In their first joint marketing campaign for the new Indiebound initiative (Shelf Awareness, November 20, 2009), the Booksellers Association and Book Marketing Limited (with support from Gardners) have announced the dozen titles selected by independent booksellers in the U.K. and Ireland for this year's independents' Christmas Books Catalogue.
The catalogue "will be supported by additional material available via the IndieBound website, including author interviews, sample chapters, recipes, competitions and signed books," the Bookseller.com reported.
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Starting today, Borders will offer a revamped loyalty card program that includes a paid option. The Associated Press (via Bloomberg Businessweek) reported that "members of both programs will receive in-store and online discounts, personal shopping days, free coffee, a free birthday gift and earn 'Borders Bucks' that add up to other discounts depending on how much you buy," but members who opt for the $20 per year Borders Rewards Plus will also receive a 40% discount on hardcover bestsellers, 20% off selected other hardcovers, 10% off most other items and free shipping for "most online orders." Teachers who sign up for the discount program will receive a "10% discount on top of other discounts on specified days."---
Sisterspirit Books, which was, in its heyday, "the place for lesbians and feminists to go in San Jose," plans to close September 15, the Mercury News reported, noting that the bookshop "was the place to meet like minds, a place to buy books and videos they couldn't get anywhere else, or simply revel in the comfort of being together in a world that went out of its way to make them feel there was no place for such things--or no place for such people."
"There were no places like this when we started," said Margie Struble, a volunteer and "guiding force" at Sisterspirit for 24 of its 26 years. "Many people met their partners here."
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10 Facts About Books You Won't Read in a Book About Books (aka "tree sandwiches"), brought to you by the Melbourne Writers Festival.
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The Children's Book Review's Dog Days of Summer feature recommended dog books for dog lovers.
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Cool idea of the day: Operation Medical Libraries was created in response to nearly three decades of war and religious extremism in Afghanistan, which "have devastated medical libraries and crippled the educational system for doctors, nurses and other health professionals," the New York Times reported. The program "began modestly in 2007 with a plea for books from a U.C.L.A. medical graduate serving in the Army," but "has since been embraced by 30 universities and hospitals, more than a dozen professional organizations and scores of individual doctors and nurses." Valerie Walker is the director of UCLA's Medical Alumni Association and helps lead the project. She said the Taliban "not only burned the books, but they sent monitors into the classroom to make sure there were no drawings of the human body on the blackboard."
Walker estimated that "27,000 medical texts have reached Afghanistan through Operation Medical Libraries, but she adds that the number is probably much higher. Donors can contribute directly by visiting the project’s website to find a military volunteer’s address, then shipping the books on their own," the Times wrote.
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Back to school reading. NPR recommended "Three Books for Surviving Graduate School": Piled Higher and Deeper: A Graduate Student Comic Strip Collection by Jorge Cham; Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage to the Antarctic by Alfred Lansing; and Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation by Lynne Truss.
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Raining poetry in Germany. Last weekend, a helicopter dropped 100,000 bookmarks "with poems by 80 poets from Germany and Chile" over Berlin, in an initiative "intended as a protest against war and a message of peace, as well as a celebration of the 200th anniversary of the independence of Chile," the Guardian reported.---
Book (festival) trailer of the day: Brooklyn Book Festival's video featuring authors who will be attending this year's festival on Sunday, September 12: Mary Gaitskill, Dennis Lehane, Rosanne Cash, Gary Shteyngart, Elizabeth Nunez, Jon Scieszka, Sara Shepard, Tad Hills, Paul Harding, Sofia Quintero, Rakesh Satyal, E. Lockhart, Jacqueline Woodson, Kurt Anderson and Amy Goodman.