Book links round-up: Sarah Palin is not one of the Common people, Random House U.K. signs to agency model, and more

• Sarah Palin creates “outrage” over the White House inviting rapper Common to its Evening of Poetry
• Random House U.K. signs to agency model, with over 6,000 titles to appear in the iBookstore
• E-bookseller iFlow shuts down, blames Apple for its “eviction notice”
• Smashing Pumpkins’ Billy Corgan to write a spiritual memoir
• Veteran N.Y.C. book editor Robert Loomis retires at the age of 84

E-books will account for 40 per cent of book revenue within five years, predicts Reisman

Two years ago, Heather Reisman, CEO and “chief booklover” of Indigo Books and Music, predicted that e-books would cannibalize 15 per cent of traditional book sales at her stores  in five years’ time. Reisman has since revised that prediction. She now puts the figure at as much as 40 per cent.

The Globe and Mail‘s Marina Strauss interviewed Reisman about how Indigo plans to cope in a market in which e-books are gaining popularity faster than anyone had expected. How do traditional booksellers survive in a world in which a large minority of sales doesn’t require physical stock to move through the store? In a word, says Reisman, they don’t.

“In the book industry, when you are in a situation where you know that 40 per cent of your business is going to go digital – you need to change,” Ms. Reisman, chief executive officer at Indigo, said in an interview in her office, which she recently cleared of decorative penguin figures and other mementos in a nod to her company’s transformation in the digital age.

Her road map for the country’s largest book seller takes a detour from physical books. Indigo, like many book retailers worldwide, has a toehold in the digital books business, with a majority stake in Kobo. But in the stores, Ms. Reisman, who had a head start in envisaging Indigo as a “cultural department store,” is betting more than ever on other categories. Indigo is stepping up its offerings of tableware, toys and tote bags – even putting comfy chairs back in the stores, in the hope of stemming the tide of consumers abandoning the retailer for Web-based alternatives.

Strauss points out that although Indigo owns a majority stake in Kobo, the e-book retailer posted a loss last quarter, and Reisman doesn’t expect it to start turning a profit until at least next year. In the meantime, she is betting the house on the kind of product diversification that could make Indigo, in Reisman’s own words, “the world’s first lifestyle store for booklovers.”

Daily book biz round-up: turning poetry into e-books, and more

• Breaking lines: the challenges of translating poetry collections into e-books
• British children’s fantasy and sci-fi author Dianne Wynne Jones has died
• Muggles can now rent Harry Potter films through Facebook, but still no word of e-book availability
• Call for 2011 Matrix magazine/Pop Montreal Litpop Awards, now with creative non-fiction category
• A designer’s interpretation of classic record albums transformed into book covers

Daily book biz round-up: March 18

• The Globe and Mail’s Doug Saunders’ Arrival City “couldn’t be more timely” according to The New York Times
• How I wish this were an Onion headline
• Novelist Alison Pick proves some authors are still loyal to their publishers in Open Book Toronto’s Questionless Books interview
• Ten Canadians make the LAMBDA Literary Awards shortlist
• Looking at earthquakes through literature
• Margaret Atwood on e-books

Kobo celebrates e-book week with a round of financing

Kobo today announced it has closed a new round of financing.

The amount of the Series C investment has not been disclosed, but in a statement, the Toronto-based e-publishing company says, “Indigo Books & Music Inc., Kobo’s founding shareholder, invested in this round and maintains majority ownership.”

In December, Kobo raised $16-million from a group of investors that included Indigo, Cheung Kong Holdings, the U.S.-based Borders Group, and REDgroup Retail, which operates Australia’s Angus & Robertson and Borders chains. In the last month, both Borders and REDgroup have filed for bankruptcy protection. There was no mention of either company in Kobo’s statement, which says it plans to use the funding to support “growth in the worldwide eReading market through continued product innovation in the eReading experience and international expansion with new distribution partners, support for a wide range of languages and the world’s best content.”

The announcement arrives during Read an E-Book Week (March 6-12), which celebrates 40 years since Project Gutenberg founder Michael Hart entered text from the U.S. Declaration of Independence into a Xerox Sigma V mainframe computer.

In a guest blog post for Kobo, Hart predicts that in another 10 years one billion e-books will be available for download.

Borders Australia updates creditors and unpaid staff

Administrators for Australia’s bankrupt REDgroup Retail, the company that owns book retail chains Borders, Whitcoulls, and Angus & Roberstson, held their first creditors’ meetings on Monday in Melbourne and Auckland, New Zealand.

Steve Sherman, from bankruptcy administrator Ferrier Hodgson, told attendees that the bookseller had close to $170 million AUD in debt (approximately $168 million Cdn.) and $6.4 million in cash, when the group entered voluntary administration as of Feb. 17.

Australian website Bookseller+Publisher reports that unsecured creditors, including publishers, are owed $44 million (REDgroup staff is currently owed $7.8 million AUD). The only secured creditor is REDgroup’s owner, private equity group Pacific Equity Partners, which is owed $118 million AUD. According to the Melbourne Herald Sun, “The 80 creditors also heard Borders was holding $45 million in stock and had only $1 million in the bank, while Angus & Robertson’s bank balance was $2.9 million.”

Within the next three days, a decision will be made as to which of the 169 Angus & Robertson, 67 Whitcoulls, and 26 Borders stores will close.

No official word yet on how the bankruptcies will affect Kobo. The Canadian e-book retailer is part owned by REDgroup and Borders U.S. (unrelated to Borders Australia), which declared bankruptcy on Feb. 16.

In Australia, Kobo eReaders are exclusively sold through Borders retail stores. In the U.S. the devices are also available at Walmart. Both the Kobo eReaders and e-books can still be purchased through borders.com.au and borders.com.

REDgroup insolvency a further challenge for Kobo

It’s been a dismal 24 hours for global bricks-and-mortar booksellers. A day after U.S. chain Borders entered bankruptcy protection, Australia’s largest bookstore chain, Angus & Roberts, entered administration, putting in question the future of its 180 stores. The Australian Borders (which is entirely separate from the U.S. Borders) and New Zealand’s Whitcoulls chain are also in jeopardy.

All three booksellers are owned by REDgroup Retail, which was placed into voluntary administration by the private equity fund Pacific Equity Partners, which has owned the retail conglomerate since 2004.

While the news is a further sign of instability for print books, it could also cause some disruption for Canadian e-book retailer Kobo. Both Borders U.S. and REDgroup are part owners of Kobo and sell the Kobo eReader in their stores; in the short term, it seems inevitable that the device will be sold in fewer physical retail outlets. Kobo, meanwhile, has assured customers in the affected countries that the insolvency of REDgroup and Borders will have no impact on the availability of Kobo e-books.

The Australian cites “a massive downturn in consumer discretionary spending” as the cause of REDgroup’s insolvency, but that isn’t the whole story. Tax-free e-retail and the search for cheaper online products – described by The Sydney Morning Herald as “the Australian consumer’s love affair with online shopping” – was also a major factor, with Australian Publishers Association CEO Maree McCaskill pointing to the impact of the strong Australian dollar. “While the Australian dollar is high, a lot of Australian consumers determine that they will buy whatever they need online and from overseas suppliers,” she commented in the Guardian.

REDgroup chairman Steven Cain also pointed to restrictions on parallel importation – the practice of retailers buying around local suppliers with exclusive territorial rights – as a cause. The Australian parliament recently shot down a proposal to lift restrictions on parallel importation, a move the Canadian Booksellers Association has also called for.

The insolvency of REDgroup does not come as a surprise to Australian publishers after the retail conglomerate reported a $43 million loss last year and laid off several senior staffers.

Book biz roundup: zombie Salinger still publicity-shy, Nabokov was right about butterflies, TED gets into e-books, and more

• A year after his death, J.D. Salinger is still shunning the spotlight
• Vladimir Nabokov’s theory about a particular species of butterfly gets confirmed by scientists
• TED, the ongoing lecture series (conference? symposium? smartypantsium?) is starting an e-book line
• Ukrainian poet and playwright Anna Yablonskaya among the victims of Monday’s bombing in Moscow
• Charles Dickens’ unfinished novel The Mystery of Edwin Drood gets yet another ending
• U.S. senator Scott Brown seeks to combine book tour and re-election campaign

Awards presented to Shapcott, Walcott, and book apps

There’s been a flurry of book award activity over the past few days (take that, Academy Awards). The awards in this roundup range from the time-honoured and prestigious to the trendy and cutting edge.

Costa Book of the Year Award
Costa Book Awards named Jo Shapcott’s poetry collection Of Mutability (Faber & Faber) its Book of the Year. The U.K. award culls its shortlist from winners across five categories: first novel, novel, biography, poetry, and children’s book. The 2010 shortlist also featured Witness the Night, a first novel by Kishwar Desai; The Hand That First Held Mine, a novel by Maggie O’Farrel; The Hare with Amber Eyes, a memoir by Edmund de Waal; and Out of Shadows, a children’s book by first-time author Jason Wallace. Shapcott receives £25,000; the winner in each category receives £5,000.

T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry
Also based out of the U.K., the Poetry Book Society awarded the T.S. Eliot Prize to Derek Walcott for White Egrets (Faber & Faber). Walcott, 81, is a Nobel laureate and currently serves as distinguished scholar in residence at the University of Alberta.

The £15,000 prize is given annually to the author of the best new poetry collection published in the U.K. or Ireland. Anne Stevenson, chair of the judging panel, described Walcott’s collection as a “moving, risk-taking and technically flawless book by a great poet.” Also included on the shortlist were Sam Willetts, Seamus Heaney, and Pascal Petit.

Publishing Innovation Awards
Digital Book World opened last night in New York City by handing out the first-ever Publishing Innovation Awards for e-books and apps. The winners are selected based on “their merits in the areas of origination, development, production, design, and marketing.”

The inaugural winners are:

Fiction:  DRACULA: The Official Stoker Family Edition (PadWorx Digital Media)
Non-fiction: Logos Bible Software (Logos Bible Software)
Children’s:  A Story Before Bed (Jackson Fish Market)
Reference:  Star Walk for iPad (Vito Technology)
Comics: Robot 13 (Robot Comics)

Book scanner could allow consumer to create their own e-books

At last week’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, ION Audio introduced a device that should strike fear in the hearts of publishers: a consumer-grade book scanner that can create e-books at a rate of one page per second.

Set to go on sale this spring at an expected retail price of $150 (U.S.), the scanner is outfitted with two overhead cameras that simultaneously photograph the pages of an open book, which rests on an angled cradle. Described by ION Audio as an “e-reader conversion system for printed materials,”  the ironically named Book Saver “promises to shake the publishing industry in the same way CD burners shook the music industry and forever changed copyright laws in the early 1990s,” says the National Post.

The Post goes on to highlight the paradigm-shifting repercussions of the device in the context of Canadian copyright law:

The Book Saver device [...] arrives as Canada is once again trying to amend outdated copyright legislation to better address the digital era.

…

A key question in the current round of talks is whether consumers have any right to make personal copies of DVDs, e-books and video games for personal use.