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.”

Bibliomania and the not-so-light side of book hoarding

Last week, the National Post‘s Mark Medley wrote a piece about his ever-expanding book collection and the difficulty he has lightening his load by even a single volume. “I am a book hoarder,” he says. “Help me, please.”

The same day the article was published, CBC Radio’s Metro Morning picked up the story and host Matt Galloway spent the rest of the week discussing the impulse on air, and over Twitter and Facebook. He even brought in Shelagh Rogers to talk about her own book-collecting habits. By the end of the weekend, the term “book hoarder” came up in national media a lot.

The piece caught the eye of one Jessie Sholl, author of Dirty Secret: A Daughter Comes Clean About Her Mother’s Compulsive Hoarding. In her view, the conversation around book hoarding overlooked an important fact: hoarding is more than a mild eccentricity, it’s an illness. (To be fair, Rogers avoided the word “hoarder” throughout her interview with Metro Morning, opting instead to call herself a “book lover.”) Sholl responded to Medley’s article on her blog at Psychology Today.

In her post, “You Are Not a Book Hoarder,” she attempts to set the record straight on bibliomania:

Just because you have a lot of books, that doesn’t mean you’re a bibliomaniac. Can you walk through the room in which your books are stored? Have you depleted any of your life savings on these books? Do you hide when the doorbell rings or not allow a plumber into your home when your sink is clogged?

…

[C]arelessly tossing the label of hoarder around, as the National Post essay does, is disrespectful to hoarders and those affected by the disorder…. [N]o one’s arguing that the term hoarding is off limits. Or that you can’t joke about hoarding, ever…. Maybe the line between harmless humor and disrespectful minimization of a mental illness is similar to what Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart said about pornography — you know it when you see it. Or maybe it’s simply keeping in mind that common expression: Language matters.

Toronto Women’s Bookstore anthology seeks contributors

Hot on the heels of its change in ownership, the Toronto Women’s Bookstore is celebrating its 40th anniversary in independent bookselling and feminist activism with an upcoming anthology edited by Tara-Michelle Ziniuk and published by Three O’clock Press under the Women’s Press imprint.

Ziniuk has sent out a call for contributions explaining the impetus for the book:

In light of the recent stresses at TWB, its upcoming anniversary and the current state of feminist book publishers and sellers, this is a pivotal time to talk about the importance of a place that’s very dear to many people, for many reasons. I am looking for love letters, historical documentation, writings about TWB from authors, artists, academics, readers and activists who have been influenced by the store. I am looking to speak with former staff, Board members, class instructors, students, customers and appreciators of all kinds. I am looking to get in touch with people who were involved in the bookstore’s earlier years … TWB has a rich history and I want to make sure to include as much of it as is accessible. I am looking for non-fiction, personal narratives, articles and interviews on a variety of topics.

The deadline for submissions is May 31, 2011, and Ziniuk asks that queries be sent in advance to twbanthology@gmail.com.

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

Canadian literary event round-up, March 11-17

Here are just a few literary/book events happening around the country in the next week:

• Author Steven Heine and poet Darren Bifford discuss the zen of Bob Dylan, March 12 (1:30 p.m., Alfred Dallaire Memoria, $10), as part of the Montreal Zen Poetry Festival
• Iconic Toronto artist Fiona Smyth launches her first YA graphic novel The Never Weres (Annick Press), with interview by RM Vaughan, live performance, and comic jam, March 13 (2 p.m., Gladstone Hotel, $5)
• Recently named Giller juror Annabel Lyon presents the Kreisel Lecture, March 14 (Timms Centre, University of Alberta, 7:30 p.m.)
• Mr. Funny Pants Michael Showalter signs books at Chapters’ Festival Hall location (John and Richmond, Toronto) on March 16 (7 p.m., free), then performs at the Horseshoe Tavern (8:30 p.m., $15)
• Shannon Rayne, Warren Dean Fulton, Daniela Elza, Mariner James, and Christine Leclerc are Vancouver poets in conversation and in collaboration, March 15 (6:30 p.m., Railway Club, free)

Links round-up: Atwood circa 1975, Rumsfeld, and more

Today’s links round-up, video edition:

• TVO launched its digital archive this week. Check out Mike McManus’s 1975 interview with Margaret Atwood about her book Lady Oracle. An Atwoodian gem from the video: “Remember I’m old. I’m 36”
• Donald Rumsfeld was on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart to talk about his new memoir, Known and Unknown. Things got awkward, sidestepping ensued
• MacMillan has made this promo to show how their enhanced textbooks work in the Inkling app
• Remember The Great Gatsby Nintendo game? Check out its sister, Waiting for Godot: The Video Game
• Warning: if you watch “organizing the bookshelf” you’ll want, nay need, a dance break

East Coast author files lawsuit against Warner Bros.

A Nova Scotia sailor and writer is suing Warner Bros. for allegedly plagiarizing his novel, Fandango’s Gold, for their 2008 Matthew McConaughey/Kate Hudson vehicle Fool’s Gold.

In a statement of claim filed in federal court last week, Lou Boudreau maintains that writer-director Andy Tennant’s screenplay shares “uncanny” similarities with Boudreau’s book, written in 1999. Fandango’s Gold, based on the author’s real-life experience as a diver and fisherman, was registered with the Writers’ Federation of Nova Scotia and published in 2006 by Tiller Publishing, a Maryland-based press specializing in nautical books.

The claim doesn’t specify the amount Boudreau is seeking in damages, though he says he’s entitled to the same cut afforded to the screenwriter of the film, which made over $300 million.

From Halifax’s The Chronicle-Herald:

In his statement of claim, Boudreau says his manuscript ended up in the hands of movie industry insiders, particularly in California, because he spent about five years between 1999 and 2004 promoting it.

In an interview… Boudreau said Fandango’s Gold starts out as the tale of a Spanish sailor on a galleon laden with gold sailing for Spain. It runs into a hurricane and is wrecked on a remote atoll in the Caribbean. The crew carries the treasure ashore and hides it in an underground cave with a passage to the sea.

[...]

In his statement of claim, Boudreau lists pages of similarities between his book and the film. They include the two romantic leads looking for the galleon’s treasure, the female lead being taken hostage by the bad guys, and the lead characters finding the treasure in an underground cave and swimming through an underwater tunnel to safety.

Boudreau is wading into risky waters – many an author has taken on big U.S. production companies and filmmakers, and the results haven’t necessarily been favourable. (Remember when Rebecca Eckler took on Judd Apatow in 2007?) In the end, Boudreau says he has to stand up for his work and his “moral rights.”

“I’m the little schooner captain from Cape Breton and they are Warner Bros. Therein lies the great inequity,” he told The Chronicle-Herald. “It’s important for me because I wrote this book. It was very personal to me.”

Chinese novel alleged to have stolen from Canada’s “literary elite”

The “Great Chinese Canadian Literary Feud” is now underway, according to a Toronto Star story by Bill Schiller. The author at the centre of the supposed controversy is Toronto’s Zhang Ling, whose previous novel, Aftershock, became a surprise bestseller in China when a film version was released there last summer.

For her latest novel, Gold Mountain Blues, Zhang is accused of stealing from a diverse group of Chinese-Canadian authors, including Denise Chong, Wayson Choy, Sky Lee, and Paul Yee. An English translation of the novel was due to appear with Penguin Canada by early 2012, but according to the Star, it has been put “in limbo until [Penguin] is satisfied that the author hasn’t been poaching from the works of Canada’s Chinese Canadian literary elite.”

It’s a damning accusation, but the case against Zhang is anything but cut and dried. The accusations of plagiarism appear to stem from an online smear campaign led by an anonymous blogger known as Changjiang. When the Star tracked down and questioned the man supposedly behind the posts, one Robert Luo, he “grew alarmed and then hung up.” Another of Zhang’s attackers, Cheng Xingbang, also refused an interview.

Meanwhile, Penguin has not said it is delaying publication of Gold Mountain Blues, only that it is waiting for the English translation to be complete before making an internal decision about how to handle the accusations. And two of the supposed victims of plagiarism contacted by the Star – Sky Lee and Denise Chong – were equally in the dark, as neither reads Chinese. As the Star reports, Chong, who is also published by Penguin, is hesitant to weigh in on the controversy:

Changjiang’s website accuses Zhang of borrowing the key character of Chong’s [1994 memoir, The Concubine’s Children] – her grandmother May-ying, the hard-drinking, smoking, gambling “concubine” of the title — then fashioning it into a character in Gold Mountain Blues.

Chong says that without a translation she can’t really comment.

But she did send an email to alert her agent once the controversy hit the Chinese blogosphere.

Reached in Montreal, reclusive Canadian writer Sky Lee, author of the groundbreaking novel Disappearing Moon Café (1990), an instant classic, admits she was “shocked and dismayed” when she first heard from a friend in British Columbia that someone might be poaching her work.

But then she realized that she couldn’t really evaluate the allegations first-hand. She doesn’t read Chinese either.

So she farmed it out to her trusted friend, Jennifer Jay, a historian at the University of Alberta who is fluent in Chinese, who spent a day reading an online version of Gold Mountain Blues.

Jay was careful in a telephone interview, saying she was not an expert, noting she had had limited reading time and, while intimately familiar with Disappearing Moon Café, she had not read it for a while. But she said Gold Mountain Blues did make her feel “alarm.”

“I’m not ready to say this author is a plagiarist,” she says. “At this point I’m saying it’s ‘problematic.’ ”

At the same time, says Jay, she has “a lot of sympathy” for Zhang.

“It must be a nightmare for the author to be going through this if she’s innocent,” she says.

Vancouver writers festival, library launch reading series

The Vancouver International Writers Festival has teamed up with the Vancouver Public Library to offer Incite, a new reading series set to launch later this month.

The bimonthly events will feature a variety of Canadian and international writers, and are open to the public free of charge. In a statement released earlier today, VIWF artistic director Hal Wake describes the program as:

an exploration of books and ideas [...] in a variety of formats.  It will be a lot like what people experience at the Writers Festival on Granville Island every October — there’ll be engaging conversations, panel discussions, on-stage interviews, and performances with authors who are writing fiction, non-fiction, poetry, memoir, graphic novels — the whole spectrum.

Andrew Pyper, Amber Dawn, and Michael Christie will take part in the first event on Jan. 26.

Books of the Year 2010: Fiction and Poetry

There’s no formula for choosing the books of the year. Some break ground, some tackle familiar themes with new energy. Some represent the best work from established authors, some introduce us to important new voices. And some are simply in-house favourites we feel deserve a little more attention. Here are the Fiction and Poetry books that made the most impact in 2010.
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