Dueling Bookstores - High Noon in Westhampton Beach

I could NOT BELIEVE that some of the residents of this small village of Westhampton Beach, New York (approx. 2000 population without tourists) could behave with such malicious, hateful behavior over a second indie bookstore opening in their town...

It's nice to be loyal to an existing owner, but damn, educated people do NOT go into a new book store and stick gum between the pages of new books! They all should be charged to the max for willful destruction of property and anything else the authorities can throw at them! Makes you wonder what these idiots have been reading lately?

Julie Bosman wrote this in the New York Times about the dueling bookstores:

Ever since Books & Books opened its doors on Main Street here last month, it has missed out on some of the adulation usually reserved for new independent bookstores in the age of Amazon.

Several storeowners nearby have ordered their staffs not to shop there. Indignant older women have marched inside the bookstore to yell at employees. And someone, or perhaps several someones, may have sneakily placed used chewing gum between the pages of new books.

The animosity seems to have stemmed from the fact that Books & Books moved in when there was already an independent bookstore, the Open Book, around the corner. And as some people saw it, there was no room for another one.

Terry Lucas, a librarian and the owner of the Open Book, which she founded in 1999, said Books & Books is on a course to put her already struggling store out of business.

The dueling bookstores have caused a bit of summer drama in this quiet, laid-back town on the south fork of Long Island, where much of the commercial activity happens on Main Street, a tidy stretch lined with restaurants, real estate offices and boutiques.

Read more http://alturl.com/dvo5y

Facebook Recruiting Top Talent Through Acquisitions

For writers wanting to build online platforms for their books and other wares, Facebook has been one of the major social media sites to accomplish that goal...Now, FB is quietly (or not so quietly) stacking their team with innovative "ringers" from the staffs of their numerous, recent buyouts.

Wonder what their agenda is? What do they see coming down the track? Hummmmm...

Let's hope they don't get too big to fail...because once in this position companies inevitably get too big for their own britches...and who suffers? We do!

This article from InformationWeek by Antone Gonsalves delves into some of the recent FB acquisitions and the talent acquired:

Facebook has bought Chai Labs, the latest in a string of acquisitions where the company's talent is at least as important as the technology.

What Chai Labs does is unclear from its website. The company says it has an "in-depth focus on a handful of verticals" and helps web publishers "easily customize and launch scalable, search-friendly sites."

However, the Mountain View, Calif.-based company was founded by Gokul Rajaram, a former Google AdSense executive. In addition, its investors and advisers include Marc Andreessen, general partner of venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz and co-founder of now-defunct Netscape Communications; Reid Hoffman, general partner at Greylock Partners and chairman of Linkedin; and Joe Kraus, general partner of Google Ventures.

Read more http://alturl.com/im9g7

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'Goodreads' Owner Pushes Print on the Web Over Paper

"Chandler talks about how the world of publishing has been blown wide open by self-publishing sites. With more than 300,000 new titles a year, he maintains that the traditional media can't possibly cover them all. 'Someone has got to sort through what is good and what is bad,' he said, suggesting Goodreads members will be the new arbiters"...

Excerpt from LATimes article by James Rainey.

I have been a member of Goodreads since last January, although, I admit, I just haven't had enough time to visit as often as I'd like...It's an excellent site and founded by Otis Chandler (pictured above), of the Chandler family who owns the Los Angeles Times.

Otis Chandler gives his outlook on the future of publishing and media in this eye-opening, LATimes aricle by James Rainey:

"Book reviews in newspapers, well, those are gone," the young Web entrepreneur told me in the most matter-of-fact way. "Independent bookstores are almost gone. Chains will probably be gone soon. It's all happening online now."

That might have been ho-hum stuff coming from just any techie. But the pronouncements were being made by a descendent of a print-and-ink empire.

Otis Chandler made no apologies. His great-great-great-grandfather may have founded the Los Angeles Times. His grandfather, another Otis, pushed the newspaper to renown. But this member of the Chandler family, generation six, has moved on.

He has built one of the biggest sites on the Internet for book lovers, one that has been growing steadily since its inception in 2006. Goodreads.com hosts reading clubs, gives away books, sponsors author chats, offers literature quizzes and generally dissects and celebrates writing. The website has 3.5 million members. It has more than 1.7 million unique visitors a month, a 65% jump from a year ago, according to the Nielsen Co.

Chandler, 32, has built a substantial audience and considerable good will. But he must confront the central challenge that faces most other media companies, old and new: how to make money off the audiences they have built on the Web.

I met with Young Otis this week in his bare-bones office in Santa Monica. It's upstairs from a liquor store and next to an acupuncturist, the same spot, according to the landlord, where Lakers owner Jerry Buss nurtured a fledgling real estate business.

When I asked whether Goodreads had turned a profit, Chandler didn't answer directly. "I'll just say we are doing well," said the soft-spoken Stanford graduate, who pecked at his laptop, which sat atop a folding table in a room with mostly bare walls.

"I think we are doing very well as an advertising platform for books," he continued, "and I have other ideas to increase that. To be a really big media business, I think you need other [revenue] streams. We have several other ideas to create those."

Young Otis, who founded the company with his wife, Elizabeth Khuri Chandler, a former Times staffer, wouldn't say where that money might be found. But he sounded confident that it lurked out there, just waiting to be mined.

Chandler said Goodreads has worked with all the major publishing houses to promote books and authors in a variety of ways. That can mean banner ads standard on the Web, "sponsored" links like the ones that power Google, and other options — like paid mentions for a book or author in one of the site's polls, quizzes or in its monthly e-mailed newsletter.

The start-up has 10 employees and announced in December that it landed $2 million in venture capital, adding to its initial round of funding.

Read more and get original comments at LATimes http://alturl.com/5p89r

Who Needs Publishers?...Anyone?

"For as long as anyone has been writing books, authors' careers have rested on the judgments or whims of publishers. Would the novel that took so many months, or even years, to write be read, let alone chosen, by editors? Who could tell? Who knew what publishers were looking for?" ... Excerpt from Who Needs Publishers?

Ray Connolly, English author, journalist, script-writer, editor-in-chief and marketing chief extraordinaire, wrote this fine article (from which the above excerpt came) in http://www.guardian.co.uk/ that backs up what I've been preaching on this blog for some time:

You won't hear it said in many publishing houses these days, where those editors and managements who have survived the 10% cull in their numbers following the credit crunch now appear frozen in the headlights of the onrushing digital revolution. But from the point of view of authors, these are potentially exciting times.

Because, although advances have been slashed, and literary agents are wringing their hands at the difficulties in finding publishers for all but the most guaranteed fiction, change is on the way. With Apple's iPad recently joining Amazon's Kindle and the Sony Reader as devices for reading downloaded books, power in publishing might just be shifting in the authors' favour.

For as long as anyone has been writing books, authors' careers have rested on the judgments or whims of publishers. Would the novel that took so many months, or even years, to write be read, let alone chosen, by editors? Who could tell? Who knew what publishers were looking for?

This was bad enough when editorial departments had the authority to buy manuscripts themselves. But then came the endless rise of marketing departments, and soon novels were increasingly being selected according to which genre they fitted.

That situation largely continues, but with the news that Amazon now sells almost twice as many digital books as hardbacks in the US, it's clear that publishing is changing. And if publishers can sell their books online, why can't writers?

Actually, they can. It isn't difficult. Anyone who is computer savvy can become a publisher these days. I know, because I've just become one.

I'm now Ray Connolly, writer, editor-in-chief and head of marketing of Plumray Books, and any one of the 2 billion computer-owning people in the world who wants to read my new novel, The Sandman, can do so at the click of a mouse. It's being serialised chapter by chapter on my website where, over the next 10 weeks, it will build like a part-work. In the words of a friend, I'm "doing a Dickens".

What's more, it's free – although should any readers want to find out how the The Sandman ends before October, and hopefully quite a few will, they can download the entire book for less than the cost of a paperback. After that it will go on to Amazon.

Read more http://alturl.com/g5eev

Booksellers' Evolving Strategies

Picture this: You're walking down the aisles of a bookstore looking at the vast shelves of books, stopping to pull one of interest down for a closer look, touching it, smelling the newness of it, flipping the pages and reading sections, holding it in your hands...Ahhh, you decide, this is the one I want...

Are these simple moves and stimulating teasers to your senses blowing away, soon to be Gone With The Wind ?

Julie Bosman of the New York Times writes an incisive piece examining the rapidly changing atmosphere of bookstores and booksellers' changing strategies to stay in business:

In the movie “You’ve Got Mail,” Tom Hanks played the aggressive big-box retailer Joe Fox driving the little bookshop owner played by Meg Ryan out of business.

Twelve years later, it may be Joe Fox’s turn to worry. Readers have gone from skipping small bookstores to wondering if they need bookstores at all. More people are ordering books online or plucking them from the best-seller bin at Wal-Mart.

But the threat that has the industry and some readers the most rattled is the growth of e-books. In the first five months of 2009, e-books made up 2.9 percent of trade book sales. In the same period in 2010, sales of e-books, which generally cost less than hardcover books, grew to 8.5 percent, according to the Association of American Publishers, spurred by sales of the Amazon Kindle and the new Apple iPad. For Barnes & Noble, long the largest and most powerful bookstore chain in the country, the new competition has led to declining profits and store traffic. After the company announced last week that it was putting itself up for sale, Leonard Riggio, Barnes & Noble’s chairman and largest shareholder, who has declared his confidence in the company’s future, hinted that he might make a play to buy the company himself and take it private.

For readers, e-books have meant a transformation not just of the reading experience, but of the book-buying tradition of strolling aisles, perusing covers and being able to hold books in their hands. Many publishers have been astounded by the pace of the e-book popularity and the threat to print book sales that it represents. If the number of brick-and-mortar stores drops, publishers fear that sales will go along with it. Some worry that large bookstores will go the way of the record stores that shut down when the music business went digital.

“The shift from the physical to the digital book can pick up some of the economic slack, but it can’t pick up the loss that is created when you don’t have the customers browsing the displays,” said Laurence J. Kirshbaum, a literary agent. “We need people going into stores and seeing a book they didn’t know existed and buying it.”

Read more http://alturl.com/b33s3

Newsday is GROWING!

Good news for newspapers!...At least one newspaper. It appears the newspaper biz may be experiencing a resurgence in profitability just like the magazine sector has of late.

I'm happy for these type publishers turning the corner.

Matthew Flamm of Crain's New York Business reports this RE Newsday:

After several rounds of cutbacks and a battle with its union over a new contract, Newsday is hiring.

In a memo to the paper's staff Wednesday morning, Editor-in-Chief Debby Krenek announced that the Cablevision-owned daily would hire 34 new reporters over the next six months and add 2,600 pages of additional news annually, or about seven pages a day.

“I'm very excited to announce that we are making this significant investment in people and pages to provide more and stronger coverage for Long Islanders,” she wrote.

The hires are a surprise move at a time when few newspapers are hiring and many continue to cut back. It's particularly surprising that Cablevision is making this investment following bitter contract negotiations that ended in June with Newsday union members agreeing to wage cuts of from 5% to 10%.

The Dolan family, which controls Cablevision Systems Corp., paid $650 million for Newsday in 2008. By combining the paper with Cablevision assets, the Dolans were hoping to become the dominant player in Long Island news. They have been mainly preoccupied with cutbacks as newspaper advertising has plummeted.

In the second quarter of 2010, Newsday had revenue of $80 million, down 10% from the year ago period. The paper's operating loss narrowed to $1.3 million from $2.6 million.

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