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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.

The message was simple and soft and alluring. And since I was in France, it was also in French.

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? 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).

Caustic Cover Critic on Nicholas Motte’s covers for Dalkey Archive, with lots of nice pictures (I LOVE the liberal use of pink; Hot Pink, I hope you never go out of style!):

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!

Amazon’s Kindle has stirred up its share of controversy. It seems people either love it or hate it. It would probably be safe to assume independent booksellers would lean toward the “hate it” category, but let’s not jump to conclusions. Green Apple Books, an independent bookstore in San Francisco, has decided to evaluate, with an open mind, the Kindle on its blog in a 10-part webisode battle of sorts. Each round explores different aspects of reading and compares how the book and the Kindle fare.

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

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