness book reviewer, who wrote the book review below, is one of the many people evacuated because of the fires. We wish her and everyone else affected the very best; our thoughts are with them.

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The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox by Maggie O'Farrell (Harcourt, $23, 9780151014118/0151014116), which is being published today, has been chosen as the sixth Barnes & Noble Recommends title.

"Alive with the energy of trapped desires, Maggie O'Farrell's The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox is a riveting work of literary imagination," Steve Riggio, B&N CEO, said in a prepared statement. "This suspense-filled novel will pull you right out of your chair and take you on a journey across continents and generations."

One of the B&N booksellers who helped pick this selection said, "Full of emotion and mystery, this novel took off at warp speed and never let up." Another bookseller called the book "immediately gripping and mysterious. I devoured it."

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More manga!

Wired magazine decided to offer its "visual history of manga in America" in manga format.

 

The following five publishers will be distributed by Consortium, effective with the spring 2008 season:

• Etruscan Press, Wilkes-Barre, Pa., a nonprofit cooperative of poets and writers founded in 2001 that publishes books of poems, novels, short stories, creative nonfiction, criticism and anthologies. Its lead title for spring is The Widening, a novel by poet Carol Moldaw that explores a young woman's volatile mix of passivity and wildness during the 1970s.
• Old Street, London, England, founded by Ben Yarde-Buller (formerly with Methuen) and David Reynolds (co-founder of Bloomsbury Publishing) in early 2006, which publishes literary fiction, crime, history, current affairs and humor. Its lead title for spring is Charlotte & Leopold: The True Story of the Original People's Princess by James Chambers.
• Persephone Books, London, England, reissues neglected classics by 20th-century writers, mostly women, and publishes novels, short stories, memoirs and cookbooks. It is launching its U.S. list in April with Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day, just before the release of the Focus Features movie starring Frances McDormand.
• Peter Lang Ltd., Oxford, England, founded in 1970, is an academic publishing company with offices in Oxford, New York, Bern, Vienna, Brussels and Frankfurt and is launching a series called the Past in the Present. Its lead title is A History of Political Trials: From Charles I to Saddam Hussein by John Laughland.
• Two Dollar Radio, with offices in Granville, Ohio, and Brooklyn, N.Y., is a family run house founded in 2005 that focuses on bold literary fiction. In the spring the press launches with The Drop Edge of Yonder, an exploration of the American West by Rudolph Wurlitzer.

This morning on the Today Show: Jean-Georges Vongerichten, author of Asian Flavors of Jean-Georges (Broadway, $40, 9780767912730/076791273X).

Also on Today: Hal Edward Runkel, author of ScreamFree Parenting: The Revolutionary Approach to Raising Your Kids by Keeping Your Cool (WaterBrook Press, $21.95, 9781400073726/1400073723).

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Today NPR's All Things Considered focuses on Letters from Mississippi: Personal Reports from Civil Rights Volunteers of the 1964 Freedom Summer edited by Elizabeth Martinez (Zephyr Press, $16.95, 9780939010929/0939010925), an expanded edition that now includes pieces by local participants.

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Today on the Charlie Rose Show: James Lipton, author of Inside Inside (Dutton Adult, $27.95, 9780525950356/0525950354). He's also on the View today.

Choice: True Stories of Birth, Contraception, Infertility, Adoption, Single Parenthood, and Abortion edited by Karen E. Bender and Nina de Gramont (MacAdam Cage, $24.00, 9781596920637/1596920637, October 19, 2007)

Abortion: the word alone smolders with controversy. Indeed, it isn't easy to find an issue more polarizing or incendiary. Vast quantities have been written on either side of the pro-choice/pro-life debate, but most fall into the black-and-white categories of "for" or "against" and avoid the complex shades of grey in between. When discussing reproductive rights, there is a certain safety in the polemic; to lay bare personal experience is to leave oneself vulnerable to attack from either side. Yet the 24 contributors to Choice have taken this risk, writing with searing honesty and intimacy about their own choices. The result is an exceptional and brave collection.
 
Although the editors have included a number of other reproductive topics in their long subtitle, the subject of abortion dominates, featuring in almost half the essays. Although the choice may have been a wrenching one, not one of the women who write about abortion expresses regret for having had one, including Deborah McDowell ("Termination"), who recalls her dangerous illegal abortion in the days before Roe v. Wade, and Kimi Faxon Hemingway ("Personal Belongings"), who relates a harrowing tale of a legal but unsafe abortion with RU-486. No matter what their experience (several of the writers discuss having children after having abortions) or how complicated the emotion, every writer here argues passionately for a woman's right, as contributor Pam Houston states, "to choose whether or not she will have a baby."
 
Two of the most moving essays come from Janet Mason Ellerby and Stephanie Andersen, who gave their daughters up for adoption. Although the two women are separated by almost 40 years, their stories are strikingly similar. Both became pregnant as teenagers, both felt they had no choice in what happened to them, and both are filled with aching sadness and lingering regret.
 
As with most collections, not every essay in Choice is a gem, although the quality of the writing is consistently high. Despite a shared passion and candor, a few of these essays define "choice" so broadly they wander outside the context of the topic, which seems impossible since every woman is faced with a reproductive choice at some point in her life. But these are exceptions to an otherwise outstanding group of talented writers. Of particular note are Ashley Talley's "Donation," the emotionally complex and knotted story of her attempt to become a surrogate for her own mother; Sarah Messer's "Trees in the Desert," a haunting tale of a botched abortion and a bad relationship; and the closing essay, Francine Prose's "The Raw Edges of Human Existence," an erudite, illuminating examination of the language in the Roe v. Wade decision.
 
The essays in Choice are at once thoughtful and emotional, intensely personal yet eminently relatable. Together they illustrate the complexities and subtleties of an issue too often reduced to simplistic moral judgments. This is a must-read for every woman. No, make that everyone.--Debra Ginsberg

 

Selected titles appearing next Tuesday, October 30:

American Creation: Triumphs and Tragedies at the Founding of the Republic by Joseph J. Ellis (Knopf, $26.95, 9780307263698/030726369X) explores the period between the Revolutionary War and the Louisiana Purchase.

Christmas with Paula Deen: Recipes and Stories from My Favorite Holiday by Paula Deen (S&S, $23, 9780743292863/0743292863) is a compilation of holiday recipes and memories.

Steve and Me: Life with the Crocodile Hunter by Terri Irwin and Gil Reavill (Simon Spotlight, $25.95, 9781416953883/1416953884) is the story of Steve Irwin's wife and the couple's experiences as conservation celebrities.

You: Staying Young: The Owner's Manual for Extending Your Warranty by Michael F. Roizen and Mehmet C. Oz (Free Press, $26, 9780743292566/0743292561) provides ways to slow the body's aging.

Write It When I'm Gone: Remarkable Off-the-Record Conversations with Gerald R. Ford by Thomas M. DeFrank (Putnam, $25.95, 9780399154508/0399154507).

A Family Christmas by Caroline Kennedy (Hyperion, $26.95, 9781401322274/1401322271) shares Christmas memories and literature.

Our Dumb World: The Onion's Atlas of the Planet Earth by the Onion (Little, Brown, $27.99, 9780316018425/0316018422) gives a hilarious spin on people and places throughout the world.

Ronnie: The Autobiography by Ronnie Wood (St. Martin's, $25.95, 9780312366520/0312366523) chronicles the career of Rolling Stone Ronnie Wood.


New in paperback next week:

Halo: Contact Harvest by Joseph Staten (Tor, $14.95, 9780765315694/0765315696).

Nature Girl by Carl Hiaasen (Grand Central, $13.99, 9780446581752/0446581755).

Santa Cruise: A Holiday Mystery at Sea by Mary Higgins Clark and Carol Higgins Clark (Pocket, $7.99, 9781416538028/141653802X).

Wild Fire by Nelson DeMille (Vision, $9.99, 9780446617772/0446617776).

Dead of Night by J.D. Robb, Mary Blayney, Ruth Ryan Langan and Mary Kay McComas (Jove, $7.99, 9780515143676/0515143677).