Globe and Mail columnist Sasha Chapman profiled Toronto landmark The Cookbook Store on Saturday. Chapman notes that the store’s history has coincided with an explosion in Canadian cookbook publishing and interest in homegrown meals.

Toronto’s culinary landscape looked very different when the Cookbook Store first opened its doors at the corner of Yonge and Yorkville in 1983. “That was back in the days of nouvelle cuisine. You know, you’d get three peas on your plate and then people would go home and eat a pizza,” Ms. Fryer recalled a few days later. Back then, devoting an entire shop to cookbooks seemed like a crackpot idea, and the words “Canadian” and “cuisine” almost never ended up in the same sentence together.

Now, look at us. The number of cookbooks published each year has increased more than tenfold. Food stories regularly make the front pages of newspapers. Television chefs command the kind of attention usually reserved for rock stars. And words such as “local” and “Canadian” are more likely to evoke pride than derision.

This year, the store has branched out into arranging events. One sold-out lecture featured author Michael Pollan, and store manager Alison Fryer has also brought a French chemist to Toronto to discuss molecular gastronomy.

Independent bookstores seem to be getting a lot of lovin’ from the media this week, with two different stores receiving full-on profile treatment.

First up is Halifax’s Frog Hollow Books, profiled in The Globe and Mail. Actually, the piece isn’t so much a profile as a letter of advice. (It appears to be part of a regular series of business advice columns.) The author, Stephen Clare, expresses concern about the recent closure of other Atlantic Canadian shops – like The Book Room (also in Halifax) and Bennington Gate in St. John’s – and proceeds to offer up suggestions to Frog Hollow owner Heidi Hallett about how she can stay competitive. Most of the advice he offers is no-brainer stuff, however, and it kind of comes across as if he thinks he can tell Hallett things she doesn’t already know.

The second profile is of Toronto’s This Ain’t the Rosedale Library, in eye weekly. As Q&Q readers already know, the shop is set to close its Church Street doors at the end of this month, but the new incarnation – in the city’s Kensington Market neighbourhood – is set to open within the next week or so. The piece offers up an interesting timeline of the store’s various incarnations, which go all the way back to 1979.

In case you hadn’t heard, tomorrow (May 3) is the seventh annual Free Comic Book Day, and comic book shops across the country will be handing out gratis goodies to all comers. Torontoist has a quick briefing today on some of the highlights you can expect:

This year’s selection of free comics is really fantastic. DC Comics offers a reprint of the first issue of Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely’s All Star Superman, widely regarded as the best Superman story in decades. Marvel Comics, not to be outdone, offers a brand new X-Men comic. Dark Horse offers up a Hellboy anthology, there’s free Archie and free The Simpsons comics, the Transformers, Gyro Gearloose, Gumby, and many, many more. There is a free comic for every taste: if you want cute owls frolicking in all-ages-suitable tales, there is Andy Runton’s Owly and Friends; if you want evil people being stabbed in the eyeball, there is an EC Comics Sampler.

Here’s a twist: Amazon UK is angry at British publishers for – wait for it – applying deep online discounts to their books.

From The Times:

An online price war for books has broken out, pitching Amazon against some of Britain’s biggest publishers.

Amazon is angry that Penguin, Bloomsbury and others are discounting titles on their websites, encouraging customers to buy direct instead of using the online retailer.

As nice as it is to see an online book retailer getting a taste of its own medicine, the end result will probably not be good for books:

There are fears that Amazon may retaliate by regarding a publisher’s online price as the recommended retail price and applying its trading terms to that. If a publisher discounts a £20 book to £15 online and Amazon has a contract for a 50 per cent discount on the full price, Amazon would pay the company £7.50 instead of £10. Publishers say that this would be unfair and could ultimately drive up prices.

From The Wall Street Journal:

Amazon.com Inc., flexing its muscles as a major book retailer, notified publishers who print books on demand that they will have to use its on-demand printing facilities if they want their books directly sold on Amazon’s Web site.

The move signals that Amazon is intent on using its position as the premier online bookseller to strengthen its presence in other phases of bookselling and manufacturing. Amazon is one of the biggest booksellers in the U.S., with a market share publishing experts estimate to be about 15%. Amazon doesn’t comment on sales.

The news appeared first on Writers Weekly, an e-zine for freelance writers. They have accumulated a huge number of links to stories about the move in the press and on the net and are providing daily updates.

Borders, the second-largest bookselling chain in the U.S., may be forced to sell itself off after hitting a financial crunch. Here are some takes on the chain’s troubles:

• Borders bookstore may be up for sale (Times Online)
• Giant Bookstore Chain Goes Broke, To Get Mopped Up By Even More Giant Bookstore Chain (Wired)
• Could Indigo target Borders? (The Globe and Mail)
• Did Borders kill the small, downtown bookstore? (MSNBC.com)
• The Rise and Fall of Borders (Gather.com)

While the Canadian publishing industry is taking a wait-and-see attitude toward e-books, the U.K. industry seems to be chomping at the bit to get on board. According to The Bookseller, two of the U.K.’s biggest book retailers – Waterstone’s and Borders – are preparing to get behind e-books in a very big way, prompting publishers to step up the production of titles.

Waterstone’s is in talks with publishers about the supply of e-books, and is understood to be planning a July launch for its programme. Borders is gearing up to sell e-books from its transactional website, which launches in April. Commercial director David Kohn said: “We hope to have an [e-book] offer in place by the end of 2008.” Gardners is also ramping up its e-book delivery service.

Agents are being inundated with requests from publishers to clear e-book rights at speed. Philippa Milnes-Smith of LAW, head of the Association of Authors’ Agents, expressed concerns that authors were being “rail-roaded”. She said: “We understand where publishers are coming from, but we’re concerned for authors that they get the right remuneration, and also that e-books are published to the same standard as printed books. Our overriding imperative is quality not speed.” Publishers are looking for blanket clearance of rights, she said. “We treat authors individually, not as a job lot.”

The industry’s burgeoning enthusiasm for e-books is especially notable in that the U.K. doesn’t even have the big e-reading devices yet – the Sony Reader and the Amazon Kindle are currently available only in the U.S. Basically, U.K. booksellers are just getting ready for the splashy U.K. launches of those devices later this year.

The 2006 Survey of Household Spending in Canada says that, despite an overall increase in consumption, “spending on reading materials decreased 5% to $260 per household.”

It seems that no one can stop the grim march of these stories about the death of reading. But there’s a silver lining: Canadians are now spending more on reading materials than on games of chance. Way to go, spending-on-reading!

One province is still reading, though. Thanks to the booming resource economy in the West, Alberta households are spending more than anyone else on entertainment. Mostly of the sporting and televisual variety, but spending on reading materials is up a healthy 8%. Seems like a good time to start marketing some books to Albertans.

Eye Weekly has a brief history of the World’s Biggest Bookstore in downtown Toronto. Apparently, it used to be a bowling alley. (Bring your own tenpins and a bowling ball and it still could be.)

The writer, Marc Weisblott, traces the evolution of the WBB from its awe-inspiring early days when it dwarfed all the other book stores (which were all 5’x11’ or smaller and sold flour and sugar too) to its Indigo-owned present day, when barnlike stores are the norm and one of the WBB’s biggest-selling titles is Mood Your Change – How to Mind Your Think by Feeling Your Toes (or something like that), which Weisblott takes as a marker of the store’s current identity.

Weisblott lumps the WBB in with such much-loved icons as Sam the Record Man and Honest Ed’s, but its history, while varied and quirky, has brought it to its present state of fluorescent lighting, grubby lino flooring, and Conrad Black via LongPen. Meanwhile, as Weisblott points out, the Yonge and Dundas intersection on which it squats is rapidly cleaning itself up. How long before the condo developers come calling?

So do you want to save the WBB? Do you want to save things just because they’re old and rich with history, or do you have to actually like them too?

Over at UFO Digest, a site dedicated to the paranormal, extraterrestrial, and the hypermundane (oh wait – that last one’s our beat), there is a first-person account of a woman and her mother being helped out by an “old man” in an occult book store. The man spoke with them, showed them books, and was, in all, a model bookseller.

He explained a lot of paranormal theory to me, heavy duty stuff. He would go into the back room and bring out books for me to read. Incredible books! Huge books!

Every so often the owner would go behind the counter next to the old man to ring up a sale. She was elbow to elbow with him.

The old man took me and my mom around the book store showing us books that would help me in my studies

I wrote a check for about $200 for the books I bought. My mom wrote a check for the books she bought. He rang them up on the till.

Sounds great; the only problem is, the old man didn’t exist.

[The owner] said there had not been an old man working there the night before or any other night. She would not believe us at all. The owner of the store thought we were nuts after that.

It may sound crazy – ghosts chatting up customers, bookstores accepting cheques for $200, etc. – but consider this: every used bookstore we’ve ever been in has contained at least one cat, the most oft-used familiar of paranormal entities. Coincidence?

The truth is out there – it may be hidden behind a teetering stack of unalphabetized paperbacks at the top of a set of too-narrow stairs in a musty room with bad lighting, but it’s out there.

Despite an unsteady book industry, The Guardian reports there is a growing appetite for self-publishing, citing the rapid growth of one of the first online print-on-demand publishers. Lulu, now five years old, is doubling in size every year and claims it publishes 4,000 new titles each week.

Lulu’s success has attracted traditional book retailer Borders to partner with it, and to launch a personal publishing program in 13 stores across the U.S.

In-store interactive kiosks will enable people to publish their own books-on-demand for just a few hundred dollars - though editing and marketing services cost extra. As for readers, well, what author can really count on those, anyway?

In the upcoming issue of Canadian Bookseller (not available online), Eleanor LeFave, owner of Mabel’s Fables and president of the Canadian Booksellers Association, weighs in on the pricing controversy with some painful memories from last fall:

I sat in the Minister of Finance Jim Flaherty’s office, explaining that our bookstores were full of inventory that we had suddenly paid too much for, hoping that he would tell Canadians that strong bookstores—not just cheap prices—were good for Canada too. He told us to find cheaper sources. We cajoled publishers and waited for help but most initiatives, when they came, were hard to administer and even harder to explain to our customers. We spoke patiently with the media, who were dangerously thick on the economics of retail. We asked for meetings with publishers but were told by lawyers that we could not meet to discuss pricing, lest we be accused of price-fixing.

LeFave also laments the recent closing of Halifax’s The Book Room, the lack of mention of “the powers of traditional booksellers” in the recent Canadian Heritage report on book retailing, and the general decline of the indie sector. “Will someone care to measure how long it takes before the loss of this literary meeting place affects reading and book-purchasing levels and even affects sales in loss-leader book retailers?”

Now that the crisis over parity and pricing has eased somewhat – at least for the moment – we can again turn our attention to a more pressing issue in books: how can we get them for free?

The easiest way to get free books is to work in publishing (or at, say, a publishing industry magazine), but there are millions and millions of readers – or, at least, thousands and thousands – out there who are not so lucky, and who are thus still paying money for books. And so, for them, here is the latest in free book news:

• HarperCollins will post free books on the web (The New York Times)
• Tor to give away e-books (Slashdot)
• Not free, but close: Random House U.S. will sell books online, chapter by chapter (The Wall Street Journal)
• But don’t forget: free books are rarely free (CNN Money.com)

Last year, the Department of Canadian Heritage commisioned a report entitled The Book Retail Sector in Canada, which was releases late last month. (You can read the whole report here.)

Its key findings probably won’t knock the wind out of anyone familiar with Canadian bookselling and publishing. To wit:

• The Canadian book retail sector is highly concentrated.
• New sales channels are emerging.
• Exchange rates are fuelling imports.
• The supply of books in the Canadian market is growing much more quickly than is consumer demand.

The report concludes that Canadian bookselling and reading habits are affected by similar changes and forces as in other Western industrialized nations, that Chapters-Indigo dominates to a potentially unhealthy degree, and that “Canada’s book retail sector faces many challenges today, but many opportunities, too.”

(For more on these developments, see Quill & Quire magazine, passim.)

A Brooklyn woman has won $15,000 in start-up cash from the Brooklyn Public Library for her design of an independent neighbourhood bookstore. Her plan is so crazy it just might work: “a small bookstore with a cafe, a wine bar, lots of wood and lots of brick,” she told the Daily News.

Giant bookstore chains such as Borders and Barnes & Noble don’t intimidate Jessica Stockton-Bagnulo one bit. She’s dreaming of someday opening a small, successful Brooklyn bookshop.

“It’s not impossible for an independent bookstore to survive, even when large chains are nearby,” said Stockton-Bagnulo, 29, of Park Slope.

A Canadian connection is that Stockton-Bagnulo, AKA The Written Nerd, is the events co-ordinator at McNally Robinson’s Manhattan location, which opened in 2004. It looks like the Winnipeg-based indie retailer is facing stiff competition – even from within.

The Guardian has put together a list of the 10 prettiest looking bookstores in the world, and though not all of their selections are eye-poppers, they’ve certainly found some doozies. The first two, in particular – located in Denmark and Argentina – are extry splendid, but it has to be noted that they were converted from old cathedrals and theatres, which is kind of cheating.

We’re sorry to report that no Canadian shops made the cut, but then, a full three of the 10 shops are in the U.K., so clearly there’s a bit of bias going on. This Quillblogger actually prefers the small and cozy sort of shops to the grand and imposing ones, two particular faves being Toronto’s elegant Theatre Books and Halifax’s low-ceilinged, overstuffed comic shop Strange Adventures.

Feel free to nominate any of your own personal favourites in the comments section below.

As New York Times critic Dwight Garner highlights on his blog, Abebooks is reporting on its website that collectible editions of Barack Obama’s Dreams from My Father, the Democrat hopeful’s 1995 autobiography, have sold through the site for as much as $1,798. Garner has also dug up one ad in which a Nashville-based bookseller is asking a whopping $2,889 for a signed first edition of the memoir.

Abebooks is also reporting that Hillary Clinton’s memoir, Living History, has sold for as much as $575. At the time of this writing, a quick search of the site revealed that some booksellers are now asking just over $1,100 for the title.

Of course, it would be foolish to think that speculation among rare book collectors has any bearing on the presidential primary currently underway in New Hampshire – but still, it is an entertaining notion. And as the Abebooks article duly points out, things aren’t looking good for John Edwards:

Rounding out the top three Democrat candidates is John Edwards and his memoir Four Trials. Signed copies can be picked up for a bargain price of just $99.

The answer is “yes,” according to Bits, The New York Times’s tech blog:

For years it was impossible to even suggest that Amazon buy eBay because eBay’s market value was three or four times that of Amazon. And there was good reason for that: EBay’s margins have been far higher because it simply moves bits around, while Amazon has to move boxes (and take the risk of owning inventory it can’t sell).

Now the tables are turning. Amazon is in favor on Wall Street. Its shares are up 150 percent over the last year, giving it a market value of $38 billion. EBay’s stock has been flat for a year, and it is now worth only a little more than Amazon at $45 billion.

Amazon has been improving its margins, in part because it is increasingly acting as a broker for goods sold by other merchants (and doing a better job for new merchandise than eBay stores or eBay’s Shopping.com). Amazon’s margins, to be fair, have been hurt because it is paying for a lot of two-day shipping under its Amazon Prime program. Amazon also has a wild card in its growing sideline business of selling storage and processing services to other Web businesses.

The real question, as far as we’re concerned, is, “Should some restless and massively rich tech company looking for a little lit-cachet buy Quillblog?” The answer to that is also “yes,” provided that we are guaranteed total editorial freedom, paid handsomely and by the word, and that each contributor is provided with a summer residence located near water.

Let the bidding begin.

Christopher Smith, co-owner of Collected Works bookstore in Ottawa, says pressure from consumers unhappy with the gap between U.S. and Canadian prices on books has spurred the store to sell dual-priced books for the U.S. price as a short-term promotion that will last until Dec. 31. Earlier this month, The Ottawa Citizen reported that the store’s owners decided to take this action in light of the Canadian dollar’s continued rise in value relative to the U.S. dollar.

Mr. Smith said the industry cites many reasons for pricing Canadian books differently, including the fact that many books were released months ago when the Canadian dollar was far weaker than the U.S. dollar.

“The consumer doesn’t really care about that,” he said, adding that the promotion will take a financial toll on his store. “We are definitely going to take a loss when we do this.”

Pat Caven, manager at the competing Perfect Books, said selling at that price wouldn’t cover costs, and so her bookstore wouldn’t be following Collected Works’ lead.

The promotion may make book-buyers merry, but just what kind of holiday cheer it brings to the Ottawa bookstore remains to be seen.

Click here for more on this issue from Q&Q Omni

When the Man Booker longlist was announced last August, pundits were somewhat surprised that many of the year’s biggest authors – Sebastian Faulks, J.M. Coetzee, Michael Ondaatje – were left off. After yesterday’s shortlist announcement, however, they’re positively hornswoggled. The most disturbing element of the list, according to The Telegraph, is that all but one of the authors – Ian McEwan – are practically unheard of, and that a full four of them have sold less than a thousand copies of their books.

While McEwan’s novella, On Chesil Beach, has been a runaway commercial success, selling more than 100,000 copies, one of his rivals for the prize, Animal’s People, loosely based on the Bhopal chemical plant explosion, by the Indian author Indra Sinha, had sold just 231 copies in [the U.K.] by mid-August, 10 days after its sales were supposedly given a major boost by being longlisted.

Nicola Barker’s Darkmans had sold only 499 copies. Anne Enright’s The Gathering had fared a little better with sales of 834 sales, Mister Pip had sales of 880 and of McEwan’s rivals, only Pakistani author Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist broke the four-figure barrier, with 1,519 readers buying it.

Every year, the rare and used books website Bookfinder.com releases a bestseller list of out-of-print books, and this year’s list has now been unveiled. Some of the highlights are Cameron Crowe’s Fast Times at Ridgemont High: A True Story, Jessica Simpson’s now forebodingly titled I Do: Achieving Your Dream Wedding, David Manners’ The Great Tool Emporium, which describes itself as “a pictorial extravaganza of the tools of yesterday and today,” and photographer Larry Clark’s too-icky-to-ever-be-printed-again Teenage Lust.

You can see the full list – which has been broken down into several categories – here.

This week’s Friday photo comes courtesy of Flickr user bryandscott74 and depicts a tiny bookstore somewhere in west Yellowstone. We think it demonstrates fairly conclusively that, when it comes to bookselling, moody lighting and a spire can only help. Oh, and you can never be too obvious when naming your store.

Have you recently attended a book reading, library event, or author appearance? Have some interesting book-related pictures you want to share? If you’ve got photos of the Canadian book scene, we’d love to see them. Send them to us or sign up through Flickr and submit your images.

According to a website called China View, Malaysian readers are scooping up pirated editions of the final Harry Potter installment in droves.

Cashing in on the popularity of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, pirates have mass-produced paperback editions which are retailed at 48 ringgit (14 U.S. dollars) each, the New Straits Times reported.

They are available at selected news vendors and bookstores, some of whom are selling the books at 60 ringgit (18 U.S. dollars) but with a 20 percent discount.

Checks at several news vendors and bookstores showed that the pirated book copied the original version wholesale, from its front and back covers and publisher’s logo to even the barcode.

Apparently, the pirated editions are selling like hotcakes, especially among the country’s student population. No word yet if the book’s Malaysian publisher will be cracking down on this, but we’re sure that Bloomsbury and Rowling herself are feeling very disappointed with the Malays right about now.

Residents of Seattle’s Mercer Island will be the first targets for a new pilot project by Amazon.com called Amazon Fresh. According to an article on seattlepi.com, Amazon Fresh is a new home grocery delivery service, similar to that offered by companies like Grocery Gateway.

“It’s just starting out, and it’s very small. We are in the early-stage beta test, and it’s a better way to serve our grocery customers,” said Craig Berman, an Amazon.com spokesman. “We are offering a great selection and great prices at a really convenient experience.”

Berman said Amazon Fresh would offer items found in a local grocery store, including organic and non-organic fruits and vegetables, dairy products, ice cream, meat, fish, health and personal care items, cereal, chips and soda.

The program lets customers order online and then have the products delivered the next day during a one-hour time slot of their choosing.

We know that Amazon has been dealing in non-book goods for a long time now, but there’s something about this new venture – and the way  Amazon seems to see books and heads of lettuce as basically interchangeable – that makes us want to crawl back into bed.

(Incidentally, the seattlepi piece goes on to note that, for the moment, books will not be included among grocery items. But if there has to be an Amazon home grocery service, wouldn’t it be better if books were included?)

According to The Guardian, the Borders bookstore chain in Great Britain has decided to move copies of Tintin in the Congo from the children’s section of its stores to the adult graphic novels section, after being pressured to do so by a human rights group.

The Commission for Racial Equality said yesterday it was unacceptable for any shop to stock or sell the 1930s cartoon adventure of the Belgian boy journalist because of its crude racial stereotypes.

The book, which includes a scene where Tintin is made chief of an African village because he is a “good white man” and a black woman bowing to Tintin saying: “White man very great … white mister is big juju man!” was highly offensive, a spokeswoman from the commission said.

She added that the only place the book was acceptable was in a museum - with a sign accompanying it saying “old-fashioned, racist claptrap”.

As The Guardian explains, however, the book already includes a foreward acknowledging the colonial stereotypes, which you would think would mitigate the problem. In any case, this spokesperson from the Commission for Racial Equality might come off a little more reasonable if she didn’t shrilly pronounce the entire book “claptrap.” How about Moby Dick? How about The Birth of a Nation? How about the entire endless litany of artworks that contain outdated values and beliefs? Let’s put ‘em all in museums and never engage with them again! That’ll make the world a better place…

Kudos, however, to Borders for not buckling to the Thought Police and banning it altogether.

Though graphic novels have attained a strong level of acceptance among traditional prose readers, comic stores still don’t seem to be making an effort to embrace those readers. As Douglas Wolk argues in an essay on Salon, “comics culture” is still just as closed-off and unwelcoming to the casual reader as it’s ever been, and, as he sees it, it’s time for things to change.

Over the last half century, comics culture has developed as an insular, self-feeding, self-loathing, self-defeating fly-trap. A lot of the people who hit their local comics store every Wednesday think of comics readers as some kind of secret, embattled fellowship. (That’s why most comics stores are deeply unfriendly places: everything about them says, “You mean you don’t know?” In some of them, even new pamphlets and books are sealed in plastic before they go out on the shelves; if you don’t walk into the store knowing what you want, you’re not going to find out.) It’s a poisonous mind-set for any number of reasons, the biggest one being that to enjoy a comic book, you either have to be a Comics Person or be able to explain why you’re not really a Comics Person.

As Wolk sees it, comics fans continue to act insular because they’re still a little insecure about the aesthetic worth of the medium.

A lot of comics readers are unhealthily attached to the idea that everyone else thinks what they do is kind of trashy and disreputable, and that they have to prove their favorite leisure activity worthy of respect — to show the world that they were right all along. […] It’s probably time to let go of that strain of earnest defensiveness. The snobbery of the rest of American culture toward comics is, if not entirely gone, dissipating quickly.

As you’ve probably heard by now, the U.S.-based McSweeney’s is appealling to its readership to help them out of a financial jam, one brought on by the 2006 collapse of its distributor, AMS. They’re offering a discount of 30% off new titles and 50% off backlist in order to bump up orders, as well as auctioning off works by Art Spiegelman, Miranda July, and several others. Now, Salon has posted a piece about McSweeney’s’ difficulties and about the similar difficulties faced by all small presses post-AMS.

The bankrupt company in question, Advanced Marketing Services, was the parent company of Publishers Group West, which distributed books for more than 130 independent book publishers. “For us the timing was particularly bad,” says Eli Horowitz, the publisher of McSweeney’s Books, which has lost about $130,000 in actual earnings as a result of the bankruptcy. “We had a new Nick Hornby book and [Dave Eggers’] ‘What Is the What,’ which was our best seller of all time.”

But it looks as if things are improving, or at least for McSweeney’s anyway:

Horowitz says McSweeney’s has received “thousands of orders in the last few days,” [and says] “In a way this feels like a whole town coming together, and to me, this is all of a piece with what we’re about.”

Sometimes it’s fun to be reminded that what’s considered business as usual within the book industry is shocking and distasteful to civilians hearing about it for the first time. In the U.K., the Times Online has uncovered the fees that the British bookselling chain Waterstone’s charges publishers for various Christmas-related displays and promotion. They break down as follows:

£45,000 For one book to appear in window and front-of-store displays, and in Waterstone’s national press and TV advertisement campaign

£25,000 To feature in a bay at front of store as a ‘gift book’ in its genre and be displayed at the till

£17,000 To be one of two titles promoted as the ‘offer of the week’ for one week in the run-up to Christmas

£7,000 To be displayed at front of store as a ‘paperback of the year’ and be mentioned in newspaper adverts.

£500 Price of an entry in Waterstone’s Christmas gift guide, complete with a bookseller review

For context, the reporters talk to several booksellers and publishers – eliciting mostly justification from the former and resignation from the latter – and also to consumers at the Piccadilly Waterstone’s, who “said they were appalled by the practice.” Among the customer comments were, “It’s disgraceful” and “It’s a con.”

BookNet Canada CEO Michael Tamblyn spoke at a Saturday morning seminar on “Digitization and the Future of Canadian Bookselling,” which focused on e-readers. In order to assess the viability of the medium, Tamblyn himself tried a 30-day no-paper diet in mid-April.

He found that while the software posed problems and the Sony Reader he used was initially hard to hold, he soon succumbed to the e-charms. He could carry about 80 books with him at once, the Reader wasn’t hard on the eyes because he could increase the font size, and the machine’s battery life was excellent. “There were lots of things I liked about the e-book experience … and all of the annoyances are solvable by engineering,” Tamblyn concluded, reminding the 40-odd attendees, “these are first-generation devices.”

But Tamblyn said he still sees a future for bookstores. He advised celebrating the books themselves, using the physical environment and face-to-face communications and recommendations offered in bookstores. “It’s about taking the role not of a stock-keeper, but a curator,” he said.

Tamblyn also sparked a minor controversy among the attendees when he suggested abandoning the practice of ordering books for individual customers. To that, one bookseller said he caters to a readership of women 35 and over who want to special-order because they don’t want to use the Internet; other members of the audience reacted with incredulity, saying that women ages 35 to 65 are the group most likely to shop online.

(On another note, someone else is apparently trying out the Sony Reader this weekend. Marketing research consultant Dan Aronchick passed his around in a seminar he conducted on Friday, and one of the attendees managed to walk off with it.)

Getting rid of extra stock is a perpetual headache for most booksellers (not to mention publishers). If returns aren’t an option, deep discounts aren’t working, and no one will take them as donations, what do you do?

A used bookstore owner in Kansas City, Missouri, has an idea: burn them! Publicly!

Tom Wayne has amassed thousands of books in a warehouse during the 10 years he has run his used book store, Prospero’s Books. His collection ranges from best sellers, such as Tom Clancy’s “The Hunt for Red October” and Tom Wolfe’s “Bonfire of the Vanities,” to obscure titles, like a bound report from the Fourth Pan-American Conference held in Buenos Aires in 1910. But when he wanted to thin out the collection, he found he couldn’t even give away books to libraries or thrift shops; they said they were full.

So on Sunday, Wayne began burning his books in protest of what he sees as society’s diminishing support for the printed word.

“This is the funeral pyre for thought in America today,” Wayne told spectators outside his bookstore as he lit the first batch of books.

The fire blazed for about 50 minutes before the Kansas City Fire Department put it out because Wayne didn’t have a permit for burning.

Wayne said next time he will get a permit. He said he envisions monthly bonfires until his supply — estimated at 20,000 books — is exhausted.

Wayne admits the burning was a “knee-jerk reaction,” but also claims “it’s a good excuse for fun.”

Really, what could be more fun and uplifting than a book burning? Though if you really want to get people talking (not to mention reading), why not display some of those titles – along with some unsold paintings from your local art store – as part of a homemade Entartete Kunst exhibit? We all love forbidden fruit! Free balloons for the kids!

A bit of New York literary history ended yesterday, the New York Times reports, as the inventory of Gotham Book Mart in midtown Manhattan was sold off to the highest bidder. The bookstore had served as a sort of salon, and its stock included books signed by John Updike and Anaïs Nin, but last fall a judge evicted the store owner and ordered an auction over a claim of more than a half-million dollars in rent owed.

The auction was unusual in that the building’s landlord had bid $400,000 for everything, and unless the cumulative amount raised by auctioning individual items topped that figure, the landlord would get everything – which he did. That left a lot of disappointed collectors, dealers, and sentimental customers.

The staff had been working feverishly to catalog the vast inventory ever since a move three years ago to 16 East 46th Street from 41 West 47th Street. Many of the boxes remained unpacked. The store set up a Web site with pictures of the interior with its antique wood paneling. But the staff never managed to itemize the inventory online.

On the fifth floor, an elderly dealer from Ireland saw near the top of a pile a box that was rumored to include books from the James Joyce Literary Society, which convened quarterly at Gotham for about 60 years. He could not reach it.

“I came back from Ireland just for this disaster,” the dealer, Sean Crean, said before the auction began. “There’s no catalog; there’s no lot numbers.”

A teary Andreas Brown, the store owner, said he hoped there would be another incarnation of the Gotham Book Mart somewhere, but the landlord plans to sell the property that was its former home.

According to the U.S.-based news service PR Newswire, the Canadian educational publisher Thomson Nelson has been purchased by two major financial investment companies – Apax Partners and OMERS Capital Partners – as part of a larger acquisition of Thomson Learning. Apax is a U.S.-based private equity firm, while OMERS is one of Canada’s largest pension plan providers; it is the latter firm that will be taking on majority ownership of Thomson Nelson, presumably in order to satisfy Canadian ownership rules.

On May 11, 2007, funds advised by Apax Partners announced the signing of definitive agreements with The Thomson Corporation, under which such funds, together with funds advised by OMERS Capital Partners, will acquire the higher education, career learning and library reference assets of Thomson Learning and Nelson Canada for a combined total value of approximately $7.75 billion in cash.

Though the transaction appears to be a done deal, the sale will not be officially completed until the third quarter of this year, following regulatory approvals.

Company officials did not return calls on Tuesday, but watch for future updates in Q&Q Omni.

Microsoft CEO Bill Gates delivered a lengthy speech about the future of media and advertising last Tuesday at a conference in Seattle, and he spent a fair portion of it talking specifically about the future of print. Seattle-based technology blogger Todd Bishop has posted several excerpts from Gates’ speech, including this one:

Reading is going to go completely online. We believe that as we get the smaller form factor, the screen has gotten good enough. Why is reading online better? It’s up to date, you can navigate, you can follow links. The ads in the online reading are completely targeted as opposed to just being run-of-print, where many of the readers will find them completely irrelevant. The ads can be in new and richer formats. In fact the only drawbacks of the digital form are the things associated with the device: how big is it, heavy is it, how many hours of power does it have, how much do I have to spend to buy it? But those are things that once you achieve that threshold, in terms of the convenience and the cost, then you see a dramatic change in behavior. […] Somewhere in the next five-year period we’ll hit that transition point, and things will be even more dramatic than they are today.

Not that Gates would be biased toward technology or anything. A more convincing examination of the future of e-reading can be found on the Guardian’s website, where author and technophobe Andrew Marr writes about his month-long experience using the iRex Iliad, which has been touted as one of the first truly usable e-readers on the market.

(Thanks to Quillblog reader Jennifer Lambert for pointing out the Gates link.)

The Tyee recently posted a good-news/bad-news article about the state of books in B.C. The good news is that local publishers are doing well and the Vancouver International Writers Festival is putting the province on the literary map. The bad news is that “there’s less about B.C. in locally produced books.” As BC Bookworld publisher Alan Twigg tells The Tyee, “I don’t perceive a strengthening of the B.C. literary climate…. it’s harder to find culturally newsworthy books about B.C. in 2007 than 1997.” And Twigg and others blame a familiar culprit: the big-box phenomenon and the decline of the independent bookselling sector.

Margaret Atwood finds items that are “quite offensive” when she browses online, at least on Amazon.com.

According to an article from The Times, Atwood spoke out against online book browsing at the London Book Fair last week: “You are not going to get the same experience on the net. Amazon is trying, by saying, ‘If you like this book you might like this other book’, but it’s often something quite offensive that they suggest.”

Fellow author Kazuo Ishiguro also enjoys wandering the shelves but says he finds the Internet more useful for research purposes. However, the practice occasionally backfires.

“Amazon’s recommendations were often amusingly useless, he added. ‘One of the last books I bought was a study guide to one of my old books, The Remains of the Day. Now they keep recommending my own books to me’.”

Peter Darbyshire, author and columnist for Vancouver’s The Province, has decided to set free his first novel, Please, by making it downloadable from his website. Please, which was originally published by Raincoast in 2002, won the ReLit Award for Best Novel, as well as the K.M. Hunter Award for Best Emerging Artist. On his blog, Darbyshire writes that he decided to make the book freely available because copies of it were becoming hard to come by through traditional retail channels. (Though it is still technically available online at Amazon and elsewhere.)

More and more authors, such as Cory Doctorow, are opting for the free route right off the bat, figuring that a wide readership is better than the paltry income likely to come from a regular publishing deal. Setting free a book that has gone out of print or that has dropped out of sight retail-wise seems to be an even easier decision to make, one that could potentially give a book a second life, albeit a likely non-remunerative one.

Letting go of anything is tough, however, and perfect-binding is probably tougher to let go of than most.

This week’s Friday photo is from a Flickr photographer identified only as gbalogh, who documents Toronto neighbourhoods, architecture, and grafitti. Quillblog speculates that the artist who painted this wall may be a fan of Silver Snail Comics on Toronto’s Queen Street West. Or maybe just of escargots?

Have you recently attended a book reading, library event, or author appearance? Have some interesting book-related pictures you want to share? If you’ve got photos of the Canadian book scene, we’d love to see them. Send them to us or sign up through Flickr and submit your images.

As frequent readers of Quillblog can attest, reading is sexy. Now we can share the message through clothing and accessories.

The website buyolympia is selling T-shirts, buttons, bags, and bumper stickers with the slogan “reading is sexy,” accompanied by a picture of a girl peering over the edge of her oval glasses. Available in styles for him or her, the shirts come in various colours.

Oprah has just announced the latest selection for her book club, and it’s kinda weird: Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. Even at the best of times, McCarthy’s prose is rather lacking in daily-affirmation material, but The Road is especially dark. Here’s how author Denis Lehane describes the book in his Amazon.com review:

Cormac McCarthy sets his new novel, The Road, in a post-apocalyptic blight of gray skies that drizzle ash, a world in which all matter of wildlife is extinct, starvation is not only prevalent but nearly all-encompassing, and marauding bands of cannibals roam the environment with pieces of human flesh stuck between their teeth. If this sounds oppressive and dispiriting, it is.

Now here’s how Oprah describes it on her website:

Start reading Oprah’s newest book club selection! It’s the father-son journey you’ll never forget.

Isn’t this a little like describing The Shining as a sweet family comedy?

Rather than provide free advertising by wearing clothing from corporations that can easily afford to buy marketing campaigns, why not encourage literacy by wearing what you read?

The website Literary Rags produces literary themed t-shirts from the works of dramatists, poets, novelists, and philosophers. Each shirt has a portrait of the artist (though not necessarily as a young man) on the front and a quotation printed on the back. Arthur Miller, Anton Chekhov, Emily Dickinson, Matsuo Basho, William S. Burroughs, Toni Morrison, David Hume, and Søren Kierkegaard are only a few of the writers who get the T-shirt treatment. The intro page for the site also includes audio readings of Jack Kerouac, Charles Bukowski, Langston Hughes, and Dylan Thomas.

An Edmonton poetry house, Rubicon Press, is also using clothing to support their poets. To learn how, check out Q&Q’s Special Report on the Prairies in our March issue – in stores now.