Notes: Transition for Powell's; Legal Setback in Utah

Describing Powell's Books, Portland, Ore., as "a how-to guide for surviving Internet and chain rivals," the Los Angeles Times examined the challenges faced by the bookstore as owner Michael Powell, 67, gradually passes the operation on to his daughter, Emily, 29, "whose business experience is limited."

"Businesses don't transition very well," said Powell, adding that his goal was to keep "from being marginalized the way music stores have been marginalized."

Using the example of online sales, the Times noted that "Powell's has a head start on this one: The company started selling books online in 1994--before Amazon--and ships millions of dollars of books, about 90% of them outside the Pacific Northwest, each year."

For her part, Emily believes the challenge will be "maintaining the culture of the store--not just the bohemian tone but stocking books that are hard to find in other independent stores, such as conservative and Christian tomes, which her father insists are usually blind spots--and preparing for the unknown."

"We're in a very antiquated industry in many respects," she said. "You have to like bookselling, not just books, in order to bring change." 

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A federal judge has ruled that "local bookstores such as the King's English and Sam Weller's Zion Bookstore, along with other local distributors of information, do not have legal standing to take part in a lawsuit regarding the Utah Harmful to Minors Act."

According to the Deseret Morning News, "the Harmful to Minors Act is intended to make Internet service providers, Web hosts and content providers limit the ability of minors to get pornography on the Internet. The bookstores filed a lawsuit in federal court challenging the law, claiming among other things that it violates the U.S. Constitution."

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Today's New York Times suggests that Judith Regan's $100 million dollar civil suit against News Corporation, "with its riveting passages about corporate connivance, public malfeasance and ill-fated romance, is as much a page-turner as any of the dozens of salacious best sellers she produced at ReganBooks, her imprint at HarperCollins before she was fired at the end of last year."

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Effective January 1, Moleskin, the Italian publisher of the little black notebooks that some Shelf Awareness staffers cannot live without, will be distributed in the U.S. by Chronicle Books as part of a new partnership between the two companies. Moleskin had been distributed by Kikkerland. Hachette Book Group is Chronicle's new fulfillment partner.

Moleskin, which already publishes notebooks, journals, planners and guidebooks, will launch a new line of softcover notebooks in February and will expand its City Notebook series in March, adding titles for Los Angeles, Chicago, Seattle, Montreal, Florence and Venice.

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Kevin Hamric has joined Quayside Publishing Group as v-p of sales and marketing and will oversee sales, marketing and publicity at the group's eight imprints--Creative Publishing international, Fair Winds Press, Motorbooks, Quarry Books, Quiver Books, Rockport Publishers, Voyageur Press and Zenith Press--and distribution of Walter Foster titles to the trade. He will work in the company's Minneapolis office.

Hamric was most recently director of book sales at Taunton Press and earlier was director of sales and operations at Sybex/John Wiley.

Mike Hejny, v-p of sales and marketing at MBI Publishing, has left the company. Quayside's current v-p of sales and marketing, Peter Ackroyd, will have new responsibilities. 

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A single manuscript page from a story by Napoleon Bonaparte sold for $35,400 at auction in France, according to the AP. The 22-page "novel," Clisson and Eugenie, was written when Napoleon was 26 and remained unpublished in his lifetime. It "was loosely based on the author's brief romance with Desiree Clary, the sister of his brother's wife."

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Kathy L. Patrick and the Pulpwood Queen Book Club are creating a new award, the Doug Marlette Award, that will go to the book club's Book of the Year and honor the late Pulitzer Prize-winning political cartoonist, author and creator of the comic strip Kudzu. As Empress Patrick put it, "Doug Marlette was a favorite author amongst the Pulpwood Queens with his books The Bridge and Magic Time both book club selections. We decided that in order for his memory, his works, and his books to live on forever, we would initiate this award as a tribute to him."

The first Doug Marlette Award will be given at the annual Pulpwood Queen convention aka Girlfriend Weekend, January 17-19 in Marshall, Tex. Marlette died in July when a pickup truck he was riding in crashed.

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Laura van den Berg of Boston, Mass., has won the first annual $5,000 Dzanc Prize, which honors a writer "working toward completion of a novel or short story collection who is also interested in bettering their community through literary community service." The award is sponsored by Dzanc Books, founded last year by Steven Gillis and Dan Wickett, to "advance great writing and to champion those writers who do not fit neatly into the marketing niches of for-profit presses."

Van den Berg, who is editor-in-chief of Emerson College's literary and arts journal, Redivider, and a Ploughshares staff member, was honored for her proposal to teach creative writing in area prisons and for the quality of her fiction writing.

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Madison Smartt Bell and William T. Vollmann have won the American Academy of Arts and Letters' 2008 Strauss Living awards, which provide each writer with $50,000 a year for five years, with the intention that they will be able to devote themselves fulltime to writing. The awards are given every five years.

Vollman was lauded by the Academy for "bold, gripping work encompassing gritty narratives that often combine fictional and journalistic techniques." Bell was praised for "exploring the dark side of human nature as experienced through characters including denizens of New York, Viet Nam, London, and Haiti."

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Richard Leigh, who sued bestselling author Dan Brown for plagiarism, died November 21, the AP (via the Guardian) reported. He was 64. Leigh had alleged that The Da Vinci Code  "appropriated the architecture" of Holy Blood, Holy Grail, a book he co-authored that was published in 1982. The suit was unsuccessful.

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On an international biblio-pilgrimage to shrines of the Beat Generation and the Lost Generation, the Sydney Morning Herald visited City Lights Books, San Francisco, Calif., and Shakespeare & Co. Bookshop in Paris.

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"The book was so much better than the film" is a line booksellers often hear, but the San Diego Union-Tribune offered a list of  "Movies better than the books that spawned them."
 

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