Well, Amazon is coming out of the chute swinging this week. The good news is that they’re acknowledging the competition by fighting for independently-publishing authors with their 70%-royalty offer for Kindle books. For the record, 70% is a seriously high royalty rate.
Just a year ago, Publishing Frontier ran an article discussing Amazon’s position in the industry and predicting their future. It’s an interesting analysis.
Andrew Savikas has a good post on the O’Reilly site on “why the Apple-talking-to-publishers news isn’t really news.”
And this week Lulu announced they’re going public. This may or may not make a lot of difference for Lulu authors, but it will matter to anyone with money who’s banking on Lulu’s business success. Which looks pretty rosy.
Meanwhile, Daemon News reports that some geeks turned a Barnes and Nobles Nook into a web tablet. Voided their warranty, but hey, now they’ve got a computer! Oh, and by the way—I don’t recommend going for the marketing game that says the Nook isn’t capitalized. That’s trying to play on the grammatical convention that brand names are capitalized, while normal vocabulary words in a language are not. I’m sorry, Barnes and Noble: I don’t think so.
The name of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt‘s parent company, EMPG, is being bandied about, as Barry O’Callaghan’s three-card monte attitude toward stockholders is revealed in this week’s financial avalanche.
Also, Borders continues to tank. Publishers Marketplace reports that Borders is in trouble now for delaying payment to small publishers, although they seem to be keeping the big publishers happy enough (thanks, guys, for your support of independent business owners in these troubled times.) They are also apparently playing around with reporting periods in order to make their numbers look better, but honestly? Beethoven’s Fifth.
On the hurrah side of the ledger:
Santa Cruz’s Logos Books and Records has survived Borders’ attempt to wrest their business away from them. When we rented our little house in the Santa Cruz Mountains to the then-new manager of the then-new Borders in downtown in 2000, the random public out-cry against franchise domination actually crossed the line into personal violence, scaring the wits out of a perfectly nice young woman. She moved to Hawaii. We sold the house. Fortunately, Logos just kept right on doing what Logos does, which is sell great books to people who love them, and they, like Modern Times Bookstore of San Francisco and Powell’s Books of Portland, Oregon, are still alive and thriving.
Hey, what great bookstores do you guys frequent? Can we compile an esoteric list of faves, so when we travel to each other’s parts of the world we’ll know where to check in when we arrive?
My, and David Bowie’s (so I hear), favorite bookstore: the Tattered Cover in Denver – a longtime, very popular independent bookstore, now doing well enough to have 3 branches 🙂
Tattered Cover is nice. In Boulder I like the Boulder Bookstore and Trident Booksellers. I like Powell’s, but the cafe is always packed and crazy.
The Tattered Cover: http://www.tatteredcover.com/
The Boulder Bookstore: http://boulderbookstore.indiebound.com/
Trident Booksellers in Boston: http://www.tridentbookscafe.com/
Chris, what’s the closest really great bookstore near Martha’s Vineyard? And in Finland? (Can we GET a link to the biggest independent bookstore in Finland?)
I don’t remember the cafe of Powell’s. We were on a roadtrip on my birthday a few years ago and got to spend the evening there. All I remember is staggering out beladen.
Of course, for smaller great bookstores there’s City Lights in SF Northbeach: http://www.citylights.com/. They’re also a publisher and right across Jack Kerouac alley from Vesuvio’s coffee shop, where I once made a complete idiot of myself loudly explaining to a writer friend Natalie Goldberg’s writing exercises, which I’d just started reading, while he said, “Shut up. You’re making us look like groupies. Shut up,” until I said, “What is your PROBLEM?” and he said, “Who is that on the wall?” (I didn’t know.) “That’s Jack Kerouac. This is his old hang-out.”
In honor of my friend I embarrassed (He really is a severe Kerouac groupie, just so everyone knows), I’m posting the second half of my interview with Carolyn Cassady today. She says Happy New Year, Robbie.
There’s a huge bookstore in Helsinki, but I forget the name. There are tons of great little used book closets in the city that I prefer to hit up. They’re a mess, and you never know what you’ll find.
Here on the Vineyard we have Bunch of Grapes, which is recovering from a devastating fire. My favorite though, is Book Den East, basically a barn with lots of dusty old books. It’s a few blocks away from my parents’ house. Closed right now, but looks like it’s still running. There’s never any music on, the place is always dead silent, the owner is super quiet, and it’s kind of awkward, but it has great stuff.
Bunch of Grapes: http://www.bunchofgrapes.com/
Wow, the Book Den lead me into quite a fascinating saga when I looked it up. Apparently, the Book Den was started in Oakland, California, not so far from me, at the turn of the last century. It was relocated to Santa Barbara in the 1930s—where it’s still thriving!
This is news to me because I used to work for the Earthling Bookshop in San Luis Obispo, which started in Santa Barbara and only branched out to SLO much later. I won’t get into details, but the SLO store closed abruptly about a year after buying a whole building and without warning its loyal employees, my friends (I was long out of there), who had worked night and day to transfer the inventory at considerable personal toll. The Earthling’s gone from Santa Barbara now, too, citing Barnes & Noble as squashing independent bookstores when it moved into downtown.
But the Book Den remains! http://www.bookden.com/pages.asp?page_id=extrapage_27
Book Den East: http://www.mvtimes.com/marthas-vineyard/directory/business.php?i=236