Mary McCarthy has joined Ingram Book Group as director of product management, where she will manage a team of buyers working with large- and medium-sized trade book publishers and will present the services of Ingram Book, Lightning Source and Ingram Digital Group to the industry. She succeeds George Tattersfield, who was recently promoted to the new position of v-p, product management.

McCarthy was most recently v-p and COO of the Harry W. Schwartz Bookshops, Milwaukee, Wis., and earlier had management and executive positions at Kroch's & Brentano's in Chicago, Random House, the Library Ltd., St. Louis, and the Booksource.

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In November, Borders will open a 25,150-sq.-ft. store at Freehold Raceway Mall in Freehold, N.J. The store will be part of Freehold Raceway Mall's open-air 100,000- sq.-ft. lifestyle expansion, which should be completed in fall 2007. The store will be located at the intersection of Raceway Mall Drive and Route 9. 

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It will be Clinton versus Clinton when two Hillary biographies are released on June 19. USA Today featured a bit of publishing world smackdown between Paul Bogaards of Knopf and Geoff Shandler of Little, Brown. According to the article, Little, Brown moved up its release date for Her Way by Jeff Gerth and Don Von Natta Jr. after Knopf announced a street date for A Woman in Charge by Carl Bernstein.

Peter Osnos of PublicAffairs suggested there would be some key publicity signs to watch for in the upcoming battle for bestseller status: "Who gets the biggest headline? Who gets on 60 Minutes? Who does better on the Daily Show? It will be fun to watch--if you're not one of the publishers."

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Radio shock jock Don Imus chose the Scranton Library in Madison, Conn., for his first public appearance since being dismissed by CBS Radio last month. NBC 30 reported that Imus accompanied his wife, Dierdre, to a signing for her new book, Green This!. The event, postponed from an earlier date, was rescheduled after Deirdre Imus called Roxanne Coady, owner of R.J. Julia Booksellers. "Deirdre said to me this would be a safe, welcoming place for her to do her event and understood they would put that aside," said Coady. According to NBC30, "The event was limited to 300 people who all bought the book to get a ticket to the signing."

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Opportunity knocking in Arizona and Louisiana?

"I wish that a bookstore or two would move into town here," Tuscon, Ariz.--and Wakefield neighborhood--resident, activist, and El Pueblo Branch Library manager Frank De La Cruz told the Arizona Daily Star. "There's nothing really like that on the South Side right now."

"What young professionals are asking for is . . . just a 24-7 downtown where people can live, work and play," wrote J.R. Ball in the Greater Baton Rouge Business Report, adding, "What they need are more entrepreneurs willing to take the risk of opening that downtown bookstore, art gallery or clothing store."

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Love books and beautiful inns? A number of authors with connections to the Jersey Shore will be signing and selling their books during the Authors and Inns Tour in Spring Lake, N.J., on June 10. The Asbury Park Press reported that the self-guided tour, sponsored by Historic Inns of Spring Lake in association with the Spring Lake and Sea Girt public libraries, will feature, among others, bestselling suspense novelist Mary Higgins Clark, who has a summer home in Spring Lake.

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BookExpo America is in New York City! Whether you're a native or just visiting, New York is a tough city to tackle in just a few days. So, from now until BEA Frommer's and Shelf Awareness are offering tips on how to make the most of the long weekend in the Big Apple. Today we dig in to the bagel debate. There is no doubt that New York has the best bagels in the country (and maybe the world!). Pauline Frommer, creator of the Pauline Frommer's Travel Guides, offers her picks for the best of the best, in case BEA leaves you in need of a bagel break.  

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"A handful of glutinous wheat mixed with a bit of malt and rolled into a circle that is boiled and then baked--that's the simple recipe behind New York's edible mascot, the bagel. You wouldn't think something as basic, as simple as this little bit of circular bread would inspire so many heated debates, such rapturous praise, but in Empire City, the bagel is king, so you should try one sometime during your visit (just don't ask to have it "scooped out," the sacrilegious craze among carbphobics today). The best places to try them (all of them modest in price), where you're likely to get them fresh out of the oven, are:

• Absolute Bagels (2788 Broadway, at 107th St.; 212-932-2052)
• Bagel Bobs (51 University Place, between 10th and 11th Sts.; 212-533-2627)
• H&H Bagels (2239 Broadway, between 80th St.; 212-595-8000; or 1551 Second Ave., between 81st and 82nd Sts.)
• Murray's Bagels (500 Sixth Ave., at 13th St.; 212-462-2830; or 242 Eighth Ave., between 22nd and 23rd Tts.)
• Kosars (367 Grand St., between Essex and Norfolk Sts.; 877-4-BIALYS)

For more New York City travel tips, check out the official BEA travel guide, Pauline Frommer's New York City (Wiley), celebrating 50 years of world travel.  Listen to Pauline and other Frommer's writers share their travel stories and tips online.

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The Rachael Ray Show features Savannah chef Paula Deen, whose latest offering is It Ain't All About the Cookin' (S&S, $25, 9780743292856/0743292855).

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Tonight on the Charlie Rose Show: Michael Beschloss, whose new book is Presidential Courage: Brave Leaders and How They Changed America 1789-1989 (S&S, $28, 9780684857053/0684857057).

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Tonight the Tonight Show with Jay Leno hears from New Mexico governor and presidential hopeful Bill Richardson, author of Between Worlds: The Making of an American Life (Plume, $16, 9780452288645/0452288649).

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Sunday on Weekend Today: Stephen Post, Ph.D., author of Why Good Things Happen to Good People: The Exciting New Research that Proves the Link Between Doing Good and Living a Longer, Healthier, Happier Life (Broadway, $23.95, 9780767920179/0767920171).

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Among major points made by speakers at yesterday's Making Information Pay seminar, held by the Book Industry Study Group, which focused on "using emerging technology to improve your bottom line":

Although e-books are nowhere near achieving their potential, there are many other digital opportunities, mostly on the Web and cell phones and iPods, that continue to grow and evolve. Publishers who aren't ready for those and unforeseen opportunities--such as by not digitizing their books, for example--will lose out. As Mike Shatzkin of the Idea Logical Co., put it: "The day will come when you should have done it last week."

Consumers are reading more and more online and want pieces of information, not full texts. As a result, making chapters and other parts of traditional books available is more important. "Consumers don't want to read a whole finance book when they're only concerned with mortgages," Nicole Poindexter of Hachette Group said. "New media is radically changing content. In the past, readers just took content as it was presented." Now, she added, "consumers create content."

Poindexter pointed out, too, that the next generation of readers are digital natives and to an extent will bypass books. "We'll have no chance to control our content unless we take action now to digitize it and be proactive."

Publishers need to be online to sell traditional books, too. More and more marketing is done online to reach niches and establish relationships with readers. In the same vein, consumers are creating communities and publishers need to involve themselves in those communities.

The digital revolution is "not happening as outlined a few years ago," Allen Noren of O'Reilly Media said. "But is has started, and O'Reilly is making significant money from digital products."

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Mike Shatzkin, founder and CEO of the Idea Logical Co., predicted that this year publishers will seek out companies that can handle digital asset distribution, which he affectionately called DADs, because "digital content opportunities will proliferate." Content distribution on the Web promotes sales, he said, and "a party with revenue might start at any time."

Shatzkin has identified about a dozen companies that qualify as DADs, including Accenture, Donnelly, Bibliovault, CodeMantra, CPI, LibreDigital (part of HarperCollin's NewsStand), the BookStore part of Holtzbrinck/Macmillan, the Ingram Digital Group, Random House and Value Chain International (Gardners).

The consolidation of digital distribution will be "inexorable," he continued, and when there are fewer DADs, it will be "easier to spread opportunities across the marketplace."

Shatzkin noted "big shifts in reaching consumers," saying that marketing needs to move "from large scale to niche." Today maybe 50 websites will reach what one show reached in the past. He said publishers should consider such marketing efforts as an investment rather than an expense, in part because the money will be spent for ongoing ventures, such as building lists. "Marketing has to be less about pontificating and more about conversing," Shatzkin continued.

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The next speaker represented a DAD: he was Chris Hart, v-p of publishing and sales applications at Random House. Hart outlined the development of Random's Insight service, which has roots in Random's decision 10 years ago to begin digitizing some information about its books, starting with covers, then including text descriptions and author biographies, expanding over time so that "now basically the whole book is online," he said.

Insight is something that "sits on the Net and allows the syndication or broader use of Random House material." As a result, "we have more content in front of more people than ever. This has made us part of the Internet conversation." He noted that Insight also "levels the playing field for retailers" by allowing a search-inside-the-book type of function for all booksellers and nontraditional retailers, too.

Hart said that "it's very important to think differently inhouse. We have to start talking about new products online." Already Insight has allowed Random to test new business models, such as possibly a subscription service just for science fiction or a cookbook newsletter associated with a book. Random is also encouraging authors to look at ways to disseminate information beyond the traditional book.

Hart noted that "reverse publishing is getting big." This involves more than just blog-to-book publishing, but allowing consumers to take their own material and wrap it with the publisher's and "make their own content."

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Allen Noren, director of online marketing at O'Reilly Media, offered anecdotes illustrating how books have lost their traditional appeal for many people. One honors computer student said to him, for example, "Books? You mean those things you older people use?"

A graduate of Yale's MBA program noted that during the whole program he didn't use books. "If it wasn't on Google," he said, "it didn't exist."

And the CFO of a publishing company, when helping her daughter with a paper, said that most of the research they did was online, commenting, "Books are so inconvenient."

The business is "competing against new and creative ways of distributing information," Noren went on. "We're competing against the immediacy and convenience of the Internet. We're competing with the concept of 'good enough.' [The idea that maybe the quality of some information online isn't the best but is adequate.] We're competing against free."

Like other speakers, Noren emphasized the importance of providing consumers easy access and requiring as few clicks as possible.

Noren outlined several O'Reilly programs that have aimed to reach consumers on the Web. Safari U. "liberated content from the book cover," allowing people to take material in a variety of ways and combine it with their own material. Safari X, a joint venture with Pearson, enables students to get digital versions of texts at lower costs. Short Cuts presents short form pdfs of longer content as it is being developed, which "also lets us do rapid publishing," he said. "These are living documents, updated many times. We're not constrained by having printed a book that can't be changed until we get through the warehouse stock."

Not surprisingly, O'Reilly has found that using "static text and images to describe dramatic processes are not fully optimal online," as Noren put it. He highly recommended new Adobe Acrobat products that allow multimedia files to be embedded in text, which he called "ideal for cookbooks, travel books, historical titles besides technology titles."

Noren said that selling pdfs of O'Reilly books online has led international sales to jump from 4% to 43% of sales. The company has added a rights link to this, making it easy for customers to buy reprint rights. It's also started selling chapters.

"Content ubiquity" is important, he continued. "We need to get content out there as far and wide as we can."

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Providing an overview of Hachette Group's experiences in digital publishing, Nicole Poindexter, v-p of strategic planning and publishing operations, said that "mistakes happen in this arena, but can we afford not to try?"

She pointed to broad changes in reading and online usage that make it imperative for any publisher to have a presence online. One study shows that there are 211 million Americans Internet users. People are becoming ever more comfortable buying--and even doing their taxes--on the Web. As more and more content appears on the Web, filters and smart searching abilities become necessary. "Search can be a powerful marketing tool," Poindexter commented. "It has the ability to allow people to find your content." In addition, books and publishers offer some credibility.

E-books still have problems: files need to work across hardware platforms and handle graphics, there should be a critical mass of titles available, readers should be multifunctional, easy to use and competitively priced. "We've made progress but we're not there yet," Poindexter said.

Digital publishing is not like traditional publishing, Poindexter emphasized. "We have to think about publishing in a very different way," from acquisitions and contracts and management to editing, sales and marketing. A major issue for the company is whether to "own" or outsource various capabilities.

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John Rubin, founder and CEO of Above the Treeline, described the retail sales data analysis company, which has just added Borders to its stable of clients. Above the Treeline has helped booksellers increase turns and helped publishers sell smarter, he said.

A major problem in sales analysis in the industry has been that the book world has "unparalleled complexity in terms of the numbers and types of SKUs" and that "algorithms go only so far when it comes to books." But technology is catching up with the industry, Rubin said, and booksellers and publishers are beginning to overcome longtime hurdles. For years, publishers feared booksellers would hoard books and booksellers have feared not being able to get books they've wanted. More and more publishers and retailers are recognizing that "they both have vested interests in getting the right books into the right stores" and are "looking at inventory as a shared asset even when it goes into stores." Rubin predicted that vendor managed inventories "maybe will work" in the book business.

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Ted Treanor, president of Rosetta Solutions and Seattle Book Co., discussed the company's newest product, Net Galley, which will be launched at BEA and aims to make the process of getting galleys to reviewers more efficient and less costly.--John Mutter

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