Oh the horror! If you look up towards the sky in Manhattan right now, you will see some very sad people dotted along the ever-so-high ledges of those massive media corporation buildings.
Yes, just when book publishers thought life could not get any worse comes the news that Oprah Winfrey, the publisher’s best friend, will shutdown her daytime talk show in 2011. All this comes on the heels of the rise of e-books, the Kindle, the Nook, the Sony e-thingy, and the demise of book coverage in the mainstream US media.
So what will be the ultimate go-to source for bookselling when Oprah pulls the plug?
Frankly, there isn’t another ’superpower of recommendation’ like the Big O, who has the book club selections and features countless authors on the show. Publishers will have to target multiple media sources, including the unofficial media of blogs and social networking sites, and hope many small hits will create a bestseller.
Somehow, I think Oprah loves her literature and that she’s going to remain linked to books one way or another. Odd how this announcement comes very soon after her recent interviews with Stephenie Meyer and Sarah Palin? Perhaps these two ladies were the straws that broke the camel’s back? (Oprah’s lawyers should note I am not actually saying Oprah is a dromedary) I’d probably be ready to pack it in after discussing vampires and foreign policy respectively with those two.
Let the Great World Spin by Irish-American writer Colum McCann triumphed last night in the fiction category at the National Book Awards. There’s been lots of interest in this novel for some time now - last month it was AbeBooks fourth bestselling signed book. There’s plenty of signed copies available right now and they start at $35 and range up to $200.
McCann dedicated his award to another Irish-American writer, “good old Frank McCourt,” who died earlier this year. “I think he’s dancing upstairs,” he said.
Goodcomics.com is spending November celebrating DC Comics’ 75th Anniversary. How, you ask? By combing through the unimaginable numbers of covers from 75 years of DC comics, posting a few a day, and at the end, having readers vote on their top 10. The result will be a list of the 75 most iconic comic book covers in DC Comics history!
The Shortlist for the 2009 Bad Sex Award has been announced. For the un-initiated the Bad Sex Award was set up by Auberon Waugh to “draw attention to the crude, tasteless, often perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description in the modern novel, and to discourage it”.
The shortlist was announced in yesterday’s Guardian where an excerpt from Philip Roth’s nominated novel The Humbling which stars a large green dildo.
“This was not soft porn. This was no longer two unclothed women caressing and kissing on a bed. There was something primitive about it now, this woman-on-woman violence, as though in the room filled with shadows, Pegeen were a magical composite of shaman, acrobat, and animal. It was as if she were wearing a mask on her genitals, a weird totem mask, that made her into what she was not and was not supposed to be, there was something dangerous about it. His heart thumped with excitement – the god Pan looking on from a distance with his spying, lascivious gaze.”
In a shocking revelation leaving millions stunned, teen media sweetheart Miley Cyrus has publicly admitted that she doesn’t like Twilight. Not the books, not the first movie, and she won’t be seeing any of the other movies.
“I don’t believe in it. I don’t like vampires. … I don’t like the wolf that pops out of the screen when I’m watching my TV at night. I don’t like it. I don’t want anything to do with it. I don’t like the shirts. I don’t like any of it.
“I feel really lame because everyone’s, like, so excited. I’m like, ‘Don’t even talk about it.’”
While Stephenie Meyer’s vampire saga shows no signs of collapsing under Cyrus’ confession, it is without a doubt a very sad day for tweens, many of whom have been witnessed wandering the streets, mouths agape, shuffling near to movie theaters and bookstores then away again, clearly confused and distressed.
No word on what Hannah Montana thinks of the stories.
There are long, long lines of people at Sarah Palin’s first book tour appearance for Going Rogue in Grand Rapids, Michigan, according to the very excited Grand Rapids Press. The first 950 folks in the line-up will get their books signed and rest are on stand-by. The Today Show are there too - looks like this is the biggest thing to hit Grand Rapids since they got the railroad in 1858.
In other GG’s news we just conducted an interview with John. H. Meier who is the curator of the finest collection of Governor General Award for Fiction winners in the world, which he will be exhibiting around Canada at Universities and festivals. He’s also offered some insight into the cream of the crop for past GG winners. You can read the full interview here
I found a video showing some of the beautiful detail and intricacy of Robert Sabuda’s pop-up version of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Some of the things paper architects can create are so amazing and detailed. Especially in a story like Alice in Wonderland, so full of vivid imagery and magic and bizarre, colourful fantasy, having the added physical dimension brings the story so much more to life. Check it out:
I would have absolutely adored that when I was a little girl. It would make a great gift. Or, if you prefer something a little more seasonally specific, the same author also did a Pop-up book version of The 12 Days of Christmas.
Anyone who uses LibraryThing will know that it is constantly evolving. Tim Spalding and his team are regularly pushing through new initiatives and the latest one is particularly interesting from the perspective of AbeBooks and secondhand bookstores in general.
LibraryThing’s latest innovation, introduced yesterday, is a ‘local book search’. Basically, when you come across a book on LibraryThing that you would like to purchase from a local bookstore you are presented with a ‘local book search’ tab on that book’s details page. By clicking through, you are presented with a list of your local bookshops and details on whether they have the book or not.
For Unless by Carol Shields, I can see the book is stocked by Grafton Books and Renaissance Books down the road in Victoria (our hometown here on Vancouver Island in British Columbia, Canada) and Beacon Books just up the highway in Sidney among others.
For Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood, I can again see that Grafton has a copy and Beacon Books, and Ten Old Books up the road in Duncan.
LibraryThing lists AbeBooks’ booksellers that have physical bookstores and that’s something we are happy about even though, to some extent, it gives book-buyers the chance to ‘go around the AbeBooks system’ and simply walk into the bookstore and buy the book without using our site (so we miss out on earning commission). We’re very aware Internet searching for local services and products is something everybody does, but we’re also aware LibraryThing’s local book search is another method of exposing AbeBooks’ sellers and their listings to the book-buying public. LibraryThing attracts a community of passionate bibliophiles and bibliophiles are AbeBooks’ target customers – this was something we definitely wanted to be part of.
It’s still early days for this new service on LibraryThing but Tim Spalding is already reporting decent interest. Local book search will improve as more booksellers go to LibraryThing and create a venue for their bookshop. We’ll be encouraging more AbeBooks sellers to create LibraryThing venues. LibraryThing is deeply committed to supporting independent bookstores of all shapes and sizes, and AbeBooks is nothing without the thousands of professional independent sellers who list on our site, so we’re looking forward to seeing how this service develops.
By selling a million copies in just over two and a half years, Meyer has knocked JK Rowling from the record-holding position.
Says buying manager for children’s books at Waterstone’s, Sarah Clarke, “Popular doesn’t even begin to describe it – the Twilight Saga is a phenomenon in its own right and like Harry Potter it has generated a global sensation that crosses several media.“
And over at Fandango, a ticket selling site, vampires have struck down Jedi knights and wizards to take the record for the largest number of pre-sales in the 10 years of operation of the site. New Moon the movie adaptation of the second book in the Twilight series set the record on Saturday evening.
Riding that popularity train, Fandango is offering New Moon gift cards.
Fandango also surveyed New Moon ticket buyers and discovered:
• 98% say the action in New Moon looks better than the action in Twilight.
• 72% plan to see the movie with a group of three friends or more.
• 52% of survey respondents say they dream about vampires.
• 22% are mothers and daughters planning to see New Moon together.
• 10% plan to show up at the theater in costume, dressed as characters from the saga.
We’re pretty excited about our most recent sale. This time we have Bookfever.com, who specialize in modern first editions and signed books, who have discounted their entire inventory, and by a margin of 20%. If you are getting a jump on your Christmas shopping they have some fantastic books listed including the lots from Trixie Belden series (including No. 1 seen here), signed Invasion by Aaron Wolfe (aka Dean Koontz), and the highly sought after Ticket to Ride by Dennis Potter.
What I really appreciated was that everything described in the article seemed so “in character” for what I expected of McCarthy. The author was dressed in jeans and cowboy boots and began his meal with a Bombay Gibson. Even the fact that he’s friends with actor Tommy Lee Jones seems right.
Brooke Magnanti, a scientist from Bristol who specialises in developmental neurotoxicology and cancer epidemiology, has been exposed as Belle de Jour - the author of The Intimate Adventures of a London Call Girl from 2005.
Brooke has a unique position in the working world as an author-scientist-prostitute - so the tools of her trades are a computer (or typewriter), a microscope and….. well… use your imagination.
The author, who now works at the Bristol Institute of Child Health, went on the Game to fund her studies for a PhD in London. I wonder what her fellow white-coated colleagues had to say when she turned up for work today?
Putting Stephenie Meyer into the vault for a minute, here is another woman who is going to sell a lot of books - Sarah Palin. The first signed copy of her book, Going Rogue, is now listed for sale and the price is $115. I can’t decide whether that is expensive or cheap. I guess it depends on how her political career goes. If she challenges Barack Obama in 2012 and becomes president, then $115 will be a bargain. Signed copies of Going Rogue are going to become reasonably plentiful once her booktour kicks off.
Her booktour starts on November 18 in Grand Rapids, Michigan. It’s interesting to see her appearances closely mirror appearances made by Palin and John McCain when they were on the campaign trail. On December 7, Palin appears at the massive Mall of America in Bloomington, Minnesota, which is close to the location of last year’s Republican National Convention, where Palin likened herself to a pit bull (an odd comparison as this breed of dog is now infamous for attacking toddlers.)
Going Rogue is getting a huge media lift - interviews with Oprah Winfrey and Barbara Walters will be televised this week, and she’ll be doing the rounds of the right-wing talk radio and TV shows. Here is the NY Times’ review.
Obama’s books and his own book tour were key factors in his bid to gain the Democratic nomination and then helped to define his beliefs once the actual presidential campaign was under way.
In terms of collectibility, Palin has a long, long way to go in order to match Obama. The most expensive Obama book sold by AbeBooks is a signed 1995 first edition of Dreams From My Father that went for a huge $12,500 during the early days of his presidency.
UPDATE - the first signed Sarah Palin book sold shortly very quickly after the post was written. The Oprah effect?
So what will be the ultimate go-to source for bookselling when Oprah pulls the plug?
Putting Stephenie Meyer into the vault for a minute, here is another woman who is going to sell a lot of books - Sarah Palin. The first