News Notes: More on PGW/AMS; Two N.Y. Bookstores; ABS SoldIn a letter sent on Monday, PGW president Rich Freese updated client
publishers on some important issues, although in many cases, final
determinations are up to the bankruptcy court handling the AMS Chapter
11 filing:
A motion the court will hear January 24 requests PGW
publishers be given "critical vendor" status and PGW be allowed to make
payments of "the amounts due from PGW to PGW publishers in January."
In filings, PGW asserts that "PGW publishers are the owners of their
inventory held by PGW in its warehouses in accordance with our
contractual relationships." Under those contracts, when books are ordered, PGW purchases them
from the publishers and sells them to retailers.
Freese emphasized that "neither AMS nor PGW have ever pledged the PGW
publishers' inventory held in PGW's warehouses against our credit line.
Accordingly, the bank excludes the PGW publishers' inventory from its
calculations against the borrowing base."
In related news, Dow Jones (via the San Jose Mercury News)
reported that AMS has asked the bankruptcy court to stop attempts by
publishers, including Random House and Simon & Schuster, to reclaim their books from the wholesaler. ---
For the second time since Sunday, the New York Times
focuses on independent bookstores: in today's case, it's an Our Towns
column by Peter Applebome about the Village Bookstore, Pleasantville,
N.Y., and Second Story Book Shop in neighborning Chappaqua, both of
which coincidentally opened on the same day, September 9, 1972.
Village Books has had five successive owners and two names. Second
Story has been owned the whole time by the legendary former ABA
president Joan Ripley (who last November sent out fliers asking
residents to support the store, an effort that was forwarded via e-mail
by a customer and led to "a stellar Christmas season").
The "absolutes"--or lessons--from the two stores: "You can't get rich
running a small-town bookstore, but smart, resourceful businesspeople
can survive. If lots of trends can kill bookstores, plenty of suburbs
are full of smart literate residents who treasure having one nearby.
And, to some extent, people really do get what they pay for. There are
good things about the fancy Borders in Mount Kisco, but if people want
the small independent with the handwritten tags recommending books real
people actually read--or the other local shops battling the big box
stores--it's their choice whether they live or die." --- Follett Educational Services has bought Academic Book Services, which buys and sells used K-12 textbooks, Bargain Book News
reported. ABS shares its facility with Kudzu Book Traders, which
wholesales remainder books; Kudzu will continue its separate operation after ABS leaves.
When the sale is finalized, ABS's 18 field salespeople will be
interviewed for positions with Follett Educational Services. About 20
of ABS's 140 headquarters employees will continue to be employed by
Kudzu and affiliated operations.
Kudzu plans to expand its remainder book business. ---
gather's book chat room 4 Borders customers. they r ready to roll.
Borders and Gather.com
have gathered together into a joint project in which Borders shoppers
who receive informational e-mails from the company will be offered
links to a chat room on Gather.com, a social media Web site, where they
can "share their thoughts on books, music and other entertainment,"
according to the AP (via the Washington Post).
The room will also feature author interviews and information on author
readings. Users will be able to earn points redeemable for Borders gift
cards and other products.
"The power of social networking and social media is changing the way
companies interact with their customers," Gather.com CEO Tom Gerace
said in a statement. "Borders is a brand that appeals to highly
educated and highly informed adults who are the core of the Gather.com
community." --- This
spring the Easy Chair Bookstore in Blacksburg, Va., is getting off its
duff and leaving downtown to move to the University Mall, where it will
share space with its sister company, Easy Chair Coffee Shop, the Roanoke Times reported.
The two-year-old bookstore, which was founded after the café, was
originally going to have a café of its own, but that project never came to a boil. The café next to the Easy Chair Coffee
Shop recently shut its doors.
"Now that the bookstore has two years under its belt and is
supporting itself, we'd kind of like to add the cafe environment to the
mix and see if the two businesses can't energize each other," co-owner
Russell Chisholm told the paper.
--- Cool idea of the day:
instead of labeling its New Year's resolutions display "resolutions" or
"I resolve . . . ," the Fountain Bookstore, Richmond, Va., is calling
it "I aspire . . . " Bookseller Anna Cloninger came up with the idea,
which the store considers much positive than the alternatives and
which allows it to expand the display to include such
things as travel books and books on how to write a novel. --- In
October, Barnes & Noble plans to open a store in Rockford, Ill., in
the Cherryvale Mall at 7200 Harrison Ave. When the store opens, the
current B&N at 6685 East State St. in Rockford will close. Share This 
* * *Media and Movies Media Heat: Order in the (Supreme) CourtThis morning on the Today Show: Anne Fletcher, author of Weight Loss
Confidential: How Teens Lose Weight and Keep It Off--And What They Wish
Parents Knew (Houghton Mifflin, $26, 9780618433667).
---
This morning on the Early Show: Naomi Judd riffs on Naomi's Guide to
Aging Gratefully: Facts, Myths, and Good News for Boomers (S&S,
$23, 9780743275156).
Also on the Early Show, Peter Walsh talks a little about his new book, It's All Too Much:
An Easy Plan for Living a Richer Life with Less Stuff (Free Press, $22,
9780743292641).
---
This morning on Imus in the Morning: Mike Huckabee, Governor of
Arkansas and author of From Hope to Higher Ground: 12 STOPS to
Restoring America's Greatness (Center Street, $19.99, 9781599957043).
Huckabee will also appear on Hannity & Colmes and the Daily Show with Jon Stewart tonight.
--- The Book Report, the weekly AM radio book-related show
organized by Windows a bookshop, Monroe, La., will feature one author
interview on today's show, which has the theme "the struggle" and
includes rememberances of Tillie Olsen:
Frank S. Joseph, the former AP and Washington Post reporter and editor and author of To Love Mercy
(Mid-Atlantic Highlands, $14.95, 9780974478531). The first novel is set in Chicago in the
1950s and centers on "the story of two boys from very different worlds
brought together in a violent moment."
The show airs at 8 a.m. Central Time and can be heard live at thebookreport.net; the archived edition will be posted this afternoon. ---
Today the View gives a royal welcome to Sarah Ferguson, the Duchess of
York, whose most recent kids' tale is Little Red's Summer Adventure
(S&S Children's Publishing, $15.95, 9780689855627).
---
Today on the Diane Rehm Show, Jeffrey Rosen makes the case for his The
Supreme Court: The Personalities and Rivalries that Defined America
(Times Books, $25, 9780805081824).
---
Today on NPR's Fresh Air: Zev Chafets, author of A Match Made in
Heaven: American Jews, Christian Zionists, and One Man's Exploration of
the Weird and Wonderful Judeo-Evangelical Alliance (HarperCollins,
$24.95, 9780060890582). ---
Tonight on the Colbert Report: David Kamp comments on The United States of Arugula: How We Became a Gourmet Nation (Broadway, $26, 0767915798). ---
Tonight on the Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson: LL Cool J is in the
spotlight with LL Cool J's Platinum Workout: Sculpt Your Best Body Ever
with Hollywood's Fittest Star (Rodale, $27.95, 9781594866081).
Share This 
* * * Movies: Arthur and the InvisiblesArthur and the Invisibles, directed by Luc Besson, goes into
wide release this Friday, January 12. The animated movie, starring
Freddie Highmore, Mia Farrow, Calvin 'Snoop Dogg' Broadus, David Bowie
and Penny Balfour, stars 10-year-old Arthur who goes into the land of
the Minimoys, creatures who are just a tenth of an inch tall, to find a
treasure that will help his grandmother keep her house from a real
estate developer. The tie-in is Arthur and the Invisibles by Luc Besson (HarperEntertainment, $7.99, 9780061227264). Share This This Weekend on Book TV: Khrushchev's Foreign PolicyBook TV airs on C-Span 2 from 8 a.m. Saturday to 8 a.m. Monday and
focuses on political and historical books as well as the book industry.
The following are highlights for this coming weekend. For more
information, go to Book TV's Web site.
Saturday, January 13
6 p.m. Encore Booknotes. Part 2 of a 2001 interview with New York Times senior writer Kurt Eichenwald about The Informant: A True Story
(Broadway, $16.95, 9780767903271). The book is an account of the FBI
and the Justice Department's collaboration with an executive at Archer
Daniels Midland who implicated the firm in an illegal scheme. The
investigation was complicated when the government discovered that the
executive was involved in his own illegal scheme.
7 p.m. History on Book TV. Timothy Naftali, associate professor at the University of Virginia and co-author with Aleksandr Fursenko of Khrushchev's Cold War: The Inside Story of an American Adversary
(Norton, $35, 9780393058093), the second of the pair's two books about
the Soviet leader's foreign policy, talked about the heated
interactions between Nikita Khrushchev and Presidents Eisenhower and
Kennedy during the Cold War. (Re-airs Sunday at 10 a.m.)
Share This Ooops Chef Put Back in Martha Stewart's KitchenOur Media Heat mention yesterday of The Soul of a New Cuisine: A Discovery of the Foods and Flavors of Africa
(Wiley, $40, 9780764569111) misattributed the author, who actually is
chef Marcus Samuelsson. He wrote the title with Heidi Sacko Walters and appeared on the Martha Stewart Show yesterday.
Our apologies!
Share This Deeper Understanding Robert Gray: A New Island Community for Readers Like 'You'First, let me offer my belated congratulations to You for being named
Time magazine's Person of the Year. You deserve it. You outdid yourself
online in 2006, turning remote islands like YouTube, MySpace and
Wikipedia into virtual continents. You even went literal with the
island metaphor by moving to Second Life and recreating Yourself in
Your own image.
Second person singular is always in caps in YourWorld, and 2007 looks
even brighter for You. One small question remains for us, however: Will
the publishing industry survive the age of You? As booksellers, our
(lower case) heads can't help but spin. Dare we "close the books" on
2006? Will anyone open them again?
Book communities continue to develop online in any number of
interesting ways, but the odds of building a book-focused Web site that
becomes a YouTube or MySpace are probably equivalent to those of buying
a lottery ticket with your morning coffee and winning $20 million
(disclaimer: all estimates calculated by former English major and thus
subject to professional derision).
If we build it, will You come?
If we don't, will You even notice?
As I read the hype about Time magazine's Year of You, I was also having
an extended e-mail conversation with Charlotte Cook, president of
Komenar Publishing, a small house whose second title, My Half of the
Sky by Jana McBurney-Lin, garnered a Book Sense Pick last year from
Keri Holmes of the Kaleidescope bookstore in Hampton, Iowa.
We discussed at length the online as well as offline world of books,
and the word "community" kept surfacing in various contexts. I'll share
some of her thoughts with you in the next two columns here, but we are
also joining Charlotte for the soft launch this week of the Habitual
Reader, a new online community.
"Our idealism strikes again!" Charlotte says. "Nick Ponticello, our
manager of operations, has pointed out that the hottest Web sites are
those that create community. We want the Habitual Reader Web site to
give voice to those among us who spend $$$$ every month on books and
then actually read those books. The centerpiece of the site will be
Profiles of Habitual Readers with suggested reading lists; a Jeff
Foxworthy-like contest about who is a Habitual Reader; Homegrown
Reviews; Survivor: Book Island; a list of Once Was Enough titles; and
even a 'nominate your favorite bookseller' option."
Charlotte came to publishing after working in a variety of fields,
including "libraries, bookstores, large retail operations (worker bee
to management) and high tech (small and large companies)." She can
expound upon the wonders of literary fiction as well as the lures and
pitfalls of technophilia: "When I was in high tech, I learned two
things: 1) There's bleeding edge, leading edge and ridiculous.
Ridiculous was being high on the technology but forgetting what your
business was. We also called it 'rapture of the deep'; 2) Every
technology takes several introductions to find its true value in the
marketplace."
Her husband, Richard, owns Sunrise Bookshop & Metaphysical Center
in Berkeley, Calif. "We started Sunrise more than 30 years ago,"
Charlotte says, "and have been part of the independent booksellers'
world this whole time. We have supported all things for indies and are longtime members of NCIBA."
Sunrise does not have a Web site. According to Richard, "We have on
several occasions begun a Web site for the bookstore, but it requires a
good deal of work, ongoing attention and commitment, and so far little
evidence that it would repay such effort. My thoughts are subject to
change on this issue."
Despite her interest in online experimentation and community building,
Charlotte concurs with her husband's resistance to online retailing.
Komenar Publishing does not sell books on its Web site: "We staunchly believe in
community bookstores. I buy on the Web only when I know exactly what I
want and can't find it locally. What the Web does is provide us with a
much cheaper venue for realizing marketing and publicity needs."
The Habitual Reader goes live this week as a work in progress with limited content but unlimited hopes.
Will You join this particular book community? Anything is possible, but everything is worth a shot.
Check in next week for an update as well as some of Charlotte's
thoughts about living the life of a small publisher in a world where
the stakes are anything but virtual.--Robert Gray ( column archives available at Fresh Eyes Now)
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