Demand for Barnes & Noble's Nook is so great that people ordering the $259 e-reader now won't receive it until after December 11, the Wall Street Journal reported.

"Demand for the product in our stores and online has surpassed our expectations," Mary Ellen Keating, a B&N spokeswoman, said.

Customers who had ordered the Nook in October have been told their orders will ship November 30. A second wave of customers were told their orders will ship December 7.

A la Amazon and its Kindle, B&N has declined to release unit sales figures.

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The opening of Open Book bookstore in a former Harry W. Schwartz Bookshop in Shorewood, Wis., over the weekend has caused some conflict with the two former Schwartz staffers who have already opened stores in former Schwartz locations, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported.

As Lanora Hurley, owner of Next Chapter Bookshop, Mequon, Wis., put it: "It's like we've been through a bad divorce, and the kids are all fighting. It's heartbreaking."

She and Daniel Goldin, owner of Boswell Book Company, Milwaukee, have said the new store is improperly targeting their customers. There are also questions about whether Open Book, which is managed by former Schwartz staffer Lisa Zupke, has improperly called itself a cooperative--it's acutally an LLC--and whether there is a conflict in the store having received a $35,000 low-interest loan from the village of Shorewood, which employs as a part-time consultant the chair of Open Book.

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CBS's 60 Minutes had to redo part of its segment last night on Andre Agassi, whose memoir, Open: An Autobiography, is being published today by Knopf, the New York Times reported. The cause: a leak on Sports Illustrated's website noting that Agassi revealed in the book that he used crystal meth. Originally Katie Couric had not asked Agassi about crystal meth, which led her to take a trip late last week back to Las Vegas, Nev., Agassi's home, to retape part of the interview.

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Cool non-book video of the day: John Nese, owner of Galco's Soda Pop Stop in Los Angeles, Calif., talks with passion about his store, which stocks only independent-made sodas, now about 500. Take a sip of his inspiring story here. (Thanks to Mark Kaufman of Paz & Associates!)

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Publisher website of the day: Just in time for the runup to the third Quirk Classic, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: Dawn of the Dreadfuls, Quirk has launched QuirkClassics.com.

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Congratulations to Gene Ambaum, half of the Unshelved.com team, who has quit his day job as a librarian to devote himself fulltime to "Unshelved, writing projects and other things that are important to me," as he put it on the website.

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Delaware is the latest state to be heard from as independent booksellers react to the book pricing wars. The News Journal called indies "one group of business owners that seems to be either incredibly resourceful, incredibly resilient or incredibly unlucky--or all three."

"Every once in a while things go haywire, and make no sense whatsoever," said Jack Buckley, owner of Ninth Street Book Shop, Wilmington.

Between Books, Claymont, "has survived for 30 years by keeping a tight focus on sci-fi, fantasy and graphic titles, building a reputation among the cognoscenti as a place to find the hard-to-find and a place to see what's hard to see," the News Journal wrote.

"We do a lot of signings," said owner Greg Schauer. "Just anything to get people into the store.... A good bookstore should be a community center. We kind of have the feel of the old-timey bookstores where people come in and hang out, discuss."

Rebecca Dowling of Hockessin Book Shelf has joined forces with Mark Eastman, owner of the Chef's Haven gourmet store "to offer customers an added attraction of sorts--in the 'Eat Drink Read' program, a cookbook purchase gives customers an opportunity to learn recipes from it at Eastman's nearby shop," according to the News Journal.

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Independent booksellers "are filling niches and emphasizing service as they fight to stay in business," the Miami Herald wrote in its examination of local indies as the Miami Book Fair International kicked off its annual celebration over the weekend.

Murder on the Beach, Delray Beach, specializes in autographed editions by Florida authors. "It's a very, very narrow niche, but we are the experts in it,'' said manager Joanne Sinchuk, who noted that a third of her business comes form online sales of these titles.

For the Downtown Book Center, Miami, the "wholesaling of Spanish-language books has come to account for three-quarters of [Raquel] Roque's business. Clients range from small shops in Little Havana to Barnes & Noble and Amazon," according to the Herald.

At Chosen Gift & Bookstore, Kendall, sidelines have gradually overtaken Jewish-interest books, said owner Molly Ben-Chetrit, adding that the "books she does sell are hard to find and are largely in Spanish."

Mitchell Kaplan, owner of Books & Books stores in southern Florida and the Cayman Islands, told the Herald "the key to success for independent bookstores is showing customers that value isn't all about discounts. His stores hold 700 to 1,000 author appearances and other events per year. His staff members know their business and can offer recommendations to match customer tastes. These features make independent shops more than just a business, Kaplan said. It makes them a cultural resource for the communities they serve."