Last fall, Texas assessed Amazon $269 million in uncollected sales tax, interest and penalties for the four years running from December 2005 to December 2009 (Shelf Awareness, October 25, 2010). Last week, Amazon filed a lawsuit in Travis County District Court that argues "the documents must be made public under the Texas Public Information Act and seeks a court order forcing their release. The suit also seeks recovery of attorneys' fees and other legal costs," the Austin American-Statesman reported.
Amazon's lawsuit contends it sent letters in September and October to the comptroller's office requesting "information related to the audit and the assessment" and an explanation of the basis for the assessment, but "auditors were not forthcoming with an explanation."
The comptroller's office refused to provide that information, arguing that it was protected by attorney-client privilege because "the entire file relating to the audit was 'prepared by an attorney,' and thus... protected from disclosure," according to the lawsuit. On December 16, an opinion issued by the Texas attorney general's office agreed with the comptroller's office, the American-Statesman wrote.
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There's a whole lot of reading going on up north. Last week, Canadians bought and borrowed more than 2.7 million books, according to a count organized by the National Reading Campaign. The study was conducted to draw attention to reading on the eve of this week's Reading Summit in Montreal.
The Globe & Mail reported that the survey, which covered about three-quarters of the book market and library systems serving 11.2 million Canadians, showed that "sales of 1,110,568 include books in both French and English sold by the Chapters-Indigo chain, Amazon.ca and 260 independent bookstores. Compiled from BookNet Canada, BookManager and la Société de gestion de la Banque de titres de langue française, they are estimated to represent 80% of English-language sales and 40% of French-language sales in Canada, but do not include digital downloads." The library circulation number of 1,604,378 was culled from 22 urban library systems.
One very important conclusion drawn from the results: "Organizers figure more Canadians picked out a book last week than watched hockey on TV."
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The e-book post-holiday season sales surge continues. For the third straight week, more than a third of the top 50 books on USA Today's bestselling books list sold more e-book copies than print versions.
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The L.A. Times Jacket Copy blog featured Stories Books and Cafe in Echo Park as its bookstore of the week, noting that co-owners Claudia Colodro and Liz Garo "opened the store in November 2008, when the economy was at its lowest. They'd been planning and getting the space ready for so long, they saw little to do but go forward."
"It was probably the worst time to open a business," Colodro said, "but it's only been up from there."
Jacket Copy noted that Stories "has a flavor that's particularly geared toward the tastes of the neighborhood: books about film, the arts, music, entertainment. It's the kind of place where you're equally likely to find a book on Caddyshack as one on Luis Bunuel--and where both are equally likely to be snapped up."
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Let the games begin: The Morning News unveiled the 16 contenders and the judges for its Seventh Annual Tournament of Books, presented by Field Notes and sponsored by Powell's Books.
"Each of these books was chosen because it was hyped," the Morning News wrote. "Or celebrated. Or not celebrated or hyped enough. Or because it won an award. Or because an individual (or individuals) we admire lobbied passionately for its inclusion. The point is, throughout the year we asked writers, booksellers, TMN readers and random people on airplanes for their favorite titles, and all of that information contributed to the process. Eventually, in a series of combative round-robin e-mails, a list of 16 books emerged from a much bigger pool. And it is not a comprehensive list. It is not definitive. People with axes to grind will find plenty to sharpen their axes on. We admit there are many multiples of 16 books that easily could have made this list.
"Every author who wrote an outstanding book in 2010 (and there were many) entered a lottery, and these 16 are the mostly arbitrary winners of that process. So it is with any award. We are happy to admit that truth. But we believe it is a very strong list."
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In the Guardian, Jon McGregor, author of Even the Dogs, chose "stories of lost lives that coalesce around a 'central absence.' " In other words, his picks for top 10 dead bodies in literature.
"Literature that focuses on a person made absent by death is about as old as literature itself; some of the first stories told were, I imagine, laments for those lost and speculations about where they might have gone," McGregor observed. "But the books I've chosen here are mostly ones where the dead body, although central, is only a starting point for a study of that person's life and the life of the people he or she was close to; and the stories which surround the dead person's body are given greater shape by coalescing around that central absence."
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Boing Boing showcased Xavier Antin's installation piece Just in Time, which "uses four devices spanning 100 years of desktop printing to generate a rather lovely book; each printer's output is the input for the next one down the line."
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Edgar Allan Poe turned 202 this week, and Mental Floss featured 5 Things You Didn’t Know About Edgar Allan Poe as well as a poetic rendition of Humpty Dumpty in the Style of Edgar Allan Poe, which begins:
Sat Humpty Dumpy all alone
Shrouded in a web of gloom
His fate as near as tomorrow's tomb
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It's time to play the ABCs of Amazon game again. The Millions noted that "Amazon, like many sites, employs an 'auto-complete' feature on its search box.... It's probably safe to assume that it suggests the most frequently searched words, so, if we look at Amazon's book section we can type in letters and discover, for each letter of the alphabet, the most popular searches on Amazon. Last time we did this, about a year and half ago, vampires were the dominant theme. This time around, the vampires have mostly disappeared and things are perhaps a touch more literary."When last we checked, "battle hymn of the tiger mother" topped "bible" when you typed in the letter b.
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Book trailer of the day: Great Philosophers Who Failed at Love by Andrew Shaffer (Harper Perennial). Shaffer noted: "My budget was $0. I couldn't afford any actors, so I had to use cats."