It’s supposed to be a bad economic climate for brick-and-mortar bookstores, and it seems booksellers are closing their doors left and right. It might come as a surprise, then, to hear about the opening of a new bookstore, one funded by the federal government. The U.S. Government Printing Office (GPO), responsible for all sorts of government publications since 1861, recently opened a retail bookstore in Washington, D.C. The store is actually a reopening of sorts, since a GPO bookstore has been in existence since 1895. The new store was redesigned to mimic more closely contemporary booksellers. The redesign and renovation were handled in-house by GPO employees.

If you don’t live in D.C., you can always order books online. The GPO bookstore offers thousands of titles that cover a vast array of subjects, everything from the history of the United States to national parks and technical manuals. To illustrate the diversity of the bookstore’s collection, here are the top five best sellers from July 2010.

1. Federal Benefits for Veterans, Dependents and Survivors, 2010
2. Reports of the United States Tax Court, Volume 131, July 1, 2008, to December 31, 2008
3. Civics Flash Cards for the Naturalization Test, 2009
4. Biosafety in Microbiological and Biomedical Laboratories, 2009
5. International Certificate of Vaccination or Prophylaxis as Approved by the World Health Organization, 2007

Also in keeping with modern times, the GPO has a Twitter feed as well as a blog.

Do you attend bookstore readings? I am fortunate to live in Portland, Oregon, home to many bookstores, including the venerable Powell’s Books. I could probably go to a bookstore reading on a daily basis, and I often read through the listings in the local paper with great interest. The truth, though, is that I rarely go to bookstore readings. I never gave it much thought other than to attribute it to laziness, but then I saw this article, “The Dreaded Question: What is a ‘Reading’?” in the Huffington Post. The piece is by bookstore owner Alex Green, who talks about how the label “reading” is not quite accurate. He writes that “many of us are reluctant to attend a reading because we don’t know what one is, and we become afraid that something egregiously uncomfortable, or boring, is going to happen.” Green then goes on to explain that readings, at least at his bookstore, are engaging and lively discussions.

Green’s article made me question why I don’t attend more bookstore readings, and I think he is right—I think they are going to be kind of boring. I fully expect the author to read a chapter or two from a book, and thanks, but I can do that on my own at home. I would rather know about the author’s writing process or reasons for writing a particular book, or maybe I want to know the author’s favorite flavor of ice cream. If Green is correct that “readings” are actually conversations between authors and readers, then I could get on board, but really, it’s hard to know what to really expect. So, what do you think of bookstore readings? Do you attend? Look forward to them? What do you like about readings?

*The photo is from the last “reading” I attended. It was at Powell’s Books for my friend Amy Karol, author of Bend the Rules Sewing and Bend the Rules with Fabric. At the “reading” she displayed and discussed some of projects in the book, took questions, signed books, and hosted a cakewalk, so no, it wasn’t a typical reading.

Curiously “Starsky et Hutch” speak French.

But there remain some common complaints. Americans are loud. They’re overweight. They don’t care about other countries and couldn’t find France on a map. Recently on a plane I was sitting next to a Romanian woman who now lives in Chicago. She told me she had watched an American television quiz show, and the host asked the question, What’s Romania? The contestant, the Romanian woman assured me, guessed it was a type of lettuce.

As a person fond of both Europe and the United States, I just smiled. Not long ago someone here in France asked me if Chicago was a neighborhood of New York.

What does this have to do with literature? One of my favorite blogs is Three Percent, devoted to modern and contemporary international literature. It’s so called because only 3 percent of all books published in the United States are translations. According to Three Percent, among books of literary fiction and poetry, the figure is only 0.7 percent (in 2008 the most commonly translated language in this category was French, with 16 percent of the total, but that added up to only 59 books).

I’m afraid, at least in literature, the stereotype of Americans is true. We all spend time in the produce section, but few of us ever buy a Romanian book.

So what is going to happen? The publishing industry is aswarm with utopian visions of an electronic, democratic future. Many find support in a theory developed by Chris Anderson, editor in chief of Wired magazine, and described in his book The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More. The kernel of the idea can be said simply. In the past there were limited distribution channels (e.g., movie theaters or bookstores), meaning only a small number of products found buyers. But the Internet has created unlimited access to goods, making consumers aware of niche and obscure products and increasing demand for them. Using the terminology of the idea, demand is moving away from the head (the most popular products) to the long tail (everything else).

Here is Chris Anderson explaining the theory.

Both publishers and self-publishers have seen potential in Anderson’s idea. Publishers hope for new sales in their own long tail—backlist and previously out of print titles. Self-publishers believe the Internet will draw sales away from titles controlled by publishers and toward material self-published or simply uploaded on the Internet. Not without its detractors, the “long tail” is so part of the discourse of online marketing that some view it to be almost self-evident, though especially in publishing, it remains an idea waiting for full validation. After all, book sales are often still in stores, and people sometimes want real human interaction. Sometimes 50,000 people wander to a small town to find books.

Below is Chris Anderson talking about the media.

Among the most interesting publishing visionaries today is Richard Nash, formerly editorial director of Soft Skull Press. Nash is one of many people who think traditional publishing is broken and needs to be replaced by the new tools and social habits of the twenty-first century. In Nash’s view publishing has to stop selling books as objects (wholly opposite to the current fetish of the object in literary publishing) and consider a different way to get writers and readers together, especially on the Internet.

Nash outlines that different way in a recent Publishers Weekly article. According to Nash, except for the 500 best-selling books, which will be published on the Hollywood blockbuster model, the future of publishing will be based on niche social communities. Reflecting this vision, Nash is starting a new publishing venture, Cursor, which will contain a “portfolio” of online membership communities to which people can subscribe. The first two will be Red Lemonade, a “pop-lit-alt-cult operation,” and charmQuark, a “sci-fi/fantasy community.” Nash explains these communities in Publishers Weekly.

Each community will have a publishing imprint, which will make money from authors’ books, sold as digital downloads, conventional print and limited artisanal editions—and will offer authors all the benefits of a digital platform: faster time to market, faster accounting cycles, faster payments to authors. But the greatest opportunity is in the community itself. Each will have tiers of membership, including paid memberships that will offer exclusive access to tools and services, such as rich text editors for members to upload their own writing, peer-to-peer writing groups, recommendation engines, access to established authors online and in person, and editorial or marketing assistance. Members can get both peer-based feedback and professional feedback.

Nash is looking for investors, so we’ll have to wait a while to see Cursor in action.

Every day it seems another independent bookseller goes out of business. You can blame the economy, Amazon.com, the Internet, or maybe your neighbor, but the facts remain—stores are closing, and people aren’t buying as many books as they used to.

Some booksellers, however, are putting up a fight. Village Books, an independent bookseller in Bellingham, Washington, has embraced technology and plans to offer customers high-tech options in addition to traditional paper books. The store has partnered with Symtio to provide audiobooks and ebooks. Customers will purchase a book in the form of a product card at the store; the card then allows them to download the book wherever they have an Internet connection.

Village Books will also be home to an Espresso Book Machine. The EBM is a print-on-demand book-making machine. Not only can customers purchase, print, and bind out-of-print books but they can also create self-published books. Village Books is banking on the belief that there will be demand for out-of-print local books. There are only a handful of EBMs in retail stores across the nation.

Allons voir plus loin, veux-tu? Voir la mer, la baie des anges et ses palmiers . . . un peu plus loin, de l’autre coté du Musée Masséna.

Translated into our more accented English, it said,

Let’s go see farther. Do you want to? See the sea, the Bay of Angels and its palm trees . . . a little farther, on the other side of the Masséna Museum.

Musée Masséna by DrOMM via Flickr

Musée Masséna? That’s in Nice, where I live, so how could I say no?

I had never met the person who wrote the note. In fact, I read the message on bookcrossing.com, a website that promotes “free range books.” The idea is simple: read a book, and afterward, instead of putting it to rest on your bookshelf, set it free. The site gives suggestions.

Leave it on a park bench, a coffee shop, at a hotel on vacation. Share it with a friend or tuck it onto a bookshelf at the gym – anywhere it might find a new reader!

When I found the listing for Allons voir plus loin, veux-tu? by Anny Duperey, I saw there were almost 800 books “in the wild” in France, all waiting for someone to find them. In the United States there were some 10,000 books left in parks, coffee shops, and other random places.

The site also lets readers post notes about books before passing them on to someone else. This copy of Allons voir plus loin, veux-tu? began in Feins, Bretagne, in the north of France. It then traveled to nearby Pléneuf-Val-André before heading south to Lyon and finally Nice in southeastern France, where a reader left a rather uninspired recommendation: “Enfin je ne sais pas pourquoi j’avais envie de lire ce livre! . . . mais j’ai passé un bon moment” (”In fact, I don’t know why I felt like reading this book! . . . but I had a good time”).

After reading the note, I decided it was my turn to “passer un bon moment.” Fortunately there was one more clue: “Livre laissé côté rue de France, sur les grilles du Musée” (”book left on the side of rue de France, on the gate of the museum”). As I was going to a concert that evening not far from the museum, I decided to “go hunting,” as the site says.

The museum is a stone’s throw from the sea and next to the famous Hotel Negresco, where, as one site claims, Claudia Schiffer, Orson Welles, and Michael Jackson all stayed. But rue de France is one street in from the sea, and at night, when I arrived, it seemed desolate. A light breeze was pushing around a plastic sack. I was wearing headphones, listening to the French pop singer Bénabar, and reached my hand through the gate to search through a thick stretch of shrubbery. I must have seemed like a thief or a homeless person.

After a while, something didn’t seem right.

I looked around and across the street. Two prostitutes stood waiting for tourists. A flic, as cops are called here, sped by on a motorcycle. Great, I thought. This is all fine, and I don’t mind the weirdness, but someone already took the book.

I confess that I am quite fond of Target. I like the company’s commitment to innovative design, whether it’s in fashion or housewares or paper goods. As I make my rounds at Target, I occasionally stop at the book section, but only if I just finished a book and need an immediate replacement. I guess I should linger a bit longer in the books, though, because according to this article in the New York Times, Target is making rock stars out of some relatively unknown writers.

Though Target sells its share of best sellers and mainstream, mass-market choices, it also has its own book club, called Bookmarked Club, and features many new titles, or at least new to the majority of readers. And Target has succeeded in generating impressive sales for many of these books: Sarah’s Key by Tatiana de Rosnay was released in hardback in 2007 and had sold only about 2,000 copies when Target decided to promote the paperback edition as its Bookmarked Club Pick. Target sold 145,000 copies. You can’t really argue with figures like that!

Some other interesting points in the article include the fact that Target’s book selection is really quite small, about 2,500 titles per store. In contrast, bookselling-behemoth Barnes & Noble has about 200,000 titles per store. Target also displays its book offerings in a manner meant to attract buyers: featured titles are set on displays at the ends of aisles, and most books are shelved with the covers facing out (yes, sometimes you can judge a book by its cover).

And while you’re there, I urge you to check out his post on Penguin’s Great Ideas series, with glorious hi-res images, which I am most appreciative of, seeing as these are not destined for U.S. bookstore shelves. This here’s my favorite one.

That reminds me, an older copy of De Quincey’s book is featured in the display “The Horrors of Opium Consumption,” at the excellent blog of The National Museum of Hospital and Pharmaceutical History: http://hospitalmuseum.blogspot.com/2009/02/on-subject-of-opium.html:

Vintage Swedish book covers at A Journey Round My Skull:

And Book Covers Anonymous on Penguin’s “Couture Classics” deluxe editions. Yeah, it’s not going to appeal to everyone! But I have to say, I DO think this is a good idea in terms of getting teenage girls interested in the books. Is that cynical of me? As a former teenage girl, I don’t think so!

So far there have been three rounds. In the first the book and the Kindle test their mettle in the used-book-selling category. The second round explores the experience of purchasing a book. In the third the book and the Kindle go head-to-head in terms of borrowing or sharing a book. Spoiler alert: so far the book is in the lead 3-0. Care to place any bets on the final outcome?

So pop some popcorn and take a look at these clever and humorous webisodes. I can’t wait to see the final score!

The Book vs. the Kindle: Round 2

The Book vs. the Kindle: Round 3

The series was launched in 2006, and these six books are a representative selection.

George Restrepo is the art director of The Improper Bostonian, and Alex Camin is the creative director at Da Capo Press/Perseus Books Group. Here’s another of Camin’s cover designs: 

I really like another MIT Press book that also won a BoNe Award: Camps: A Guide to 21st-Century Space, by Charlie Hailey. According to the press’s website, Hailey examines “how camp spaces are informed by politics and transform the ways we think about and make built environments.” Leaving the bookboard and stitches exposed was a great idea!

In addition to looking gorgeous and supporting a great cause, the collection is also getting praise from book reviewers. Nick Rennison of The Sunday Times writes: “As a showcase for a fictional form that too often gets pushed to the back of the queue when critical plaudits are being distributed—and one that’s filled with fine exhibits—it deserves support on its own merits.” Likewise, William Skidelsky of The Observer says that the collection “would be worth reading whether or not an NGO was responsible for it.”

I wonder if they’ll distribute it in the U.S. . . .

The designer, Jon Gray (http://gray318.com/), also designed this, which you may recognize:

Photo courtesy of the Level 26 web site

If you find it tough to get through a long book these days, you are not alone–Anthony Zuiker, the man behind the popular CSI television series, admits he can’t get through a 400-page book, and now he’s doing something about it. Zuiker inked a deal with imprint Dutton to produce a series of three “digi-novels,” novels that come with accompanying videos.

The first of the series, Level 26: Dark Origins, is scheduled for release in September 2009. The books will be cowritten by Zuiker and writer and comic book creator Duane Swierczynski. Each digi-novel includes a book plus 20 3-minute videos (Zuiker calls them “cyber-bridges”) that readers can access online. The videos are intended to enhance the reading experience. A video will be available every 20 pages or so.

For those who fear the books themselves will be poorly written and the whole thing smelling too gimmicky, rest assured; Dutton’s Brian Tart, who is responsible for the deal with Zuiker, said in USA Today that the books must be of high quality and “have to stand on their own as books.” He added that “publishers need to experiment with new ways of engaging readers. Books were a primary form of entertainment when there were only a couple of TV channels and no Internet.”

For more information, see Swierczynski’s post about his involvement with the project.

But the most distinguishing thing about Europa is the books themselves—which is to say that you can spot one from a mile away. All of their titles are released in trade paperback (common among many European publishers) with handsome French flaps, which give the books a sleek and elegant feel. And every cover bears Europa’s signature stork logo. Many of their covers feature bold images that are cut out against brightly colored backgrounds.

A recent discussion on The Book Design Review suggests that there is little consensus about the cover designs themselves. While some who commented appreciated the spareness and eyecatching images on many of the covers, others found them boring and somehow dated looking. In spite of people’s aesthetic differences on this point, however, there seems to be no dispute about the fact that Europa’s books are immediately recognizable.

“They attract me because I know they’re Europa titles,” one commenter confessed. That pretty much says it all.

I’m sure it’s a coincidence, but the last one is uncannily similar to the cover of Gale’s Contemporary Theatre, Film & Television, which we work on as book developers. I’m guessing they both reference the same kind of mid-century design, but I don’t have much knowledge of design history. Any theories?

In light of all that has happened in publishing in recent decades, it seems that the essence of the “retro” publishing model at Europa Editions is its focus on the quality of the text itself—language, characters, and story—and a staunch belief in the inherent salability of good literature.

Some hallmarks of Europa’s retro style:

• A decorated industry veteran at the helm. Europa is headed by Kent Carroll, who served for 12 years as editor-in-chief at the legendary Grove Press (which had transformed the American literary consciousness during the 1950s and 1960s with authors like Samuel Beckett, Henry Miller, and William Burroughs) before establishing his own highly esteemed company, Carroll & Graf.
• A commitment to building their readership from the ground up. Whereas the “new” (post-conglomerate takeover) publishing model is predicated on the expectation that a book should have a built-in market of thousands before it’s even released, Europa is committed to capturing the attention of reviewers and winning the respect and loyalty of independent booksellers.
• Low overhead. In the wake of the conglomerate takeovers, many publishers—who used to behave like college professors—came down with a kind of corporate fever. Midtown offices got big and glitzy, salaries and expense accounts followed suit. At Europa Mr. Carroll is the only full-time employee. He operates out of a modest office in Union Square, New York, with one freelance assistant and a couple of unpaid interns.
• Maximizing value. Another feature of the “new” publishing era is the practice of paying exorbitant advances to authors whose books are expected to sell big. A great many of these books do not reap the returns, and publishers lose out in the deal. By all comparisons, translation rights are cheap, even for some of the most acclaimed international authors. The less Europa has to spend on acquiring rights to foreign works that have already proven successful in their original languages, the more they can invest in publicity and marketing in the United States.

Next time I’ll look at another thing Europa’s doing right—not necessarily retro, just good business sense.

Amazon has made it pretty simple to publish books for sale on a Kindle. You basically just have to have an Amazon account (and who doesn’t these days) and a book to which you own the electronic publishing rights. The book can be in a number of formats, including HTML (the Amazon-recommended format), PDF, plain text, and Microsoft Word (but not .docx). You upload the file, Amazon then automatically converts the file to Amazon DTP (digital text platform), you set the Suggested Retail Price (Amazon pays you 35 percent of the Suggested Retail Price), and voila! Kindle book for sale!