The data, provided by Nielsen BookScan, include nationwide sales information from Barnes & Noble, Target and other big-box brick-and-mortar retailers, from Amazon.com and from some independent booksellers. Nielsen estimates that BookScan captures 75% of print book sales in the U.S. retail market.

BookScan’s sales tallies do not currently include sales of e-books, for the Kindle or other devices.

Authors who use Amazon’s Author Central will see a geographic sales map of books sold during a four-week window, with a lag of about a week. Early Thursday, the sales figures displayed included Nov. 1 to 28; later Thursday, Amazon expects a new week to load, so the information will span Nov. 8 through Dec. 5.

This is the closest thing to real-time aggregate sales data available to publishers, and it hasn’t been cheap. Nielsen’s BookScan, now a decade old, began to find widespread enrollment with major publishers in 2004, when fees ran $100,000 and more per year.

It would have been far beyond the reach of most individual authors, if it had been available to them.

Taking the argument one step further, GalleyCat asks the provocative question, “Literary agents … Who needs them?”

One published author who asks to be unnamed disagrees [that agents still serve a useful purpose], “What do you need an agent for anymore, really? Why? To negotiate a meager advance? You can’t get them on the phone anyway. You’re stuck promoting the book yourself because publishers don’t put any marketing dollars into your book unless you’re John Grisham. I don’t see the whole point when I can hire an attorney to negotiate my publishing contract for a flat fee or just upload the book to Kindle myself.”

It is hardly surprising, then, that one of the first reports coming out of the fair is a positive one. From Publisher’s Weekly:

On Wednesday, the fair’s final day, attendees were walking the show floor in the early morning, and meeting tables at most stands continued to be filled. “Overall attendance may not be that great, but the quality of the attendance has been phenomenal,” said Frank Daniels, chief commercial officer of Ingram Digital. “People are very focused,” he said, and those who did show up “came to do business.”

The life of the children’s book illustrator
How the stars of Canadian picture books deal with authors, publishers, and workloads (behind-the-scenes sketches included!)

Spring previews
A close-up on the season’s hottest upcoming books in fiction, non-fiction, children’s books, and international titles

Cross-border shipping (and selling)
Hachette’s new set-up is a game-changer for the Canadian book biz. But it remains to be seen who will win or lose

Retreating advances?
With the economy tanking, agents and authors brace for hard times

FRONTMATTER

• The new/old face of fiction
• Reisman’s green gamble
• Building a universe
• CanLit award follies: the past 10 years
• Watch Your Language: Tricky questions of tone
• Snapshot: John Degen of the Ontario Arts Council
• Local Buzz: Lord Selkirk: A Life
• Cover to Cover: Kid Rex

GUEST OPINION

Jack Illingworth on the real e-publishing opportunities – and the real risks of e-piracy

SPECIAL REPORT: CHILDREN’S AND EDUCATIONAL PUBLISHING

• More CanCon? More or less
• The fight for e-schoolbooks

REVIEWS

• The Almost Archer Sisters by Lisa Gabriele
• To Whom It May Concern by Priscila Uppal
• Having Faith in the Polar Girls’ Prison by Cathleen With
• I & I by George Elliott Clarke
• Plus more fiction, non-fiction, and poetry

BOOKS FOR YOUNG PEOPLE

• Boo Hoo Bird by Jeremy Tankard
• Bradley McGogg, the Very Fine Frog by Tim Beiser and Rachel Berman
• Stanley’s Beauty Contest by Linda Bailey and Bill Slavin
• Big and Small, Room for All by Jo Ellen Bogart and Gillian Newland
• Plus more fiction, non-fiction, and picture books

THE Q&Q/BOOKNET CANADA BESTSELLERS

THE LAST WORD
Kenneth Whyte on how the hardest part of writing a first book is letting go

Stark contrasts are drawn between company parties past and those planned for the future: Macmillan, which announced mass restructuring and layoffs in mid-December last year, will trade their Hotel del Coronado spring list meeting venue for meetings via webcam. Simon & Schuster cancelled its holiday party, while one division of Random House had pizza and beer in a cafeteria room. Other “glittery and cozy traditions” of the industry that are being clamped down upon are flights, hotel bills, cocktail hours, and, of course, the lunch tabs.

Nobody expects one of the staples of the business — the long lunch — to die off completely because of these straitened circumstances. But publishers, editors and literary agents, who have often been among the best diners in the city, are now reconsidering their favorite restaurants.

Besides the flash, though, other aspects of the publishing business are being examined, like distribution of advance print galleys, the return of unsold books by retailers, and cash advances for authors.

At HarperCollins a new unit is experimenting with a model that substitutes profit sharing with authors for cash advances and eliminates returns of unsold copies from booksellers.

Jonathan Galassi, publisher of the literary powerhouse Farrar, Straus & Giroux, said the custom of accepting returns from booksellers was created during the Great Depression to persuade bookstores to take more copies. “In a moment where getting people to put stock in a store of anything, not just books, is harder because of the money it costs to front them,” Mr. Galassi said. “I think it might be counterproductive to have a return-free business at this point.”

Much hand-wringing ensues, with various industry types implying that business can only be conducted over the consumption of expensive food in trendy restaurants. It should be noted that the article also includes a few voices of reason on the issue, but let’s ignore those and highlight instead one agent’s attempt to explain why she should continue dining out on someone else’s dime most days:

Ann Rittenberg, an independent literary agent based downtown, said she is taken to lunch several times a week at restaurants like Bar Americain and Molyvos. She said in an interview that the money publishers spend on her and her fellow agents is well worth it.

“It’s one of the best marketing tools that the editorial department of a publishing house has,” Ms. Rittenberg said. “Because really, I do find out at lunches what I need to know in order to match an editor with a book.”

Funny stuff. Also amusing is the view put forth by some that “the notion that lunch as a ritual is fading signals a sorry chapter in the history of [the] industry.” Let’s see: ever-increasing competition from other media, a tough retail landscape dominated by a few major players, blockbuster-or-bust acquisition practices, the ongoing conundrums of engaging young readers and figuring out a viable digital business model…. But the real worry is the loss of parmesan-encrusted venison over mushroom ragout.

Kavanagh represented some heavy hitters in the literary world, including Joanna Trollope, John Irving, and William Trevor (not to mention her husband), but she was perhaps equally well known for the scandals that seemed to follow her throughout the upper echelons of the British writing and publishing community. In 1995, she was dropped by her most famous client, Martin Amis, in favour of Andrew Wylie, nicknamed “The Jackal,” who managed to secure the author a £500,000 advance for his novel The Information. The split with Kavanagh caused a very public falling out between Amis and Barnes, who had previously been close friends and snooker buddies.

Then last year, Kavanagh caused a stir once again by resigning from the British agency Peters, Fraser and Dunlop, and inciting a raft of other agents to follow her. Kavanagh’s departure and its attendent fallout caused the editorial director of one British publishing house to confess to the London Times that the sedate and sophisticated bonhomie of London’s literati is largely a façade: “On the surface we all get on brilliantly, but on a personal level we all f***ing loathe each other.”

The notice in The Bookseller is very brief, and gives no indication of the cause of death. The only direct quote in the piece is from a spokesperson for United Agents, the firm that Kavanagh helped establish after leaving PFD:

“Pat Kavanagh was an exceptional agent and a great friend. We all owe her a tremendous amount. She was an extraordinary presence who was much loved and will be greatly missed by her colleagues and her clients. All our thoughts are with Julian at this difficult time.”

The demise of publishing has been predicted since the days of Gutenberg. But for most of the past century–through wars and depressions–the business of books has jogged along at a steady pace. It’s one of the main (some would say only) advantages of working in a “mature” industry: no unsustainable highs, no devastating lows. A stoic calm, peppered with a bit of gallows humor, prevailed in the industry.

Survey New York’s oldest culture industry this season, however, and you won’t find many stoics. What you will find are prophets of doom, Cassandras in blazers and black dresses arguing at elegant lunches over What Is to Be Done. Even best-selling publishers and agents fresh from seven-figure deals worry about what’s coming next. Two, five years from now–who knows? Life moves fast in the waning era of print; publishing doesn’t.

As for how to solve the problems currently plaguing the industry, Kachka says:

[....] As a series of interrelated challenges, they constitute a full-blown crisis–a climate change as unpredictable as it is inevitable. And like global warming, it elicits reactions ranging from denial to Darwinian survivalism to determined stabs at warding off disaster–attempts not to recapture some long-lost era but to harness new, untapped sources of power. That is, if it’s not too late.

(Cue ominous musical soundtrack…)

Today, the Guardian reports that Danish publisher Trykkefrihedsselskabets Library (Free Speech Library) is negotiating with Jones’s agent, Natasha Kern, to publish the novel in Denmark.

[Free Speech Library] co-owner Helle Merete Brix said that the fact that Random House was prepared to pay $100,000 for the book showed its quality, and that she was determined not to “bow to any censorship.”

Brix expects the negotiations to conclude on Friday. This Quillblogger expects Brix will hand over a lot of Danish kroner.