Calling last-minute Christmas shopping a case of "deferred gratification," the Daily Camera interviewed retailers about this trend, and Arsen Kashkashian of the Boulder Book Store, Boulder, Colo., said he noticed that gender played a role: "Traditionally, what we see in these last few days is the ratio of men to women shopping increases greatly from the rest of the year. You see a lot of men who haven't done any shopping yet."
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Are you ready for Take a Chicken to Work Day? MinnPost.com showcased Wild Rumpus bookstore, Minneapolis, Minn., "a place where the magic of books is cradled by a creative jumble of animals and art. While Pimento [the resident chicken] patrolled the aisles, an orange-tabby cat snoozed under a cage where three birds sang with gusto. A pair of chinchillas napped nearby. Anne Frank gazed from one of the book posters across comfy old reading chairs to a veritable zoo of toy tigers and bears."
"It's getting back to the basics," said customer Vickie Hawkins. "People want to get out of that big box mentality."
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Williams' Book Store, San Pedro, Calif., will celebrate its centennial next month, and co-owner Anne Gusha, who is 89, told Bookselling this Week she can't recall a time when she wasn't either a customer or a bookseller at the landmark store.
"Customer service is what's kept us going," she said. "With all the online business, you have to kind of change the way you've been doing things. I might start stocking book-related things. But I'll always stock books. Reading a book on a computer is not the same thing as holding a book in your hand. But everything has to change--nothing stays the same."
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Montford Books, Asheville, N.C., will open next month in the space formerly occupied by the Reader's Corner for 11 years until its closing last May, according to the Citizen-Times.
"We're hoping to certainly continue with all the good things that Gillian Coats had done when it was Reader's Corner, and I really want to give her credit for building a great bookstore business with lots of variety and quality used books," said owner Kay Manley. "When we reopen, some of the differences will be that we're going to have a bit of a café atmosphere--just with coffee and tea--and try to make it a cozy place to hang out."
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"Eons ago, in the Paleozoic Era, people went to bookstores to get books and to record stores to get records," noted the Stonington Times, which observed that "the people that work and own book shops and record stores are still experts in their fields and have opinions about what was good reading and good listening in 2008."
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The New York Times reported that after years of largely unfulfilled hype, the age of the e-book may finally be at hand because Amazon's Kindle "has at least lived up to its name by creating broad interest in electronic books." Added to this is the fact that the Kindle is sold out at the moment, a shortage that may have opened the door for other devices, like the Sony Reader, to gain traction during the gift-buying season.
"The perception is that E-books have been around for 10 years and haven't done anything," said Steve Haber, president of Sony's digital reading division. "But it's happening now. This is really starting to take off."
There is another potentially strong competitor in this market, however. According to the Times, "Perhaps the most overlooked boost to e-books this year--and a challenge to some of the standard thinking about them--came from Apple's do-it-all gadget, the iPhone. . . . Publishers say these iPhone applications are already starting to generate nearly as many digital book sales as the Sony Reader, though they still trail sales of books in the Kindle format."
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More about The Taqwacores, the novel by Michael Muhammad Knight that was highlighted yesterday in the New York Times. Knight self-published the tale about "imaginary punk rock Muslims in Buffalo" five years ago and it was picked up by Autonomedia, as the paper reported, but a revised version is coming out from Soft Skull Press March 1 ($12.95, 9781593762292/1593762291) and will be distributed by PGW.
Soft Skull is publishing several other titles by Knight, who converted to Islam:
- Impossible Man (Or, F. Scott Fitzgerald and the Rise of Islam) ($14.95, 9781593762261/1593762267), an autobiography to be published in March.
- Blue-Eyed Devil: A Road Odyssey Through Islamic America ($14.95, 9781593762407/1593762402), with a May 1 pub date.
- Osama Van Halen ($14.95, 9781593762421/1593762429), a July novel.
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While e-books may be gaining ground elsewhere, the Buffalo News profiled Western New York Book Arts Collaborative, "a museum, workplace and inspiration center for people devoted to paper, ink and type."
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Is Joshua Henkin "a marketing genius, an author stalker, or a little of both?" asked the Philadelphia Inquirer in its lighthearted profile of the author's dedication to book group appearances in person, by e-mail and over the phone to discuss his novel, Matrimony. Henkin "has visited more than 80 book groups in person or on the phone and, believe me, will visit yours even with only a few hours' notice," the Inquirer added.
"He's really kind of off the charts on it," said Wendy Sheanin, senior marketing manager at Simon & Shuster.