Books and Bars, the monthly book club run by Magers and Quinn Booksellers in Minneapolis, Minn., takes place in a bar near the store where some 50 people gather each month to drink and discuss current books, usually fiction, the Minneapolis Star Tribune reported.

The store believes it's the largest book club in the Twin Cities. 

--- 

In March 2008, Barnes & Noble will close and open stores in Macon, Ga. The new store will be in the Shoppes at River Crossing at Riverside Drive (US Highway 23). The day before that store opens, B&N's current store at 265 Tom Hill Sr. Boulevard will close.

---

A Harvard student writing down prices of required textbooks so he could do comparison shopping online was asked to leave the Harvard Coop, the Crimson reported. The Coop president told the paper that there is no policy against the practice, but "we discourage people who are taking down a lot of notes."

The action appeared to be in response to the efforts of Crimsonreading.org, an online database of text titles required at Harvard whose information comes in part from students who take notes in the bookstore, which is managed by Barnes & Noble College. The store called such information its intellectual property.

---

"The big, bad chain stores don't scare them," the New York Daily News reported in a piece about Brooklyn indie bookstores A Novel Idea, Spoonbill and Sugartown Booksellers, BookCourt, P.S. Bookshop and Heights Books.

Bina Valenzano, co-owner of A Novel Idea in Bay Ridge, cited one-on-one relationships with customers for the store's success. "When a person comes into a store and asks for a book, 80% of the time we know where the book is and what it is about," she said, adding that she "tries hard to remember customers' tastes so that when they return she has recommendations."

---

WWJD? (What would Jack do?)

The San Jose Mercury News suggested that its readers go "On the Road" via the Web, beginning in Lowell, Mass., and then virtually crossing the country to a California that is "packed with all things Beat and Kerouac-related, including City Lights book store, which faced obscenity charges for publishing poet Allen Ginsberg's Howl. Generations later it is still owned by another Beat poet, Lawrence Ferlinghetti."

---

The question, in one form or another, gets asked a lot these days, but Adweek isn't afraid to ask once more: "Will E-Books Get Lost in Translation?"

The answer, as usual, is a qualified maybe. 

--- 

Ingram Publisher Services, Ingram Book Group's distribution company, has announced:

• Michelle Fisher has joined the company as national account manager for mass merchandise accounts. She was formerly mass merchandise sales manager for PGW and will be based at the IPS office in Berkeley, Calif. She has more than 17 years of experience in book, periodicals and mass merchandise sales.
• Cinda Van Deursen has joined the company as field sales representative for the Mid-Atlantic region. She has more than 30 years of experience at Bantam Doubleday Dell and Random House. In 1998, she won the New Atlantic Independent Booksellers Association's Helmuth Award given to outstanding sales reps and was a board member of NAIBA for three years.