Prime Crime Mystery Bookstore, a popular shop in Ottawa’s Glebe neighbourhood, has announced it will close its doors on March 13th. The store opened in 1985, and owner Linda Wiken, who is also a crime writer, has been running it since 1995. Wiken told the Ottawa Citizen she had been trying to sell the store for over a year, and that it was “just time to move on.”

Despite the presence of big-box book retailers in Ottawa, Prime Crime carved out of a niche for itself. The 300-square-foot store with the skeleton in the window won the 2001 Canadian Booksellers Association award as specialty bookseller of the year.

Just because the greatest books rely on imagination and abstract images doesn’t mean the stores that sell them have to. Thankfully, some of them do anyway. A photoblog that will be of particular interest to book lovers (or indeed anyone who appreciates fine architecture).

As a buyer, I’ll admit to occasionally putting a book down because I want to compare prices with another bookstore or check the Internet at home. Apparently some iPhone programmers have too, because some of them created Snaptell, an app that, by simply photographing the cover of a book (or CD, or DVD, or video game), will automatically compare its price to those on the Internet and every store in your local area.

Understandably, the existence of such a technology is making some booksellers nervous. But as the L.A. Times notes, it’s unlikely book buyers will be willing to drive 20 minutes or spend another token on the subway just to save $2. And online sellers conveniently omit shipping and handling from their prices, which can easily add another $5 to the cover price (unless you’re spending more than $35 to begin with). So the only sellers who really need to worry are the ones who charge $5 or $10 more than the others, and they should be lowering their prices anyway.

As a customer, you have to admit it sounds convenient.

• Toronto bookseller Ben McNally is profiled at blogTO.
• The League of Canadian Poets has “declared” April 21 to be National Al Purdy Day. Says their release (which doesn’t seem to be online): “We invite all Canadian poets, and lovers of Canadian poetry to host a Purdy Party to raise funds to preserve this important cultural and heritage property.” (More on the “Let’s save Al Purdy’s house” movement here.)
• From the sublime to the etc., etc.: U.K. paper claims Britney Spears has signed deal to write series (!) of memoirs. No further comment.
• Some info on Q and A (the novel on which Best Picture Oscar nominee Slumdog Millionaire is based).

It’s the circle of life. Last week – the same week that saw what Pages Books & Magazines proprietor Marc Glassman refers to as a six-month “stay of execution” on the store’s lease – The Globe and Mail reported that another longtime Toronto independent, David Mirvish Books, would be shutting its doors for good at the end of February.

Eleanor Johnston, manager of the store for more than 25 years, said there was no one reason for the Feb. 28 closing. “David [Mirvish] just felt that it was time, that the retail world has indeed changed a lot…. [But] it’s not really a question of us not being able to weather those shifting sands, to mix metaphors. I think we just decided, ‘It’s enough; it’s time.’”

Although the demise of the much-loved Markham Street bookstore is unfortunate, Toronto book-lovers can at least comfort themselves with the news of Pages’ lease extension, and the imminent arrival of the Roxanne Reads New & Used Bookstore in Riverdale, and the long-awaited Toronto outlet of the prairie-based mini-chain McNally Robinson Books.

Last fall, Q&Q Omni reported that after 30 years at its current Queen Street West location, Toronto’s Pages Books & Magazines  was slated to move – or shut down – when the store’s lease expires at the end of February. However, it seems that Pages proprietor Marc Glassman has come to an understanding with his landlord, Pinedale Properties, to keep the store open, at least for now. In a message sent out to members of the This Is Not A Reading Series Facebook group, TINARS co-ordinator Chris Reed wrote:

After spending anxious months dealing with an uncertain future, Pages Books & Magazines has just been given a six-month extension on its historic Queen Street location. “We’re thrilled to be staying until at least the end of August,” says [Pages proprietor] Marc Glassman….

The release continues:

Community support over the next few months will be critical for Pages’ survival. “We’ll continue to work with Pinedale in hopes of securing a longer lease,” says Glassman. “Realistically, Pages will be looking for other locations as well. We look forward to forging partnerships, if possible, with like-minded enterprises and artist’s centres. We are heartened by the groundswell of community support for our predicament and look forward to continuing a dialogue about the role that Pages plays in the cultural life of Toronto. And we’ll certainly be talking to Councillor Vaughan about Pages’ relationship to the changing downtown environment.”

In the New York Times, Motoko Rich looks at the dying glitz and glam of the publishing world, which, according to Rich, once “came with a milieu that mixed cultural swagger with pure Manhattan high life.”

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.”

As part of the global celebrations marking the release of Q&Q’s annual “Books of the Year” issue, the World’s Biggest Bookstore in downtown Toronto has put together a display in its honour:

The display.

Not-at-all-suspicious-looking store manager Blake DesRoches sneaks a peek at the issue.

Now, before you decide you can avoid actually buying the issue to find out what we picked as books of the year, you should know that not all of the books displayed here are on the list, and not all of the books on the list are displayed here. So caveat emptor. And there’s no such thing as a free lunch.

• Margaret Atwood talks to Salon about her well-timed meditation on debt, Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth
• Are Canadian authors’ festivals the greatest?
• More gripes about those nasty chain bookstores
• Reed Elsevier beginning to look desperate in its sale of Reed Business Information
• The 10 most expensive Edgar Allan Poe books, as sold on Abebooks.com
• Gus Van Sant bears a striking resemblance to Tom Wolfe. Oh, and he’s planning a film version of The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test

Farley Mowat is the cover star of the November Q&Q, which is making its way to subscribers and bookstores now. In a profile by Marq de Villiers, the 87-year-old Mowat discusses some of the passions and preoccupations that have defined his career. Also in November, a closeup on two e-reading devices, the Sony Reader and Amazon’s Kindle, a look at hustler-turned-author Daniel Allen Cox, and a Special Report on College and Scholarly Publishing, covering the newly reduced Broadview Press, a new online textbook initiative, and the quirky Toronto imprint Alphabet City. All this plus reviews of new books by M.G. Vassanji, Nino Ricci, Margaret Atwood, and more. The full table of contents appears after the jump.

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