E-Books, Shmee-Books: Readers Return to the Stores

Facing economic gloom and competition from cheap e-readers, brick-and-mortar booksellers entered this holiday season with the humblest of expectations.

But 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.

Barnes & Noble, the nation’s largest bookstore chain, said that comparable store sales this Thanksgiving weekend increased 10.9 percent from that period last year. The American Booksellers Association, a trade group for independents, said last week that members saw a sales jump of 16 percent in the week including Thanksgiving, compared with the same period a year ago.

Full article

Using E-Books to Sell More Print Versions

How do you help brick-and-mortar stores sell books? Throw in an e-book. That is the idea of one publisher, Algonquin, which began a promotion in 300 Barnes & Noble stores this month that gives a discounted e-book to customers who buy an Algonquin trade paperback. The publisher has planned a similar effort for October, giving customers who buy a hardcover copy of “When She Woke,” by Hillary Jordan, the digital version of the book free.

“We spend a lot of time lately trying to figure out how to sell books in this new world order,” said Elisabeth Scharlatt, the publisher of Algonquin, part of Workman Publishing. “And particularly to help booksellers to sell hardcover books, which seems increasingly difficult. So this seemed like one way of calling attention to a book by giving an incentive to the customer.” Full story.

Nook Color Gets Apps, Flash and More. Officially a Tablet.

“The $250 Nook Color just became the best value in the tablet world, as Barnes & Noble adds apps, email and a Web browser capable of Flash video.  People who own the Nook Color can upgrade by downloading the firmware at nookcolor.com/update, or wait for it to be pushed to their Nook via Wi-Fi. Since the update brings the internal OS to Android 2.2 (Froyo), the browser will support Flash.

It’s important to note that the Nook Color is not a fully supported Android tablet, complete with Google’s Android App Market. You can only run apps that come from B&N store. But there are already 125 apps and games, among them popular favorites like Angry Birds, Pulse reader, Pandora, Uno, Epicurious and Drawing Pad — an iOS app that is only now making its move to Android.”  Story

Need Advice on What to Read? Ask the Internet (Goodreads, updated)

Netflix uses a software algorithm to recommend movies and Zappos uses one to recommend shoes. Now Goodreads, the social network for book lovers, is introducing an algorithm to recommend books.

Goodreads was started in 2006 for people who wanted to talk about books online. Its 4.6 million members load their virtual bookshelves with books they’ve read, are reading and want to read, rate and review them, and discuss them with friends and others on the site.

On Thursday, Goodreads will announce that it has acquired another start-up, Discovereads.com. It uses machine learning algorithms to analyze which books people might like, based on books they’ve liked in the past and books that people with similar tastes have liked.

Full story

Best Sellers Club changes

In case any patrons come in asking questions about the recent changes to the Best Sellers Club, here is some helpful information. We decided to eliminate the following authors from the Best Sellers Club for the following reasons:

Ken Follett – has not published a new book in almost 3 years
P.D. James – as far as we can determine, due to her advancing age she will not be publishing new material
Ed McBain – died in 2005 and had only 1 book published posthumously in 2006
Judith McNaught – has not published a new book in almost 4 years
Belva Plain – has not published a new book in almost 2 years
Sidney Sheldon – died in 2007 and has not had any books published posthumously*
Scott Turow – has not published a new book in almost 4 years 

The purpose of the Best Sellers Club is to automatically reserve those authors who REGULARLY publish materials. The above-mentioned authors no longer fit into this category and so have been removed from the Club’s list of authors.

Because of these deletions, we were able to add the following new authors to the Best Sellers Club list:

Clive Cussler
Vince Flynn
Greg Iles
J.A. Jance
Brad Meltzer
Jodi Picoult
Daniel Silva

There is an Add/Delete Form in the top drawer of the Reference Desk that patrons may fill out to add any of these authors to their membership list. Please leave all forms on Denise”s desk. If you receive any e-mails regarding these changes, please leave them in the Inbox for Denise to answer. If you have any questions, please feel free to ask Denise.

*Another author, Tilly Bagshawe, has published a sequel to Sidney Sheldon’s novel “Master of the Game” and the sequel is titled “Mistress of the Game.” Patrons need to reserve this title separately from their Best Sellers Club membership as Ms. Bagshawe is not a Best Sellers Club author.

Upcoming Alex Reader: Cleverly Solves Problem of Reading Internet Text

There’s something very unique about the Alex Reader.  It has a regular black and white display like the Kindle, but also has a fully functional ,color, touch sensitive computer at the bottom (think of the iphone or ipod touch).  You can run applications to play music or surf the web, but once you find a webpage you want to read, say the New York Times, Wikipedia or any of the millions of titles from Google Books or Gutenberg.org, you simply click a button and the text and graphics from that webpage are sent to the black and white display for comfortable reading.  There’s no price or release date, but this is easily the coolest reader I’ve seen thus.   Watch Video

Amazon’s Best 100 Books of 2009

Amazon.com Book Editors Announce Their Favorite 100 Books of 2009, as Well as Top 100 Customer Favorites, the Majority of Which Are Available on Kindle. Top 100 of 2009

Group Files Suit to Burn Library Book

Found on Drudge.com:

“After fighting for the removal of the book Baby Be-Bop from a West Bend, Wisc., library, the Christian Civil Liberties Union and three other plaintiffs have sued over the book, seeking “the right to publicly burn or destroy by another means” the book and asking for $120,000 in damages because they were exposed to it in a library display.”   Story From Timesonline

Catcher in the Rye Sequel Draws J.D. Salinger Suit

From NY Times:

“Compiled by DAVE ITZKOFF

In “The Catcher in the Rye,” the narrator Holden Caulfield warns his readers to beware of phonies, and his creator, J. D. Salinger, evidently still believes in that caution. On Monday Mr. Salinger, the reclusive author, filed suit against the writer and the publisher of a planned book cast as a sequel to “The Catcher in the Rye,” Reuters reported. In an interview in The Telegraph, the author, John David California, said that his novel, “60 Years Later: Coming Through the Rye,” would feature a 76-year-old character called Mr. C, who wanders the streets of New York after he escapes his nursing home, in a manner similar to Holden Caulfield’s escape from an elite prep school. In The Telegraph, Mr. California said that Mr. Salinger was “a great writer who influenced the entire world with the words he made up” and that his novel was “a tribute the way Holden would have said it.” In the suit, filed in Federal District Court in Manhattan, lawyers for Mr. Salinger said, “The sequel is not a parody and it does not comment upon or criticize the original. It is a rip-off pure and simple,” according to Reuters.”

How well do you know Modern Library’s list of 100 best novels?

Can you name the 100 best novels according to Modern Library (1900 to 1998)?

• Enter a novel in the box
• Correctly named novels will show up in the table below
• Answers do not have to be guessed in order
• you have 14 minutes – or you can give up at anytime to see the answers

Test yourself  now