Some nights were longer than others.
Filed under cartoon by author, CarToonsday
The Bookstore Strikes Back – Ann Patchett – The Atlantic.
Parnassus Books
by Ann Patchett
Author opens an independent bookstore to fill a need.
Address: 3900 Hillsboro Pike, Nashville, TN 37215
Phone:(615) 953-2243
Two years ago, when Nashville lost its only in-town bookstores, the novelist Ann Patchett decided to step into the breach. Parnassus Books, which Patchett and two veteran booksellers envisioned, designed, financed, and manage, is now open for business and enjoying the ride.
In late February I am in my basement, which is really a very nice part of my house that is not done justice by the word basement. For the purposes of this story, let’s call it the Parnassus Fulfillment Center. I have hauled 533 boxed-up hardback copies of my latest novel, State of Wonder, from Parnassus, the bookstore I co-own in Nashville, into my car; driven them across town (three trips there and three trips back); and then lugged them down here to the Parnassus Fulfillment Center. Along with the hardbacks, I have brought in countless paperback copies of my backlist books as well. I sign all these books and stack them up on one enormous and extremely sturdy table. Then I call for backup: Patrik and Niki from the store, my friend Judy, my mother. Together we form an assembly line, taking orders off the bookstore’s Web site, addressing mailing labels, writing tiny thank-you notes to tuck inside the signed copies, then bubble-wrapping, taping, and packing them up to mail. We get a rhythm going, we have a system, and it’s pretty smooth, except for removing the orders from the Web site. What I don’t understand is why, no matter how many orders I delete from the list, the list does not get shorter. We are all work and no progress, and I’m sure something serious must be going wrong. After all, we’ve had this Web site for only a week, and who’s to say we know what we’re doing? “We know what we’re doing,” Niki says, and Patrik, who set up the Web site in the first place, confirms this. They explain to me that the reason the list isn’t getting any shorter is that orders are still coming in.
You may have heard the news that the independent bookstore is dead, that books are dead, that maybe even reading is dead—to which I say: Pull up a chair, friend. I have a story to tell.
The reason I was signing and wrapping books in my basement is that more orders were coming in than the store could handle, and the reason so many orders were coming in is that, a few days before, I had been a guest on The Colbert Report. After a healthy round of jousting about bookstores versus Amazon, Stephen Colbert held a copy of my novel in front of the cameras and exhorted America to buy it from Amazon—to which I, without a moment’s thought (because without a moment’s thought is how I fly these days), shouted, “No! No! Not Amazon. Order it off ParnassusBooks.net, and I’ll sign it for you.” And America took me up on my offer, confirming once and for all that the “Colbert bump” is real. That explains how I got stuck in the basement, but fails to answer the larger question of what a writer of literary fiction whose “new” book was already nine months old was doing on The Colbert Report in the first place. Hang on, because this is where things get weird: I was on the show not because I am a writer but because I am a famous independent bookseller.
Let’s go back to the beginning of the story.
Two years ago, the city of Nashville had two bookstores. One was Davis-Kidd, which had been our much-beloved locally owned and operated independent before selling out to the Ohio-based Joseph-Beth Booksellers chain 15 years earlier. Joseph-Beth moved Davis-Kidd into a mall, provided it with 30,000 square feet of retail space, and put wind chimes and coffee mugs and scented candles in front of the book displays. We continued to call it our “local independent,” even though we knew that wasn’t really true anymore. Nashville also had a Borders, which was about the same size as Davis-Kidd and sat on the edge of Vanderbilt’s campus. (In candor, I should say that Nashville has some truly wonderful used-book stores that range from iconic to overwhelming. But while they play an important role in the cultural fabric of the city, it is a separate role—or maybe that’s just the perspective of someone who writes books for a living.) We have a Barnes & Noble that is a 20-minute drive out of town without traffic, a Books-A-Million on the western edge of the city, near a Costco, and also a Target. Do those count? Not to me, no, they don’t, and they don’t count to any other book-buying Nashvillians with whom I am acquainted.
In December 2010, Davis-Kidd closed. It was profitable, declared the owners from Ohio, who were dismantling the chain, but not profitable enough. Then, in May 2011, our Borders store—also profitable—went the way of all Borders stores. Nashvillians woke up one morning and found that we no longer had a bookstore.
The rest of the story at: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/12/the-bookstore-strikes-back/309164/?single_page=true
Are you a book hoarder? There's a word for that. – LA Times.
How many books is too many books? What makes you a book hoarder? What do you do when you have too many?
In Japanese, there’s a word for it: tsundoku. It’s a noun that describes a person who buys books and doesn’t read them, and then lets them pile up on the floor, on shelves, and assorted pieces of furniture.
Read the rest of the article at: http://www.latimes.com/books/jacketcopy/la-et-jc-book-hoarding-tsundoku-20140724-story.html
Amazon Is NOT the Vladimir Putin of the Publishing World – The Daily Beast.
by Nick Gillespie
Can you believe those…those…those…sons of bitches at Amazon? After launching almost 20 years ago and making virtually every book—new, used, dead-tree, electronic, audio, and I’m guessing any day now, olfactory—available to everyone in America at good-to-great prices, the company’s true character now stands revealed. It’s not pretty, folks. Despite a huge market share, Amazon apparently still wants books, especially the e-books that everyone agrees are the future of the medium, to be cheaper than what publishers and big-name authors want you to pay for them.
Just who the hell does Amazon think it is? Maybe a bare-chested tyrant who used to work for the KGB? Amazon is “like Vladimir Putin mobilizing his troops along the Ukrainian border,” a proprietor of an “e-book discovery site” tells The New York Times. “A bully,” offers Richard Russo, the novelist and president of the Authors Guild (which knows exactly how to bully mere “writers”). Amazon, says author James Patterson, who published 13 detective books last year, is waging “war” and doing unspeakable things for which “the quality of American literature will suffer.” No, wait. That’s all wrong. Amazon isn’t like a Russian despot waging a war, says Dennis Loy, proprietor of the small publisher Melville House. It’s more like “the Mafia.”
Filed under Amazon, book publishing, publishing
Stephen Colbert Gives Jeff Bezos the Finger — Twice.
Amazon is messing with the wrong guy.
A few days after best-selling author Malcolm Gladwell came out against the online retailer for raising prices and delaying shipments of his books because of a dispute with publisher Hachette, Colbert has done the same. Colbert’s plaint, however, is funnier.
During a segment on Wednesday night’s Colbert Report, Colbert announced he was “mad prime” at Amazon for its latest actions. In particular, Colbert mocked Amazon’s suggestion that consumers in the market for his books should buy a used copy.
[Editor’s note: I think writer Sherman Alexie is correct. This is a battle between two big companies and the person(s) to support are the authors, who are getting smashed by both sides in this battle.]
Source: http://mashable.com/2014/06/05/stephen-colbert-amazon/#:eyJzIjoiZiIsImkiOiJfbDN3ZHQ3eDIza3NsOXdmZCJ9
Filed under Amazon, book publishing, publishing
22 Books You Pretend You've Read But Actually Haven't.
Most people lie and say they’ve read these classic books to seem smarter, according to a survey in The Guardian. Chances are, you’re one of those people too.
Filed under classics, literature
Doctors Are Now Prescribing Books to Treat Depression | Smart News.
Sample of article:
William Nicholson once said, “We read to know that we are not alone.” And that sentiment, of reading to connect with the world and to feel less isolated, may be more than just a poetic thought. Doctors are now prescribing books to patients with depression, hoping that reading will help them find connections.
Leah Price at the Boston Globe reports on the a new program that launched in the United Kingdom this June:
If your primary care physician diagnoses you with “mild to moderate” depression, one of her options is now to scribble a title on a prescription pad. You take the torn-off sheet not to the pharmacy but to your local library, where it can be exchanged for a copy of “Overcoming Depression,” “Mind Over Mood,” or “The Feeling Good Handbook.” And depression is only one of over a dozen conditions treated. Other titles endorsed by the NHS include “Break Free from OCD,” “Feel the Fear and Do it Anyway,” “Getting Better Bit(e) by Bit(e),” and “How to Stop Worrying.”
Read more: http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/smartnews/2013/12/doctors-are-now-prescribing-books-to-treat-depression/#ixzz2pHkNT3OX
Give the gift of Smithsonian magazine for only $12!: http://bit.ly/1cGUiGv
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Filed under Uncategorized
Amazon best-selling books of 2013: what they tell us about America..
Sad or maybe not so sad thing is, except for The Great Gatsby, I don’t have nor have I read any of these other books, and not sure I want to.
Filed under book list
Giving the gift of writing takes on many forms.
Answer: You can’t take the reading side of the relationship between writer and reader for granted. You have to help “grow the market,” as it is called in marketing-speak today. With all the options available to occupy people’s dwindling free time, you can’t assume books are the first thing somebody thinks of. In short, if you want people to read your work, you have to help make sure they are reading.
Below is the opening of an article by Alanna Okun. The title of the article is “Books to Give as Gifts for Every Occasion.” You may not agree with all the selections made in the article, and that’s okay. I didn’t. But if you aren’t giving books as gifts, how can you expect others to give yours as a gift?
GRADUATION
The Elements of Style, by Strunk & White
Bonus points if it’s the version of this classic that’s illustrated by the luminous Maira Kalman; that’ll make it feel more like a keepsake and less like a standard-issue textbook (albeit a wonderful one) on the first day of sophomore English Lit.
This Is Water, by David Foster Wallace
This legendary speech was given by the late David Foster Wallace at Kenyon College and contains the kind of simple yet staggeringly important advice that any high school/college/grad school student/actually human, in general, would benefit from thinking about for at least a few minutes.
“It is,” the speech ends, “about simple awareness — awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, that we have to keep reminding ourselves, over and over: ‘This is water, this is water.’”
For illustrations and more suggestions, go to http://www.buzzfeed.com/alannaokun/books-to-give-as-gifts-for-every-occasion
Filed under Writing Tip Wednesday
The rooster atop the birdcage. Through the window are books offered for sale.
By David E. Booker
I have worked at a struggling independent bookstore. I used to joke that I couldn’t hang out in bars, so I hung out in bookstores instead. Truth is, I probably wouldn’t be hanging around bars anyway. They never held much attraction for me.
But a neighborhood bookstore in a former bar, and on top of that a bar that has a reference in literature? Sometimes more serendipitous things have happened, but for slightly over two years Central Street Bookstore was just such a place. Housed in what was formerly the Corner Lounge, the same Corner Lounge referenced in Cormac McCathy’s novel Suttree, it was a place where you could find a good used or rare book as well as stand at the bar that may have been around when Cormac McCarthy lived in Knoxville.
You could also find interesting curiosities such as an orrery, a smiling Buddha with red nipples, a limber-headed statue of Edgar Alan Poe, and a rooster sitting atop a birdcage housing lights. It was a place, as owner John Coleman said, “where people can still make serendipitous discoveries,” be those discoveries novels by authors you knew or didn’t know (including Suttree and other books by McCarthy), books of poetry, history books, and copies of books you might not find anywhere else, including comic books and even the occasional book on tape. I found and bought probably way too many books there for myself and friends, including some this past Christmas.
Some of the books for sale at Central Street Books.
Unfortunately, that will all end this March 2013, when Central Street Books closes its doors. John says the store is too small to be profitable, and that at least for the moment, he’ll concentrate on his Internet book selling and traveling to sell at book fairs. He will also have some books at a local antique mall. The struggling independent bookstore I worked at over 15 years ago is also closed. Has been for many years. The building is now home to an Oriental restaurant.
It was a serendipitous that this bookstore showed up in my neighborhood, even if for only two years. I’m just not sure where my next serendipitous finds will be found.
Books and more.
Filed under Essay, Photo by author, Sunday story
Booker's Blog 