When Amazon offered in December to reward customers who scanned book bar codes in bookstores and then bought the book on Amazon instead, we wrote “Amazon’s strategy could backfire.”

“When Amazon’s sales reps call for an appointment to pitch their list,” we pointed out, “they may find the owners’ phones turned off.” (See Please Shut Off Your Cellphones. This is a Bookshop)”

They did. Barnes & Noble will not carry books published by Amazon’s publishing imprints.

“In a sharp answer to Amazon and its expanding publishing efforts,” writes the New York Times‘ Julie Bosman, “Barnes & Noble said on Tuesday that it would not sell books released by Amazon Publishing in its bookstores. The ban includes books released by New Harvest, a new imprint of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt that recently struck a deal to publish and distribute books released by Amazon Publishing’s unit based in New York.

“’Barnes & Noble has made a decision not to stock Amazon published titles in our store showrooms,’ Jaime Carey, the company’s chief merchandising officer, said in a statement. ‘Our decision is based on Amazon’s continued push for exclusivity with publishers, agents and the authors they represent. These exclusives have prohibited us from offering certain e-books to our customers. Their actions have undermined the industry as a whole and have prevented millions of customers from having access to content. It’s clear to us that Amazon has proven they would not be a good publishing partner to Barnes & Noble as they continue to pull content off the market for their own self interest.’”

B&N’s decision may impact negatively on the authors and their agents contemplating selling their authors to Amazon Publishing.

Though some publishing executives may take a measure of satisfaction that B&N, now the victim of Amazon’s aggressive marketing strategies, is paying dearly for its own predatory practices when it was the ruthlessly dominant bookseller of the twentieth century, consumers will rally around it and its more helpless independent bookstore cousins. Publishing industry old-timers like to say “What goes around comes around” and for Amazon it has come around.  We hope however that Amazon Publishing will itself come around – to an open policy of mutual cooperation in the fragile ecology called publishing.

Details in Barnes & Noble Won’t Sell Books From Amazon Publishing

Richard Curtis

Did we get your attention, grammarians? We hope so, because this story is about apostrophes.

It seems that the new head of Waterstone’s, the British bookshop chain, has dropped the possessive apostrophe because Digital Age rules prohibit that punctuation mark in domain names.  “Waterstone’s,” the Telegraph reports, “will become plain old Waterstones.” Worse, it will become waterstones, with a lower case w.

Punctuation, like puppies, has fanatic defenders in Britannia, and the apostrophe is no exception. John Richards, who is swear-to-God chairman of an organization called the Apostrophe Protection Society, characterized the change as “slapdash”. Take that, you miserable barbarians!

Waterstones ditches apostrophe

Richard Curtis

Okay, all you street corner prophets. Given the depressing if not depressed economy, last year’s dismal holiday retail sales, the meteoric triumph of e-books, the advent of bookstore showrooming that drives customers out of bookstores, and the bankruptcy of Borders, how do you think bookstore sales will fare over the 2011 holidays?

If you said Down the Crapper, go back to Prophecy 101 and relearn the first two principles: #1, Never Give a Specific Time Line. And #2, The Odds That a Prediction Will Be Correct are 50-50.  Julie Bosman, covering the book beat for the New York Times, reports that “The initial weeks of Christmas shopping, a boom time for the book business, have yielded surprisingly strong sales for many bookstores, which report that they have been lifted by an unusually vibrant selection; customers who seem undeterred by pricier titles; and new business from people who used to shop at Borders, the chain that went out of business this year.” Sales are up as much as 16% over the same period in 2010.

One of the biggest surprises is that “glossy, expensive hardcover books have emerged as sleeper successes,” says Bosman. There’s a brisk trade in books of $75 and more. To what can we attribute this counterintuitive if not perverse surge in consumer commitment to print?  Our guess is that now that consumers have had a few years of e-books, they are starting to distinguish between books they merely want to read but not own, and those they want to read and own.

But that raises another question: why aren’t they buying them on Amazon and BN.com to take advantage of heavy discounts? Many book lovers we’ve spoken to have said they would rather pay list price and support their local bookstore than get a high discount that may lead to the demise of that store.  If you thought writers were strange, what can you say about readers?

One book we think you will want to read and own is The Oxford Companion to Beer by Garrett Oliver, arguably the world’s authority on the beverage.

Here is Oxford University Press’s product description for the book:

For millennia, beer has been a favorite beverage in cultures across the globe. After water and tea, it is the most popular drink in the world, and it is at the center of a $450 billion industry.

The first major reference work to investigate the history and vast scope of beer, The Oxford Companion to Beer features more than 1,100 A-Z entries written by 166 of the world’s most prominent beer experts. Attractively illustrated with over 140 images, the book covers everything from the agricultural makeup of various beers to the technical elements of the brewing process, local effects of brewing on regions around the world, and the social and political implications of sharing a beer.

Garrett Oliver is the Brewmaster of the Brooklyn Brewery and author of The Brewmaster’s Table: Discovering the Pleasures of Real Beer with Real Food. He has won many awards for his beers, is a frequent judge for international beer competitions, and has made numerous radio and television appearances as a spokesperson for craft brewing.

RC

Publishing industry consultant Joe Esposito crackles with good ideas and his “Metadatarium” is one of them.  Stop and go back to the word and piece it out syllable by syllable until you’re comfy with it. The root word, of course, is metadata, and if you’re not sure what that means you can look it up here.  Got it?

Okay, on with the concept.

It’s a simple one, somewhere between a mega-bookstore and an e-book kiosk.”We need a utopian solution” to the crisis of our disappearing bookstores,” Esposito says. “We need our bookstores, but we also need Amazon’s inventory. We need libraries–and we need a way to pay for them. We need analog tools for discovery and digital modes of delivery. We need a Third Place for community and a Cloud-based infrastructure to deliver all information to anyone anywhere anytime. And I need a place to kill some time on Saturday afternoons.”

Put them all together and you have a metadatarium: a physical location where books are showcased, but then you point and click your mobile device at the book you’re interested in, review the information, then order it for download. We’ve long dreamed of e-book kiosks (see The Day of the Kiosks is Upon Us) and this is one way the idea might be realized.

Esposito sounds serious about launching not just one metadatarium but a chain of, um, metadataria, and it’s hard to detect any irony when he declares “This chain will be funded through an appeal on Kickstarter, managed with the perfection of Apple, and later taken public on NASDAQ, to the benefit of the 401K plans of its shareholders.“  As of today, however, a search on Kickstarter, the crowdfunding website, was Metadatariumless. But we’ll keep trying.

One way or another the day of the kiosk will be upon us and it just may look like like Joe Esposito’s brainstorm.

Read it in detail: Joe’s Metadatarium: Creating New Forms of Discovery in the Bricks-and-Mortar World

Richard Curtis

Sirloin? Or puppy?

Do you trust me? I’m holding a bag with meat in it and I’m telling you it’s choice sirloin. But it could be dog. It’s yours for twenty dollars. No, I won’t show it to you until you’ve paid me. I’ve always leveled with you and I’m leveling with you now. So? How about it?

This odd offer is actually the basis for the expression “a pig in a poke.” It’s “a confidence trick originating in the Late Middle Ages, when meat was scarce, but cats and dogs (puppies) were not,” Wikipedia informs us. “The idiom pig in a poke can also simply refer to someone buying a low-quality pig in a bag because he or she did not carefully check what was in the bag.” (“Poke” is related to the French poche, a bag.)

The reason we bring this up is that Little, Brown is offering bookstores the equivalent of a sealed bag, promising “the inside story of life with one of the most controversial figures of our time” but won’t tell whom it’s about or who wrote it.  They want the stores to trust them that it’s prime stuff, but all they will tell you for now is that the title is Untitled and the author is Anonymous.

“In its e-mail the publisher promised a ‘massive media rollout’ with a confirmed ’60 Minutes’ appearance,” writes New York Times book beat reporter Julie Bosman. “Bookstores were instructed to comply with a highly orchestrated release on Nov. 14, with no sales permitted until then, an embargo arrangement typically reserved for splashy debuts of political memoirs or Bob Woodward books.”

Little, Brown is the furthest thing from a fly-by-night bunco operation, and if there is any publisher whose word I would trust it’s they. Which is why I’m happy to fully disclose that I do lots of business with them. But they’re really pushing credence to the limit in asking store buyers to accept a sealed bag containing an object shaped like a blockbuster bestseller but could be a penny dreadful.

Bosman reports that at least one bookstore owner “reluctantly ordered 10 copies of the book after receiving the publisher’s e-mail. ‘I hate these books,’” the proprietor was quoted as saying. “‘But you cannot not buy it.’”

I never thought a day would come when I said it’s a good thing that books are returnable, but in this case stores can take advantage of that option if Untitled turns out to be la viande de chien.

Okay, your turn to guess what’s in the poke. Read A Publisher Plays Coy With Book Release

Richard Curtis

We posted this item discussing the most stolen books a while ago but the topic has become hot again, so we reprint it – with an update.
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Book theft just isn’t what it used to be.  Thieves are neither as selective as they once were, nor as imaginative.

That seems to be the conclusion reached by author Margo Rabb (Cures for Heartbreak) in an article she wrote for the New York Times Sunday Book Review, Steal These Books.

From all she is able to learn, the most purloined title is The Bible. “Apparently,” Rabb writes, “the thieves have not yet read the ‘Thou shalt not steal’ part — or maybe they believe that Bibles don’t need to be paid for. ‘Some people think the word of God should be free,’” an Austin, Texas bookstore owner tells her, and for a Springfield, Oregon bookstore manager, it is free. “If a person asks for a Bible,” says Rabb, “they’ll be given a copy without charge.”

New Yorkers are more secular in their shoplifting tastes. A Manhattan bookshop reports the disappearance of fiction masters like Martin Amis, Charles Bukowski, William S. Burroughs, Raymond Carver, Don DeLillo and Jack Kerouac.

Note that no female authors are on the hit-list. “’It’s mostly younger men stealing the books,’” a Brooklyn store owner told Rabb. “They think it’s an existential rite of passage to steal their homeboy.’” The manager of operations of the famous Tattered Cover in Denver reported the same thing. “’Our arrest record is very male.’”

Bookstores may inadvertently be accessories to these crimes. For an Austin store called BookPeople, the books promoted by the store are the ones most likely to be nicked. “I feel like our staff recommendation cards should read: ‘BookPeople Bookseller recommends that you steal ________.’” the head book buyer told Rabb.

You can get arrested for stealing a book from a store, but that’s not as bad as stealing an e-book, for which you can possibly be sued.

Of all the titles you would imagine are most likely to be stolen, Abbie Hoffman’s 1971 classic Steal This Book is the most obvious. At this writing a mint copy can cost you over $50.00. Stealing that copy of Steal This Book would be considered a felony in many states.

Publishers Weekly recently updated the Most Stolen list but some familiar candidates, like Jack Kerouac, are still there. New on the list is Paul Auster, whose New York Trilogy seems to get lifted wholesale. One bookstore owner reported “I had a whole stack once of about 20 or 30 copies of The New York Trilogy that somebody just came in and took the whole stack.”

Richard Curtis

This picked up from Andrew Sullivan’s “The Dish” blog on The Daily Beast.

There’s No Place Like Here: Brazenhead Books from Etsy on Vimeo.

Reps are in jeopardy.

One of the most devastating changes wrought by the upheaval in the book business has been the shift from traveling sales representatives to telemarketers. (See Howdy, Brownsville, New York Calling. Have We Got a Great Bio of Spinoza for Y’all).

“Travelers,” as they were originally called (and still are in some circles), are an endangered species holding on by their fingernails.  Their fates are inextricably attached to that other threatened breed called independent bookstores, and with the advent of computerized ordering, heavy big-box-store discounting and all the advantages offered by Amazon, traveling book reps find themselves in the same position that itinerant knife-sharpeners held a century ago.

“It’s a great irony,” one member of the traveling clan told Publishers Weekly‘s Judith Rosen, “that physical bookstores that carry thousands of books that readers want are losing out because cutting people out of the transaction is rewarded with the lowest prices. It’s the great devaluation of people in the financial transaction that is hitting the bookstores especially hard right now.”

A book industry that depends on human beings?  Preposterous!

But, reports Rosen, travelers are a rugged clan and they’re starting to fight fire with fire. “In addition to iPads stuffed with digital collateral material that not so long ago filled an entire car trunk, many groups rely on sophisticated database systems to let buyers know about previous seasonal ordering patterns and what similar stores are doing with a particular title.”

“To the extent that we still have small publishers and small bookstores, I’m going to have a job,” said one rep, who thinks of himself and his colleagues as “the missionaries of the church that is publishing.”

To which we say a fervent Hallelujah!

Richard Curtis

The news that independent bookstores are starting to charge admission to author events has stirred up a lot of controversy, but there are some collateral issues that no one seems to have given a lot of thought to.

For instance, should a store charge more for an appearance by Charlaine Harris or Lee Child than it does for Joe or Jane Shmoe? How much more?  Is a Janet Evanovich event worth more than a Jody Picault or an Ann Patchett?  How much more?

The New York Times article by Julie Bosman and Matt Richtel explains the reasons for making attendees pay to hear an author speak in a book store. “Too many people regularly come to events having already bought a book online or planning to do so later,” the reporters explain. “Consumers now see the bookstore merely as another library — a place to browse, do informal research and pick up staff recommendations. ‘They type titles into their iPhones and go home,’” says one store manager. Another one says “We don’t like to have events where people can’t come for free, but we also can’t host big free events that cost us a lot money and everyone is buying books everywhere else.”

How does this in-store admission deal work? One California bookstores makes customers buy a gift card that admits them to the author appearance.  They can apply the card towards the purchase of the author’s book.

If you are outraged that stores are starting to charge admission for activities that up to now have been as free as the air, you’re probably unaware of how much those activities cost. A typical one for a reasonably well known author breaks even for the store and loses money for the publisher, according to The economics of bookstore events, an eye-opening analysis published a few years ago by Penguin’s Colleen Lindsay. So making customers pay is by no means off the wall.

Ostensibly, an appearance by a megastar like Harris or Evanovich is worth far more than one by an anonymous struggling newbie. But because those two authors guarantee a profitable event that will sell lots and lots of copies, doesn’t it stand to reason that an admission charge is unnecessary?

Does that mean the store should charge for Mr. or Ms. Unknown Author?  That doesn’t make sense either. Why would anybody pay to see someone they’ve never heard of?

In short, charging admission to author appearances, famous or otherwise, is a lousy idea.  But it’s a lousy idea whose time has come. Bookstores have seized on admission as a potential source of income and nothing is going to roll the practice back.  So look look for it to come to a bookstore near you.

Join the debate.  Read Come Meet the Author, but Open Your Wallet

Richard Curtis

We’ve heard of popup stores for Halloween costumes. We’ve heard of them for Christmas ornaments.  But we’ve never heard of one for books. And we’ve certainly never heard of one devoted to a single book.

But there’s a first time for everything, and credit for that distinction goes to Andrew Kessler, who “booked” a New York City storefront and, with a lot of help from his friends, opened a shop dedicated to sale of just one title – his own.  It’s called Martian Summer, and if you happen to be in the vicinity of 547 Hudson Street in lower Manhattan, drop in and support your local bookstore and its unique merchandise.

Jason Boog of Galley Cat reported Kessler’s “Monobooklist” store and you can read in detail here how he used up his ration of favors to enlist help.

In case the popup store has popped down by the time you read this, here’s a link to the print and Kindle editions on Amazon.  And you won’t want to miss the video (below) of Kessler infectiously describing what it’s like to do Martian science from a distance of millions of miles – “Like hitting the Nerd Lottery!”

Does Kessler advise other authors to follow in his footsteps? “I’d be very nervous to tell others to spend their hard-earned money on art projects (although I secretly want them to).” Thanks, sir, but, knowing the cost of Manhattan real estate, we’ll pass on that one.

Richard Curtis